I like it. All right, sounds good. All right. So we have all that coming up. Let's start. However, as I like to do with the deep dive, the topic I want to tackle in today's deep dive is the art of no. So saying no is a major part of my own professional life, because I'm someone who has multiple jobs with multiple demands and am somewhat in the public eye.

So I have to spend more time saying no and thinking about how to say no and the ramifications of saying no, I would say than probably the average person. So it's something that I have thought a lot about. There's a couple observations I've always had about saying no. Number one, I think the average person creates this false binary between either you're someone who basically says yes, or you are a disagreeable person who says no.

And they say, well, if those are my two choices, I don't want to be the disagreeable person. That seems stressful and emotionally taxing. So I'm just the person who who says yes, I kind of have to say yes, but seems at all like it would be difficult to say no.

The reality, though, is that everyone says no a lot, whether they know it or not, whether it's implicit or explicit. But if you think about it, most knowledge workers, you know, they have a full schedule, usually about 20 percent more full than they want it to be, but not impossibly full.

They're not working till 2 a.m., but maybe they're working till 6 p.m. It is highly unlikely that the exact volume of things that was put onto their plate that they said yes to just happened to exactly match an eight or nine hour day. Right. Almost certainly there is many more things coming at them and they had that they had to sort it through and they basically were implicitly or explicitly saying no, just enough to keep a day full.

So we're already all saying no, even if we don't realize that we just do it somewhat haphazardly. And I wrote a New Yorker piece about this last fall where I said my theory about how most people informally handle the goal of saying no, they don't have a plan, they don't have an intention, they don't have a vision for what they're trying to accomplish.

They instead wait until their level of experience stress is high enough that they feel emotionally justified turning someone down. So it's like I am so overwhelmed right now, I feel justified saying no. And until that point, I don't. And what I argued in that New Yorker piece is that this is a terrible way to go about this because it ensures that you remain at a persistent level of elevated stress.

If you have to be sufficiently stressed to feel comfortable saying no, then you're never gonna start saying no until you're sufficiently stressed. So you're gonna stay at this level of being sufficiently stressed, basically persistently. So when we are not intentional about how we filter what we do and don't do, we end up in this default purgatory, this productivity purgatory of having just a enough just enough on our plate that it is bearable, but uncomfortable.

And we persist there. So we burn out and don't produce what we want and all the other negatives to come. So what we need to do is be more specific with ourselves about how we figure out what's a reasonable workload, what that workload should be made up of how we're going to go about dealing with requests to fit that load and not overload.

We need to be more specific about it. That's why I was happy to see an article that someone sent to me, an alert listener sent to me, that appeared in a it's a column in the journal Nature. And it is written by four scientists. And it is titled, "Why Four Scientists Spent a Year Saying No" and it is an article that gets into the tactical weeds about the challenges and proper strategies for declining or turning away stuff that's going to overload you, turning away work.

So I want to go through this article because I often harp about this, "Hey, you got to be more intentional about how you say yes or no," but we don't necessarily get into enough tactics about, "Well, how do I actually say no without feeling really bad or annoying people?" All right, so I have the article here.

So those who are watching on YouTube, so you can find this at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia. You'll see on the screen that we have the date highlighted. This is from August 25th, so this is recent. Now the four scientists who wrote this column, their names don't show up in this version I have here, but probably relevant to this article, I believe all four are women.

So that'll come up a little bit later. All right, so I want to highlight a couple things here. First, just to start, let's give the premise for what they were doing here before we get to their specific advice. So the premise is the following. "Last May," I'm quoting the article here, "Last May, facing pandemic and career burnout, this member whimsically suggested," so member of these four scientists have a group that meets regularly to discuss just their career and the challenges of being scientists.

All right, so back to the quote, "A member of the group whimsically suggested we make a game out of saying no by challenging ourselves to collectively decline 100 work-related requests. Thus, we spent a year tracking and reflecting on our decisions to say no." So they started in May of 2021, they finished in March of 2022.

So they got systematic about saying no and had four observations. They call them here four insights about what they learned saying no systematically 100 times over the course of a year. So let's go through these four insights real quick. All right, the first insight, "Tracking helped make no an option." So they started keeping track of all the things they said yes or no to, just a simple list.

