Ch. 4: Eliminate

Eliminate: Flex Your “No” Muscle, page 91.

• Between work, family, social activities, church/community, and a million other types of commitments, we freely give up our precious energy to practically anyone who asks. 
• We know we can’t say yes to everyone, but we still take on far more than we should.
• Why do we do this to ourselves? 
• For many, it’s a lack of courage. 
• We may hate conflict, feel guilty about disappointing people, or worry about missing out on new opportunities.

Get Comfortable Saying “No” 

• The trick is to remember what is at stake. 
• You’ve already done the work to figure out your “Why.” Now you must keep your why in front of you at all times. 
• This doesn’t mean simply saying no to a lot of bad ideas; it also means turning down a ton of good and worthwhile ideas. 
• Staying overworked and overcommitted is easy. The hard work comes in saying no to requests that aren’t important and eliminating unimportant tasks that are eating up your time and energy.
• Some people like to focus on their to-do list. I’d rather focus our energy on the road less traveled: the “Not-to-Do” List.

Understanding Time Dynamics 

• Time is a zero-sum game. There’s only so much to go around. 
• If time, and therefore your calendar, is a zero-sum game, we must realize saying yes to one thing means saying no to something else. 
• Even if we hate saying no, we must understand that every yes inherently contains a no. 
• Eventually, all of our little yesses and nos add up and we find ourselves with a packed schedule. 
• We get to the point where we can’t add one more thing without eliminating something else. 
• That means we must make choices, and these choices are often not between something good and something bad, but between competing opportunities that are good, better, and best.

Acknowledging Trade-Offs 

• Yes and no are the two most powerful words in productivity. 
• We must realize there is a trade-off baked into each one. Every time we say yes to one thing, we’re saying no to something else. 
• Start thinking about the trade-offs you’re making when you’re confronted with an opportunity. 
• Count the cost of saying yes by answering some tough questions:
  • What will I have to give up by saying yes to this opportunity? 
  • Will saying no to this allow me to say yes to something better? 

Filter Your Commitments 

• When examining trade-offs in our commitment decisions, we need a filter, something that will enable us to process an invitation, request, or opportunity and determine whether we should say yes or no. 
• Like a real compass, your Freedom Compass (Ch. 2) will point you in the right direction. It will remind you of your true north, your Desire Zone, whenever you get lost or start veering off in the wrong direction. 
• Everything outside your Desire Zone is a possible candidate for elimination. 
• True productivity isn’t about squeezing more things into your packed schedule, it’s about doing the right things. By cutting away the nonessentials, you create space for the important things.

Create a Not-to-Do List 

• The biggest obstacle is your mindset. 
• People focus on what they might lose, not what they’ll gain. 
• Too often, we operate with a scarcity mentality that drives us to hold on to things we should abandon simply because we’re afraid of another opportunity. 
• There are always more opportunities to be had, and we can’t let the fear of missing out lead us into overextension.
• So, don’t be afraid to grab a chisel and get to work. You’ll never truly thrive as long as you’re carrying around the dead weight of your Drudgery, Disinterest, and Distraction Zones. 

Saying No to New Requests 

• Get comfortable saying no a lot. 
• Learning how to say no is a critical piece of your productivity puzzle. 
• “No” is rarely a popular response, but that doesn’t mean it must be rude, undignified, or ungraceful. 
• There are two common situations where you’ll need to decline graciously:
  • New requests you haven’t answered yet. Those are easier.   
  • Things you’ve already committed to that you now know are outside of your Desire Zone. 
• No matter how great your productivity system is, nothing can prevent people from making new requests of you. 
• In fact, as you become more productive and efficient, you may develop a reputation for being the go-to person.
• That’s why you must develop a bullet-proof strategy for gracefully saying no to new requests that are outside your Desire Zone. 

 

5 tips for a tactful “No”

• Acknowledge that your resources are finite
  • To avoid total burnout, begin to budget your time and energy much like you’d budget your finances. 
  • Whether it’s time or money, careful budgeters go into the month with a plan for where every dollar will go. 
  • You need to budget for your high-priority items first. 

• Determine who needs access to you and who doesn’t
  • While an open-door policy sounds like a good idea in theory, in practice, it can ensure that you never get your own work done. 
  • Being a good leader doesn’t mean jumping whenever someone calls. It instead means focusing on your most important priorities while having systems in place to make sure everything else gets done without you. 
  • If you are the go-to person for every project and problem, your system is fundamentally broken. 

