The Art Of Saying No | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | I like it. All right, sounds good. All right. So we have all that coming up. Let's start. However,

00:00:03.760 | as I like to do with the deep dive, the topic I want to tackle in today's deep dive is the art of

00:00:11.280 | no. So saying no is a major part of my own professional life, because I'm someone who has

00:00:20.000 | multiple jobs with multiple demands and am somewhat in the public eye. So I have to spend

00:00:25.920 | more time saying no and thinking about how to say no and the ramifications of saying no,

00:00:31.200 | I would say than probably the average person. So it's something that I have thought a lot about.

00:00:35.360 | There's a couple observations I've always had about saying no. Number one, I think the average

00:00:41.200 | person creates this false binary between either you're someone who basically says yes, or you are

00:00:50.240 | a disagreeable person who says no. And they say, well, if those are my two choices, I don't want

00:00:55.120 | to be the disagreeable person. That seems stressful and emotionally taxing. So I'm just the person who

00:01:00.320 | who says yes, I kind of have to say yes, but seems at all like it would be difficult to say no.

00:01:04.800 | The reality, though, is that everyone says no a lot, whether they know it or not, whether it's

00:01:11.360 | implicit or explicit. But if you think about it, most knowledge workers, you know, they have a

00:01:15.520 | full schedule, usually about 20 percent more full than they want it to be, but not impossibly full.

00:01:21.200 | They're not working till 2 a.m., but maybe they're working till 6 p.m. It is highly unlikely

00:01:26.480 | that the exact volume of things that was put onto their plate that they said yes to just happened to

00:01:32.560 | exactly match an eight or nine hour day. Right. Almost certainly there is many more things coming

00:01:38.240 | at them and they had that they had to sort it through and they basically were implicitly or

00:01:41.840 | explicitly saying no, just enough to keep a day full. So we're already all saying no, even if we

00:01:46.400 | don't realize that we just do it somewhat haphazardly. And I wrote a New Yorker piece

00:01:50.080 | about this last fall where I said my theory about how most people informally handle the goal of

00:01:55.600 | saying no, they don't have a plan, they don't have an intention, they don't have a vision for what

00:01:58.960 | they're trying to accomplish. They instead wait until their level of experience stress

00:02:04.320 | is high enough that they feel emotionally justified turning someone down.

00:02:10.240 | So it's like I am so overwhelmed right now, I feel justified saying no. And until that point,

00:02:16.560 | I don't. And what I argued in that New Yorker piece is that this is a terrible way to go about

00:02:22.160 | this because it ensures that you remain at a persistent level of elevated stress. If you have

00:02:27.120 | to be sufficiently stressed to feel comfortable saying no, then you're never gonna start saying

00:02:30.880 | no until you're sufficiently stressed. So you're gonna stay at this level of being sufficiently

00:02:34.560 | stressed, basically persistently. So when we are not intentional about how we filter what we do

00:02:39.440 | and don't do, we end up in this default purgatory, this productivity purgatory of having just a

00:02:46.480 | enough just enough on our plate that it is bearable, but uncomfortable. And we persist there.

00:02:53.040 | So we burn out and don't produce what we want and all the other negatives to come. So what we need

00:02:59.520 | to do is be more specific with ourselves about how we figure out what's a reasonable workload,

00:03:06.400 | what that workload should be made up of how we're going to go about dealing with requests to fit

00:03:10.800 | that load and not overload. We need to be more specific about it. That's why I was happy to see

00:03:16.880 | an article that someone sent to me, an alert listener sent to me, that appeared in a it's a

00:03:23.440 | column in the journal Nature. And it is written by four scientists. And it is titled, "Why Four

00:03:32.400 | Scientists Spent a Year Saying No" and it is an article that gets into the tactical weeds about

00:03:38.720 | the challenges and proper strategies for declining or turning away stuff that's going to overload

00:03:44.720 | you, turning away work. So I want to go through this article because I often harp about this,

00:03:49.680 | "Hey, you got to be more intentional about how you say yes or no," but we don't necessarily get

00:03:53.360 | into enough tactics about, "Well, how do I actually say no without feeling really bad

00:03:59.280 | or annoying people?" All right, so I have the article here. So those who are watching on YouTube,

00:04:04.480 | so you can find this at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia. You'll see on the screen that we have the date