So this is separate from whatever other organizational system you have for organizing your time or projects. Let's just have a yes/no list. So as they pointed out, first of all, it helped them understand how much they'd already said yes. It's easy to forget. It also induced the gamification motivation of, well, how many no's do we have?

I want to get a couple more no's this week. Maybe I do want to say no. What they then talked about is that once they started tracking no, this got them in the tracking mindset, which helped them in other ways as well. So reading from the article here, they say, "We logged completed tasks to counteract imposter syndrome.

We kept a running count of active projects and tracked how we were spending time each day." This is all the type of stuff I recommend. When you actually start tracking your time, your projects, what you're doing, what you're not doing, when you actually confront what we talked about in the show, the productivity dragon of what's really on your plate, what you've slayed in the past, this is all very important for you getting your arms around your work and making confident plans for how you want to go forward.

As long as you exist in this liminal space of emails coming in, you're saying yes or no, you're jumping in and out of meetings and just always scrambling, but you're not really sure, what am I doing? How much am I doing? What have I gotten done? What am I saying yes to?

If you don't know these things, you're a fireman. You're putting out fires. And people who put out fires eventually get burnt. All right, number two, second thing they observed from this experiment, say no more often and to larger asks. So when they were reflecting, they said, "We declined too many little things, such as reviewing journal articles, and not enough big tasks." I think that's a good point.

They were saying, you can rack up the no's quicker if you're aiming on the little things, the things that might take you a couple hours of the afternoons, but they're noting the things that caused the most stress were the big asks. And they give some examples here, leadership opportunities, the chance to help write large grant proposals, et cetera.

By the way, all of this is giving me cold sweats because this is too close to home. Jesse knows this. Okay, so what they ended up doing is coming up with a series of questions to help evaluate when to say yes and when not. So here's their questions. They have five of them.

This is what they started asking to try to figure out, okay, is this something I should say yes to? One, does it fit to my research agenda and identity? Two, does it spark joy? Three, do I have time to do a good job without sacrificing extra commitments? Four, does the opportunity leave space for my personal life?

Five, am I uniquely qualified to fill this need? Right, so that made it easier for them to say no because they had, eventually they had these criteria. So when something big would come along, they would say, look, there's two of these criteria, it doesn't pass. So now I have a reason to say no.

Three, and this is an important one, maybe sometimes overlooked, saying no is emotional work. It really is. I have to say no a lot. I just earlier this week got out, you know, said no to a speaking thing that I sort of went down the road with it because I thought it would be interesting, but it logistically was going to be a pain.

I knew I would regret it later on. And it's hard. And sometimes the other people get upset. I would say nine times out of 10 people aren't really upset. They just need an answer and they're moving on. But just emotionally, the lived experience of saying no, because of the way it plays on our interpersonal social network wiring in our brain, the lived experience is often quite stressful.

This hits different people differently. So here's the authors here I'm reading. In myriad ways, we saw how our cultural conditioning as women, academics, and public servants contributed to our difficulty with setting boundaries, tracking not just how often we said yes or no, but also our emotional responses made the emotional labor of saying no visible.

We often do ignore the emotional side of some of this otherwise seemingly dry technical productivity, uh, strategy, that there is an emotional side to it. I talk about in a world without email, there's non surprising, but well done surveys of workplace behavior that says, if you start to categorize what they call non-promotable behavior.

So these are behaviors that aren't directly projects, activity tasks, not directly ties you being promoted. So I will help organize the birthday party for Jesse, you know, next month, women were way more likely than men to be doing those like they're, they're disproportionately spending more hours on it. So there's these, these subtleties in terms of just the emotional exchange and saying, no, not wanting to let someone down.

Uh, women are much less likely just to be straight up jerks. Guys can kind of get away with that. In academia, you have a lot of guys that are barely in some fields, barely fit for social, like human social interaction. If that makes sense, you can ask my wife about this.

She's been, she threw out grad school. I brought her to a lot of, uh, computer science parties. You get some of that. You get out of a lot of work when you don't even want to have a conversation with someone. So I think that's a good point they're pointing out.

Um, so what they say here is we need less logistical advice and more emotional advice when it comes to thinking about yes or no. So let's acknowledge that. I think that's a very important point. All right. In the same piece, they pulled out. I want, there's one other thing I want to highlight in the same section here.