• Let your calendar say no for you
  • One of the best ways to say no is to blame your calendar. 
  • You can do this through what’s called time blocking, and it requires a little intentionality on the front end. 
  • Block chunks of time off for specific high-priority activities. 
  • These blocks appear to others as meetings, because they are. You are scheduling meetings with yourself. 
  • When a request comes in that doesn’t fit your criteria and interrupts your scheduled activities, simply say you have another commitment – which is absolutely true. 
  • Do this even when you are in your office by yourself working on high-priority tasks you have assigned yourself or have accepted from others. 

• Adopt a strategy for responding to requests
  • The best time to plan how to respond to a request is before that request ever hits your desk. 
  • Adopt a strategy in advance, which will make it much easier to follow through in the moment. 
  • In his book, The Power of a Positive No, Harvard professor William Ury outlines four strategies for dealing with demands on our time:
  • Accommodation
    • We say yes, although we really want to say no. 
    • This happens often when we value the relationship with the person making the request more than we value our own interests.
  • Attack
    • This is where we say no poorly. 
    • Here we value our own interests more than we value the importance of the relationship with the other person. 
    • Our response to the request is often an overreaction born out of irritation, resentment, fear, or pressure. 
  • Avoidance
    • We simply ignore the request altogether or wait a long time before we respond, hoping the situation will resolve itself without us having to get involved. 
    • This usually happens because we’re afraid of offending the other party, but we do not want to do what they’re asking.
    • We ignore the problem and hope it goes away. Sadly, it rarely does. 
  • Affirmation
    • This is the response that works, usually creating a win-win for everyone without causing us to sacrifice either the relationship or our own priorities. 
    • This healthy response is what Ury calls a “positive no,” and it’s built around a simple formula with three parts: yes-no-yes. It works like this:
      • Yes.
        • Say yes to yourself to protect what is important to you. 
        • Include affirming the other person. You don’t want to shame others for thinking of you as a possible solution to their problem.
      • No.
        • The answer continues with a matter-of-fact no that is clear and sets boundaries. 
        • Do not leave any wiggle room or ambiguity, and do not leave open the possibility that you might be able to do it another time. 
      • Yes.
        • End the response by affirming the relationship again and by offering another solution to the person’s request. 
• Accept the fact that you’ll be misunderstood
  • It is important to prepare yourself for negative responses. 
  • Sometimes people will express their disappointment with you directly. When that happens, I politely reply by expressing empathy, but also by restating my no. 
  • Disappointing some people in life is inevitable, so make sure you’re not disappointing the ones who matter most. 

Getting Out of Existing Commitments 

• Chances are, you had a long list of existing commitments before you picked up this book, and now you’re scratching your head wondering what to do with those things that fall outside your Desire Zone. 
• Let me be clear here: people of integrity keep their word. 
• If you’ve already committed to doing something, even if it doesn’t fit into your new framework, you should find a way to honor your commitment. 
• That said, there is nothing wrong with attempting to negotiate out of the commitment. 
• Four Tips for Negotiating Out of an Existing Commitment:
  • Take responsibility for making the commitment. 
  • Reaffirm your willingness to honor your commitment. 
  • Explain why honoring your commitment is not the best outcome for the other party. 
  • Offer to help solve the problem with them.
    • Do not shift the burden off your back by dumping it onto theirs. Instead, offer to help find an alternative solution. 

Celebrate the Pruning Process 

• The whole point of this chapter has been to get you comfortable cutting as many things as possible from your calendar. 
• The process of elimination may leave you in an unexpected predicament: you might end up feeling guilty about the time you’re freeing up. This is a trap! 
• If cutting out unnecessary, or undesirable tasks leaves you with free time or margin, that is something you should celebrate! 
• Don’t give into the pressure of finding a thousand other things to replace the ones you said no to. 
• You aren’t making a one-to-one swap as you strike things off your list. 
• The goal of productivity should be achieving more by doing less. You won’t get there if you can’t get comfortable doing less. 
• Your best actions and best thinking come when you’re well-rested and you’ve given yourself the befit of free time. 

Exercise: Build Your Own Not-To-Do List 

• Start with your Task Filter worksheet and mark obvious candidates for elimination. 
• Download and use the Not-to-Do List from FreetoFocus.com/tools. 
• Use the worksheet to record the tasks you should never do. 
• List other meetings, relationships, and opportunities you should never pursue.