00:04:09.920 | highlighted. This is from August 25th, so this is recent. Now the four scientists who wrote this

00:04:16.800 | column, their names don't show up in this version I have here, but probably relevant to this article,

00:04:22.720 | I believe all four are women. So that'll come up a little bit later. All right, so I want to

00:04:27.760 | highlight a couple things here. First, just to start, let's give the premise for what they were

00:04:31.680 | doing here before we get to their specific advice. So the premise is the following. "Last May," I'm

00:04:37.680 | quoting the article here, "Last May, facing pandemic and career burnout, this member whimsically

00:04:44.480 | suggested," so member of these four scientists have a group that meets regularly to discuss just

00:04:51.520 | their career and the challenges of being scientists. All right, so back to the quote, "A member of the

00:04:57.360 | group whimsically suggested we make a game out of saying no by challenging ourselves to collectively

00:05:04.960 | decline 100 work-related requests. Thus, we spent a year tracking and reflecting on our decisions to

00:05:13.760 | say no." So they started in May of 2021, they finished in March of 2022. So they got systematic

00:05:22.320 | about saying no and had four observations. They call them here four insights about what they learned

00:05:27.680 | saying no systematically 100 times over the course of a year. So let's go through these

00:05:32.240 | four insights real quick. All right, the first insight, "Tracking helped make no an option."

00:05:40.560 | So they started keeping track of all the things they said yes or no to, just a simple list. So

00:05:47.120 | this is separate from whatever other organizational system you have for organizing your time or

00:05:51.040 | projects. Let's just have a yes/no list. So as they pointed out, first of all, it helped them understand

00:05:56.160 | how much they'd already said yes. It's easy to forget. It also induced the gamification

00:06:03.120 | motivation of, well, how many no's do we have? I want to get a couple more no's this week. Maybe I

00:06:06.960 | do want to say no. What they then talked about is that once they started tracking no,

00:06:14.000 | this got them in the tracking mindset, which helped them in other ways as well. So reading

00:06:20.960 | from the article here, they say, "We logged completed tasks to counteract imposter syndrome.

00:06:26.960 | We kept a running count of active projects and tracked how we were spending time each day." This

00:06:32.080 | is all the type of stuff I recommend. When you actually start tracking your time, your projects,

00:06:37.200 | what you're doing, what you're not doing, when you actually confront what we talked about in the

00:06:40.000 | show, the productivity dragon of what's really on your plate, what you've slayed in the past,

00:06:44.320 | this is all very important for you getting your arms around your work and making confident plans

00:06:49.200 | for how you want to go forward. As long as you exist in this liminal space of emails coming in,

00:06:54.960 | you're saying yes or no, you're jumping in and out of meetings and just always scrambling,

00:06:59.200 | but you're not really sure, what am I doing? How much am I doing? What have I gotten done? What

00:07:03.200 | am I saying yes to? If you don't know these things, you're a fireman. You're putting out fires.

00:07:08.720 | And people who put out fires eventually get burnt. All right, number two, second thing they

00:07:12.400 | observed from this experiment, say no more often and to larger asks. So when they were reflecting,

00:07:22.320 | they said, "We declined too many little things, such as reviewing journal articles, and not enough

00:07:29.200 | big tasks." I think that's a good point. They were saying, you can rack up the no's

00:07:38.240 | quicker if you're aiming on the little things, the things that might take you a couple hours

00:07:42.240 | of the afternoons, but they're noting the things that caused the most stress were the big asks.

00:07:46.960 | And they give some examples here, leadership opportunities, the chance to help write large

00:07:53.040 | grant proposals, et cetera. By the way, all of this is giving me cold sweats because this is

00:07:59.600 | too close to home. Jesse knows this. Okay, so what they ended up doing is coming up with a series of

00:08:06.160 | questions to help evaluate when to say yes and when not. So here's their questions. They have

00:08:15.600 | five of them. This is what they started asking to try to figure out, okay, is this something I should

00:08:19.920 | say yes to? One, does it fit to my research agenda and identity? Two, does it spark joy?

00:08:24.720 | Three, do I have time to do a good job without sacrificing extra commitments? Four, does the

00:08:29.680 | opportunity leave space for my personal life? Five, am I uniquely qualified to fill this need?

