I've written before about the fact that "time management" is really task management, and task management is really about knowing when to say "no." Today I want to explore that idea a bit further and describe two approaches that I have found to be useful: NO-vember and the NO-lympics.

We academics are, as a general rule, driven. We are committed to our work and driven to succeed, both for our own sakes and for the sakes of others: students, colleagues, and collaborators. Many of us would describe our work as a "calling," more of a vocation than simply a career. It is precisely this level of commitment to our life's work that can make it difficult for us to know when to say "no" to an opportunity. And yet, if we allow ourselves to say "yes" too often, the results are predictable and undesirable: some level of failure becomes inevitable. Failure can take many forms: not completing tasks we've agreed to do; completing tasks at a lower level of quality than we would like; missing deadlines; allowing more important work to languish in order to fulfill our promises. If any of those sound familiar, then I invite you to consider saying "no" more often, for the sake of living and working according to your core values. In particular, I invite you to consider re-framing your use of this difficult two-letter word. Consider that every time you say "no" to an invitation or request, you are saying "yes" to spending your time on the things that you value the most.

We each have a finite amount of time. Some of it is already spoken for; the rest is ours to allocate as we see fit. If you are like most of the humans I know, you can easily think of several situations where you said yes to an invitation or request, regretted that choice, and then spent hours of your finite and precious time fulfilling your commitment. Too often, we automatically say "yes," or at least "maybe," without really considering whether we ought to say "no." Sometimes I even find myself volunteering to do things in situations where I haven't been asked to do anything!

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Flowchart for responding to requests

Provenance: Carol Ormand Ph.D., Carleton College
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Why are we so eager to say "yes"? I think there are many reasons. Sometimes we just want to be helpful -- hence my volunteering. Sometimes we feel flattered that someone values our expertise or perspective. Sometimes the person asking is a department chair, a colleague, and/or a friend, and we want to maintain a positive relationship with them. And I suspect that sometimes we just don't realize that we have the option of saying "no." The next time you are asked to do something, consider the questions in the flowchart to the right.

I can hear some of you thinking, "I'd love to say "no," but sometimes I just can't." You can. Imagine a request that you just can't say "no" to. What would you do if you were getting married the day of the event? Or if you were giving a keynote address at a conference? You'd say "no," right? Please tell me you'd say "no." Because you would have something more important to do, right? Whenever you say "no," you are making time for things that are more important to you. If you feel as though you "have to" say yes to most requests, read Kerry Ann Rockquemore's advice on how to just say no.

If you are ready to try an experiment in saying "no" more often, here are two strategies that have worked for me:

NO-vember: a month of practice

One year, I used the month of NO-vember to practice saying "no." I simply set an artificial goal for myself: let "no" be my default answer to everything. Of course, it isn't possible to say "no" to everything. But it turns out that having "no" as my default answer meant saying "no" a lot more often than I usually would.

NO-lympics: incentivizing the word "no"

A friend of mine finds that an external reward system is effective. He and a colleague have a friendly competition they refer to as the NO-lympics. Each person earns a point every time he says "no" to a work-related request, invitation, or opportunity. I borrowed this idea and use it outside of work.

Is anyone interested in having a friendly NO-vember NO-lympic competition?

What strategies do you use to decide when to say "no"?