these two lessons are part 2 of yesterday’s post. although i’ve thought about the two particular lessons below before, miriam put them in succinct ways that i appreciate.
“if iām gonna say no, i have to be serious about when i say yes”
i like the idea of saying no as a muscle. but, as far as i know, every muscle in the human body has a counter-muscle that controls the opposite motion. your biceps help you bend your arm inward and your triceps help you bend it outwards. so, to stretch the analogy maybe too far, on the other wise of the saying no muscle is the yes muscle. and, as miriam said, getting better at saying no means being serious about showing up when saying yes.
imo, this just means not bailing at the last minute. i used to bail a lot on things i had committed to. mostly i’d bail because i had committed to the thing when my schedule was already full and then when the time came to do the thing, i was exhausted and couldn’t bear to go. either because i didn’t want to have to answer the dreaded “what do you do” question or because i just needed sleep or because i was socially over-scheduled and needed to do some work. either way, learning strengthening my no muscle has actually resulted in an increased ability to show up and show up well when i do say yes. people seem to really appreciate it, too. they know when i say yes, it’s not just off-hand or out of courtesy.
“saying no is really about setting boundaries”
this is accurate in all sorts of ways. i don’t even know where to start with this one, but one thing i’ve noticed is that it seems people’s individual capacity to set boundaries is diminishing. it seems like in some places it’s structural and cultural. for example: working at a place where it’s normal to be on your email all day every day and to have your work email on your phone with notifications. or another example is just how rude it’s perceived when you tell someone you don’t want to get together for a drink or coffee.
saying no, in some senses is about being clear about what you need to be well and then setting boundaries so that you get what you need.
this, to me, is the most powerful part about getting better at saying no. i definitely don’t feel that great at it yet, but i can tell that over the past two years, i’ve been able to make way more progress in the areas that i wanted to. i think that’s fundamentally related to the fact that i say no to things that aren’t helping me move towards my goals.
during a productivity boost session with my friend miriam, one of the topics we touched on was the power of saying no. i wrote about this a lot when starting my coaching practice, but my thinking on this has expanded (much in part because of my conversations with miriam). here are some ways that saying no has shown up in my life:
saying no has helped me not commit to seeing a ton of people all the time
i used to fill every night (and many afternoons) with catch up meetings. i’d run into someone in the street or the library or at an event or coffeeshop. then the inevitable “we should catch up!” would follow and we’d schedule something. i’ve been in boston so i know a lot of people. every week i was probably meeting up with 4-6 people. it was exhausting. i would feel myself get tired of telling people what was going on in my life. not a good sign.
now, because i have specific slots on my calendar, i have more confidence in saying no (or just scheduling way in advance). this, in turn, leaves me time to actually just be alone. at first, i thought it would be lonely. turns out, it’s not. it’s actually glorious.
saying no has helped me not fill unscheduled time with seeing people nearby
when i first wrote that, i actually cringed a bit. am i a person who doesnāt want to make time for people when i’m near them? but then, i remembered, i love making time for people; i just want to do it in a way that makes sure i get what i need to be healthy, happy, and sane. like i mentioned above, having specific slots on my calendar for when i see random people outside of my inner circle of friends helps me decide whether i have time to drum up a random social meeting or not.
i used to feel bad about not trying to see everyone all the time. now, because i have a fairly robust personal system, i know that the time i’m not spending having random catchup meetings is helping me move towards the goals i established at the beginning of the year.
out of time for today. tomorrow’s post will cover the last two points:
lesson from miriam: if iām gonna say no, i have to be serious about when i say yes
lesson from miriam: saying no is really about setting boundaries
ps - i just saw the book below in a space my friend, sidney, manages. maybe it’s relevant?Ā
earlier this week, i was explaining why multi-tasking is no good to a new client and thought i’d share. i think i’ll just share rapid-fire bullet point style:
multi-tasking isn’t real. as explained beautifully over here, the brain can only handle one cognitive function at a time. the only exception to this is that you can do one cognitive task while doing a physical task that you’re very familiar with (like walking or sketching or knitting).
when people think they’re multi-tasking, they’re often just missing information. sometime soon, i think i’m going to count the number of times someone is texting while i’m talking to them and they ask me “what?” after i’m done talking to them. i would estimate three people do this to me daily.
missing information is costly. this point speaks for itself. however, a less obvious cost to missing information while multi-tasking is the time and energy it takes to go find the information again OR the time it takes to fix a mistake that impacted someone else.
task switching, which is what multi-tasking actually is, undermines productivity. this is contrary to how many of us are being (culturally) trained. we live in a society where doing more is seen as better, regardless of whether or not you have capacity for what you’re doing. it’s a vicious cycle whereby being overworked or frenzied creates a situation in which the frenzied stated of being is the only way to make ends meet (speaking economically and socially). some of this is an economic failure, but some of it is just cultural. but i digress… multi-tasking doesn’t actually help you do more things well, it allows you to do many things in a mediocre way. by preventing focus, multi-tasking undermines depth in production (and maker time is SO important to producing good work). additionally, as weinshenck mentions in her article, multi-tasking requires energy from your pre-frontal cortex. your pre-frontal cortex is critical to being productive. so when you occupy your pre-frontal cortex, you diminish your own ability to be creative.
context switching is incredibly expensive. i learned via the trello blog (which is a pretty amazing productivity resource whether or not you use trello) the most detrimental type of task-switching is context-switching. this is when you’re doing one type of work and then you quickly switch to a different type of work. this undermines flow is the one and creates a slow on-ramp to flow in the other.
for example, you’re working on a complicated excel spreadsheet. you’ve got lots of information in your head about what goes where and how you need to make equations to get the numbers you need. then, an email pops up and you go to your inbox to respond to it. this is the most expensive type of switch. to use the analogy of a computer, your RAM (short-term memory) was filled with information needed to finish that spreadsheet. without that information floating around in your short-term memory, you actually can’t get to the answer you need. when you switched to your email, your brain dumped all that stuff from your RAM and started filling it up with email information: who is this email from? what’s the context that this email is about? how do i need to respond in a politically appropriate way? etc. when you return to the spreadsheet, you have re-up all the information you had dumped before to finish the task. the time it takes to reacquaint yourself likely would have been saved if you had just finished the spreadsheet and then gone to deal with the email later.