00:08:36.080 | Right, so that made it easier for them to say no because they had, eventually they had these

00:08:41.520 | criteria. So when something big would come along, they would say, look, there's two of

00:08:44.400 | these criteria, it doesn't pass. So now I have a reason to say no. Three, and this is an important

00:08:53.520 | one, maybe sometimes overlooked, saying no is emotional work. It really is. I have to say no a

00:09:04.640 | lot. I just earlier this week got out, you know, said no to a speaking thing that I sort of went

00:09:11.360 | down the road with it because I thought it would be interesting, but it logistically was going to be

00:09:15.200 | a pain. I knew I would regret it later on. And it's hard. And sometimes the other people get

00:09:21.360 | upset. I would say nine times out of 10 people aren't really upset. They just need an answer

00:09:25.120 | and they're moving on. But just emotionally, the lived experience of saying no, because of the way

00:09:29.520 | it plays on our interpersonal social network wiring in our brain, the lived experience is often quite

00:09:36.240 | stressful. This hits different people differently. So here's the authors here I'm reading.

00:09:40.800 | In myriad ways, we saw how our cultural conditioning as women, academics, and public

00:09:46.560 | servants contributed to our difficulty with setting boundaries, tracking not just how often

00:09:52.320 | we said yes or no, but also our emotional responses made the emotional labor of saying

00:09:56.800 | no visible. We often do ignore the emotional side of some of this otherwise seemingly dry technical

00:10:06.400 | productivity, uh, strategy, that there is an emotional side to it. I talk about in a world

00:10:14.560 | without email, there's non surprising, but well done surveys of workplace behavior that says,

00:10:21.120 | if you start to categorize what they call non-promotable behavior. So these are behaviors

00:10:25.200 | that aren't directly projects, activity tasks, not directly ties you being promoted. So I will

00:10:30.720 | help organize the birthday party for Jesse, you know, next month, women were way more likely than

00:10:38.720 | men to be doing those like they're, they're disproportionately spending more hours on it.

00:10:43.280 | So there's these, these subtleties in terms of just the emotional exchange and saying, no,

00:10:48.240 | not wanting to let someone down. Uh, women are much less likely just to be straight up jerks.

00:10:53.520 | Guys can kind of get away with that. In academia, you have a lot of guys that are barely in some

00:11:01.200 | fields, barely fit for social, like human social interaction. If that makes sense, you can ask my

00:11:07.200 | wife about this. She's been, she threw out grad school. I brought her to a lot of, uh, computer

00:11:11.360 | science parties. You get some of that. You get out of a lot of work when you don't even want to have

00:11:16.480 | a conversation with someone. So I think that's a good point they're pointing out. Um, so what they

00:11:20.880 | say here is we need less logistical advice and more emotional advice when it comes to thinking

00:11:25.840 | about yes or no. So let's acknowledge that. I think that's a very important point.

00:11:28.640 | All right. In the same piece, they pulled out. I want, there's one other thing I want to highlight

00:11:34.960 | in the same section here. They were looking, what's the terminology here? Soft no or little no.

00:11:43.680 | So they had heard something called little no, which is where like you agree to a little bit

00:11:47.760 | or to do a lesser thing. So it's not as emotionally taxing. And they described that strategy,

00:11:52.400 | that strategy for reducing the emotional toll of saying no to be a slippery slope that led people

00:11:59.440 | to ask for a greater commitment. Later on, they went on to say only a firm no truly reduced our

00:12:04.640 | commitments. That is so true to my experience. I, you know, I become a master of that in my time.

00:12:11.600 | You can't, can't try to soften the blow. You have this sense of like, maybe there's a way I can say

00:12:19.040 | no here that I'm not really saying no, but I don't have to do the work. It doesn't work. You have to

00:12:22.880 | be incredibly clear. And, you know, I I've learned this through experience where I'll say, I really

00:12:28.720 | appreciate this invitation. I'm honored. You thought of me. However, because of X, Y, Z, I have

00:12:34.720 | to say no to this request. Like you have to have that piece. It's I unfortunately are with regrets.

