How many times have you not said no and lived to regret it? Hint: it’s a lot.
From little favors to big asks, I am inundated every day for requests for my time. Learning to say ‘no’ is a skill I am still working on. I decided to keep track of the requests for a week and here’s what I found:
I am spending most of my day not working on the things I wanted or needed to work on.
Part of the problem is that I work from home. A lot of people don’t see working from home as really working. I am partly to blame for this, because I always give the impression that working from home means making your own schedule. And this is true, but you still need to get the work done, eventually!
Some things are easier to say no to. Of course, I will walk the dog, but not in the middle of the work day. Or I will do the dishes, but not at 2 in the afternoon.
The more difficult requests are the ‘kind of work-like’ requests: Could I help a fellow musician out and record a guitar part? Could I give feedback on someone’s book/art?
The Overwhelming Tide
I could blame the askers for all of these requests, but I know better. They come because I don’t say no and I don’t say no because I want distractions or I want to help or I want to be seen as helping.
And each request brings stress. And before you know it, if you’re like me, you’re sitting in a bathtub of stress and your skin is getting pruney!
I use these requests to create an illusion of spontaneity, but really they are the opposite. Each request pulls me away from the things that deep down I want to do. And some days it gets so bad that they pull me away from the things I should be doing — like work!
Even my preferred way of relaxing, let’s say with a movie or a book, gets set aside because I just have too many things piled up.
And I look back and see that I am not getting the things done. And then the regret kicks in.
The Favor Calendar
How did I get passed this? It took me a long time, but I came up with the idea of a ‘Favor Calendar’. Every day I set aside 1 hour to do things that are not directly for me or my responsibilities (work and personal). I plan a time to go to the grocery store. I plan a time to go to the gym.
The more I keep to the schedule the more used to it I become and I find that I can actually give better. I can do the favors I want and the results are more satisfying and slowly the regret is passing.
Ok, I’m 54, so there’s a lot of regret in the backlog, but I can only move forward through time (I had to remove ‘create a time machine’ from my to-do list years ago), and moving forward the goal is to not add more regrets of wasted time to the pile.
I hope this helps someone. It’s a bit stream of consciousness.
