Learning to Say NO: YES is the Fast Track to Chaos

After a relatively well managed year in 2022, Q4 has been a literal storm. A massive storm of projects and commitments, conference speaking engagements, travel, fundraising, mentoring, advising and deals that all have to get done by the end of November. My calendar is an overbooked mess.  It is very overwhelming. And with a packed schedule, you have little time to breathe, let alone think. For an obsessive compulsive like me, or aspiring professional, I literally cannot relax until I get all my work done. 

The worst of it is that it was all self inflicted. AGAIN. When you don’t track your time, when you just automatically say YES to everything that comes your way, this is what happens. I want to be helpful to people. But when you get to this state, you become mentally tired, distracted and frankly, do substandard work. And I don’t want to do substandard work. This is most people in the professional world and you don’t want to be like them. 

We all have friends or colleagues who do this. They commit to and take on way too much. Then the inevitable projects and initiatives slip through the cracks. They are the last ones to respond to requests, they deliver things late (or sometimes not at all). This continues for some time and they quickly develop a reputation for unreliability. They aren’t bad people but they are ineffective. And in the long run no one wants to work with these people. 

I do believe in saying YES to everything when you are young and starting out in your career, that’s how you learn. But as you gain experience and reputation, you need to be much more selective. You have to guard your time, energy and brain space very carefully, which in my enthusiasm, seem to have forgotten. 

I swear as I write this, despite being a champagne problem of too much demand and business, I will say NO a lot more. Yes, I want to be helpful, but I will not be effective. So better to manage their expectations or even better, just say NO. Doing low quality work really serves no one well. All at the same time making your own life less productive, less impactful and less enjoyable which goes against the whole point of being on this earth. 

In the meantime while in the middle of this, all you can do is try to step away for a moment to breathe, meditate for a few minutes or even better, take a short walk to the beach. Then jump back into the fray and grind it out. And making sure you keep this seared in your brain to not get yourself back in this situation again!