DR. KARR: Yeah. I love that. I mean, I love that thing Thomas Keating says about practicing mindfulness, and that itās sort of like ā thereās a bunch of water that has mud and silt in it, and the longer you practice, the more that just kind of settles to the bottom, and you donāt feel any peace. You might practice for days and weeks, and itās just cloudy and noisy. And he says what you donāt realize is that healing is happening, that that stuff ā by doing that, you are settling it, but you donāt notice it because it hasnāt settled yet. You have to just ā how difficult just to keep sitting there.
this has been exactly how meditation has benefitted me over the last couple of years. i started trying to meditate daily in jan 2015. i hit 250/365 days that year and, as far as i can remember, iāve meditated 10+ minutes every day this year.
at first, i didnāt really notice anything. it didnāt seem like much was changing about anything i could sense or feel.
then, during the summer, i started meditating before i went to work. i noticed a significant difference in my ability to assess situations more thoughtfully. i could just see into a situation with more perspective.
that fall, when i got a new job, i began to notice that i could notice when i wasnāt focused. i would be focusing on a particular work task and then i would feel myself reaching for something unrelated. likeā¦ i could sense my brain wander away from what i was doing. or, to be more explicit, i noticed when thoughts crept in that werenāt related to what i was working on.
that proved to be unbelievably valuable because i could then either (a) find a way to deal with the distraction (which often just involved writing it down to do later) or (b) put it aside and refocus. either way, both of those options were better than what i would do previously, which was let the thought actually distract me and then snap out of it (texting, facebook, email, twitter, reading random articles) 30+ minutes later and wonder āwtf have i been doing?!?ā
these two last things iāve gained from daily meditation are probably the most impactful.
by noticing which thoughts wander into my brain during meditation (i.e. whatās on my mind), iām able to better parse out what is taking up my mental energy. that allows me to, outside of meditation, handle those things that would have taken up lots of mental energy over the day. iām then freer to focus on other things with more calm and clarity. the positive impact of this cannot be understated.
learning to let my thoughts come and go with the trust that the important things will come back when they need to. sometimes during the day iāll remember something that seems so important but i wonāt have time to process it properly. then, i would beat myself up and try so hard to think of the thing i had forgotten.
it turns out, as iāve meditated more and more, iāve noticed that my brain is actually quite adept at not letting me forget really important things. the really important things always come back up (often during meditation, but not always). iām able to process the thought then if i missed it the first time. and if a thought doesnāt come back up, it honestly probably wasnāt that important. now, i know thatās a very common trope thatās often seen as trite, but iāve really begun to trust it lately and itās brought a lot more ease to my thinking.
so yea. it really feels like the process of muddy water settling. you donāt necessarily notice it day-to-day, but over time, the ability to see through the increasingly clear water provides huge benefits. you just have to let it settle enough to get there.
āAs we expand the diversity of social connections we have, the bandwidth we can commit to each of those connections becomes more limited, and the information that comes from them gets weaker and narrower. And that in turns makes weak ties suitable for certain kinds of work and strong ties suitable for others.ā
i think about this all time. the two most common contexts for me are productivity and social connections, but it comes up in other places, too.
on the productivity front, it shows up as needing to make tough choices about priorities (the last part of the quote above about weak ties vs strong ties isnāt really relevant for the productivity front, but it is for the social). it means recognizing that you canāt do everything. and you can really only do a few things at the same time if you want to do any of them well.
on one hand, that reality has to do with amassing resources. building knowledge (and sometimes a network, too) relevant to what it is youāre trying to do requires focus. whether its raising a family or becoming an opera star, the more you can focus, the faster and more deeply youāll learn.
the diversity/bandwidth tradeoff shows up in a parallel way socially to the productivity breakdown.
for example, when i was in grad school, i really tried to do everything. this resulted in me running myself ragged. what iāve been learning this year is that itās super important (and very counter-cultural) to have a clearly delineated group of close friends and focus on those friendships intensely. yes, this means that being close to everyone is not possible, but it allows three things. (1) it allows us to build the type of deep friendship that we all crave (the āi would drop whatever iām doing if you needed meā type of friendship). (2) it allows spontaneity in those friendships because you arenāt overcommitted. (3) when do you do hangout with someone outside of your inner circle, it means you can show up fully for that person because youāre not exhausted from giving too much to too many different people.
of course, there is always a balance. itās not good to only be thinking about just one thing or have just one friend. but most people (myself included) try to do way too much and it undermines their success.
sidenote: on this friend front, i think there may be a lot more to this that belongs in another postā¦ for example:
maybe this theory is why having a small number of close friends and many distant ones is good.
i wonder if people and communities would be better if we thought strategically about this from an early age? what if we taught our children that their lives would be the most fulfilling if their thought about their friendships like this? what if the design of our physical communities supported and encouraged friendships like this? hm!
