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Leslie Harradine
Saying “No”
Saying “No” - The First Step in Simplifying Your Life
As is stated in the Getting Things Done training, one of the reasons people have so much complexity in their lives is because we are a culture that places great value on saying, “Yes”.
“Yes, I can do this.”
“You want me to handle that? Sure, no problem.”
Saying “yes” stems from the importance we place on customer service and pleasing our clients, whether internal or external. There is a lot of weight that value carries and a lot of implications as well. The good news about it is that as customers, we have become rather spoiled in our expectations of those who are providing service to us. If you don’t quite buy into that notion, just travel to a country that doesn’t place as high a value on the idea that “the customer is always right”. Standing in a queue at the airport in Moscow, it quickly becomes clear that we are at the mercy of the agent behind the desk. If it’s time for their break, it doesn’t matter how many people are waiting in line or how vocal they are, that agent will disappear without care or concern for anybody else. In fact, chances are that the more vocal you are in protesting them leaving, the longer a break they will take.
Hence, the good news about living in a culture that puts the customer first: we get the results we are looking for and, more often than not, it happens in a timely manner. The trickle down effect of this, however, can have consequences that impact our professional and personal lives.
One of the dark sides of this is that we as a culture tend to be allergic to saying, “No”. Many of us want to be looked upon as friendly and available and if we say “No”, we risk being perceived as impolite or uncooperative. In a work environment the problem appears when we keep saying, “Yes” to all the requests or opportunities that show up and then we find ourselves overwhelmed with all we’ve committed to do. It then becomes a vicious circle that keeps getting bigger and bigger as we keep taking more and more on. By continuing to say “Yes” on the front end, our behavior will eventually start to say “No” on the back end because there is no way we can keep all the promises we have made. In the end, the very thing we were after by saying “Yes” (happy customer, happy manager, happy spouse, etc) ends up being sacrificed because we aren’t able to do what we told them we would in the time they expected it to be done.
The first step in taking control of this cycle is to write everything that you have committed to do down. (In the training we refer to this as the “Mind Sweep”. In the book “Getting Things Done” this is discussed in detail on pages 113-117.) It’s very difficult to say “No” when you don’t know what you’ve said “Yes” to. Once you have a comprehensive list of all those things you’ve said you will do, then when something new shows up, you can look at that new item and weigh it against all the other commitments you have made. You can then give a realistic time line in completing the task or have a conversation about what you’ll need to either let go of or adjust in order to handle what you have taken on. In some cases, it is appropriate to say, “You know, with everything else going on, I can’t do this today.” Now obviously if you are in a customer service position and you have a policy of a turn around time of 24 hours and you can’t handle all the requests that are coming your way in that period of time, it becomes an issue for management to address.
For some people saying, “No” is risky business because it may challenge an image of ourselves we like to present to the world. If that is the case, some deeper introspection on what sits behind our habit of saying, “Yes” may be warranted. Nevertheless, “No” is one of the most empowering things we can do to start to take control over our lives. When we do this strategically then all the “Yeses” become much easier to manage. What do you think would happen in your life if you kept all the commitments you made? The only way to do that is to know what we have said “Yes” to and always reserve the right to say “No’. Then “No” becomes a very positive and tactical approach for having greater balance and clarity in our lives.
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