00:12:40.080 | I have to say no to this request. You have to have that piece. It can't just be like, yeah, I don't

00:12:45.360 | know. You know, I'm pretty busy. I'm not sure if this is going to work out and X, Y, and Z, and

00:12:49.120 | just hope that they're going to come back and say, you know what? You seem too busy. Don't worry

00:12:52.080 | about it. They won't. They, their life will be easier if you say yes, as long as there's any

00:12:56.960 | opening, they're going to keep going. You owe them and yourself clarity. So that's, you have to have

00:13:01.200 | in there somewhere. I've definitely learned this specifically. I am saying no period. And then you

00:13:06.960 | can add regrets and stuff like that. That's fine, but don't give any wiggle room. The other thing

00:13:12.720 | to say is don't say, well, I'm really busy right now. So I don't think I can do it this semester

00:13:17.680 | or this month because they will be like, great. How about January? So it has to be because of

00:13:23.040 | busyness or because of whatever I have to say no. So you can't answer back like, okay, but maybe you

00:13:28.800 | mean yes. All right. Fourth thing, they, these authors, the fourth insight practice makes no

00:13:33.680 | easier as they did it more as they got closer to 100, it got easier to do. So anyways, I like that

00:13:42.560 | article. Uh, and I like the topic. You have to control what is on your plate. You are doing

00:13:49.920 | this, whether you have a plan or not, you are saying no to things, you're turning things down.

00:13:55.520 | You're probably just doing implicitly. You're probably just waiting until you're stressed

00:13:58.720 | and then lashing out randomly and trying to get out of things until people see you're so

00:14:02.640 | exhausted that maybe they stop bothering you. All right. That's not a good plan. It's a plan,

00:14:07.520 | but it's not a good plan. You need a better one. And I think this article is a, uh, a pretty good

00:14:12.160 | treatment of the topic. So get more systematic about saying no recognize the difficulty of doing

00:14:17.840 | so and it'll make your life in the long run, uh, a lot easier. I say no all the time, Jesse,

00:14:27.280 | like my whole life. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine you get a lot of requests. I do. I do. I mean,

00:14:33.920 | it helps. I don't, this is why I don't have a general purpose way for people to reach me.

00:14:37.520 | It's why there's, there's, um, if you go to my contact page, so if you're interested in speaking,

00:14:43.840 | here's my speaking agent. If you have like a publicity thing, here's my publicist. If you

00:14:49.040 | have like a question about rights or translations or something about the books, here's my literary

00:14:52.640 | agency, right? It's like your question has to get moved to someone who is not me. If you want to

00:14:58.240 | send us links, which I love, here's the address, but, uh, requests won't be answered. Like we just

00:15:03.520 | make that clear on the site. Like there's just too many of the messages that come through. I love

00:15:06.400 | that you guys send me things, but I can't say I can't actually respond to it. So there's not

00:15:09.280 | actually a general purpose place. I mean, and then if people make their way, sometimes people

00:15:13.840 | make their way to my Georgetown address, but then I just feel fine. Like if you're using that for a

00:15:18.240 | non-academic purpose, like you already know, like I don't, I'm not expecting to get a response. I

00:15:23.360 | don't respond to those. You know, it, it, it works. I mean, it's, it's hard because it's nice

00:15:28.160 | to talk to people. And I used to interact with all of our, all my different readers and would

00:15:31.760 | answer every email and it took all my time and then I couldn't do anything else. So it's, it's,

00:15:37.600 | uh, it is hard. Uh, and then I still get a lot of requests. I have to say no to, you know,

00:15:42.320 | I'll tell you the hard ones. Sometimes they come from friends, you know, it'll be, uh, the, the

00:15:48.080 | hardest ones and then, and then I'll, I'll leave it. I'll just say the hardest ones are, let's say

00:15:53.760 | it's a friend of the family or, you know, who doesn't know much about me, but just like comes

00:16:00.640 | across something and then is like, oh, I know him. Like I know his wife, I know his mom or something

00:16:06.240 | like that. And like, Hey, can you, uh, it's so exciting. I saw you like, um, can you come like

00:16:10.640 | down to our office and like, come give a talk and like, you know, come join this webinar, do this

00:16:15.920 | and that. And those are kind of the, those are the, those are the hard ones. Yeah. It's hard to say

00:16:20.560 | no, which I do, but it's just hard to do. Yeah. But you just have to, we just have to rip off the

00:16:26.320 | bandaid. Yeah. Yeah. My wife's got used to that. Just saying to people who know her and she's like,

00:16:31.600 | he just, he's not doing things right now. And she has some phrase, she says like, he's not,

00:16:34.880 | he's not taking on new things right now or something. She's got the script optimized.

00:16:38.880 | She's got the script optimized.

The Art Of Saying No | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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