They were looking, what's the terminology here? Soft no or little no. So they had heard something called little no, which is where like you agree to a little bit or to do a lesser thing. So it's not as emotionally taxing. And they described that strategy, that strategy for reducing the emotional toll of saying no to be a slippery slope that led people to ask for a greater commitment.

Later on, they went on to say only a firm no truly reduced our commitments. That is so true to my experience. I, you know, I become a master of that in my time. You can't, can't try to soften the blow. You have this sense of like, maybe there's a way I can say 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 be incredibly clear. And, you know, I I've learned this through experience where I'll say, I really appreciate this invitation. I'm honored. You thought of me. However, because of X, Y, Z, I have to say no to this request. Like you have to have that piece.

It's I unfortunately are with regrets. I have to say no to this request. You have to have that piece. It can't just be like, yeah, I don't know. You know, I'm pretty busy. I'm not sure if this is going to work out and X, Y, and Z, and just hope that they're going to come back and say, you know what?

You seem too busy. Don't worry about it. They won't. They, their life will be easier if you say yes, as long as there's any opening, they're going to keep going. You owe them and yourself clarity. So that's, you have to have in there somewhere. I've definitely learned this specifically.

I am saying no period. And then you can add regrets and stuff like that. That's fine, but don't give any wiggle room. The other thing to say is don't say, well, I'm really busy right now. So I don't think I can do it this semester or this month because they will be like, great.

How about January? So it has to be because of busyness or because of whatever I have to say no. So you can't answer back like, okay, but maybe you mean yes. All right. Fourth thing, they, these authors, the fourth insight practice makes no easier as they did it more as they got closer to 100, it got easier to do.

So anyways, I like that article. Uh, and I like the topic. You have to control what is on your plate. You are doing this, whether you have a plan or not, you are saying no to things, you're turning things down. You're probably just doing implicitly. You're probably just waiting until you're stressed and then lashing out randomly and trying to get out of things until people see you're so exhausted that maybe they stop bothering you.

All right. That's not a good plan. It's a plan, but it's not a good plan. You need a better one. And I think this article is a, uh, a pretty good treatment of the topic. So get more systematic about saying no recognize the difficulty of doing so and it'll make your life in the long run, uh, a lot easier.

I say no all the time, Jesse, like my whole life. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine you get a lot of requests. I do. I do. I mean, it helps. I don't, this is why I don't have a general purpose way for people to reach me. It's why there's, there's, um, if you go to my contact page, so if you're interested in speaking, here's my speaking agent.

If you have like a publicity thing, here's my publicist. If you have like a question about rights or translations or something about the books, here's my literary agency, right? It's like your question has to get moved to someone who is not me. If you want to send us links, which I love, here's the address, but, uh, requests won't be answered.

Like we just make that clear on the site. Like there's just too many of the messages that come through. I love that you guys send me things, but I can't say I can't actually respond to it. So there's not actually a general purpose place. I mean, and then if people make their way, sometimes people make their way to my Georgetown address, but then I just feel fine.

Like if you're using that for a non-academic purpose, like you already know, like I don't, I'm not expecting to get a response. I don't respond to those. You know, it, it, it works. I mean, it's, it's hard because it's nice to talk to people. And I used to interact with all of our, all my different readers and would answer every email and it took all my time and then I couldn't do anything else.

So it's, it's, uh, it is hard. Uh, and then I still get a lot of requests. I have to say no to, you know, I'll tell you the hard ones. Sometimes they come from friends, you know, it'll be, uh, the, the hardest ones and then, and then I'll, I'll leave it.

I'll just say the hardest ones are, let's say it's a friend of the family or, you know, who doesn't know much about me, but just like comes across something and then is like, oh, I know him. Like I know his wife, I know his mom or something like that.

And like, Hey, can you, uh, it's so exciting. I saw you like, um, can you come like down to our office and like, come give a talk and like, you know, come join this webinar, do this and that. And those are kind of the, those are the, those are the hard ones.

Yeah. It's hard to say no, which I do, but it's just hard to do. Yeah. But you just have to, we just have to rip off the bandaid. Yeah. Yeah. My wife's got used to that. Just saying to people who know her and she's like, he just, he's not doing things right now.

And she has some phrase, she says like, he's not, he's not taking on new things right now or something. She's got the script optimized. She's got the script optimized.