Orgflow: 0. Saying No
As foreshadowed in the introductory post in this series, the orgflow system is not meant to make you more productive.
It probably will, but not in the way you think.
The point of it is to help manage your relationship with all the work you have to do, not magically catch you up in a short period of time.
I would even go so far as to say that no productivity system will ever catch you up on everything you need to do.
This especially holds true if you just have too much work to do.
It’s worth saying the following out loud:
- No productivity system can free you from too much work.
- No productivity system can combat exploitative labor practices.
- No productivity system can solve all your problems.
If you are an aspiring academic, there is no shortage of work that you could do. And the amount of work you could do always stands to increase. It only takes one second to say yes, while it takes tens or hundreds of thousands to actually do it. Add in some power imbalances and naivety about not knowing what will lead to good pay offs and you have a recipe for guilt, overwhelm, and racking up lots of project debt.
This feeling is probably familiar to a lot of people, we’ve all been there before and many of us probably somewhat are there now.
That mountain of “stuff” you need to do is what the orgflow system is for managing.
But step one (or, step 0!) is to stop making it worse for yourself, aka, start saying No!
This is why I wanted to start the series talking about thoughts on saying no.
In an ideal world, if you wanted to truly get out of project debt/guilt, you would just say no to everything until you are “caught up”. Along the way you would have mastered the practice of organizing and tracking your work, then you’d just open up the gates once you are caught up, but this time at a reasonable pace.
But you can’t do that, it’s impossible. You also wouldn’t want to do that, since if you just worked on backlogged projects, the lack of novelty might drain the life out of you as you’re trying to save yourself.
So if you did have to say yes, what should you say yes to?
My opinion at this point (for students, at first) would be things such as…
- Whatever a trusted advisor thinks you should be spending time on
- Work that will make it possible for you to continue on in the career you hope to pursue (aka, great publications for academics)
- Basic CV requirements for the above point (teaching, service that you find meaningful)
The points above might be great for students, but what about everyone else?
The criteria that I (try to) use for new work comes from an anecdote that I cannot for the life of me find the source to. I swear it was on some RStudio person’s blog at the time, talking about deciding which conferences and speaker events to agree to in a pre-COVID world. So if someone reading this recognizes this idea, please let me know and I will add it here.
The basic idea was to say yes only to work that you would literally drop everything you had to do today in order to do tomorrow.
And for this to work, you have to take it quite literally. If you wouldn’t (or couldn’t!) cancel all your commitments right now to do this new thing, you should say no.
Why?
The justification for it was that, though you don’t have to do any new work you agree to tomorrow (literally), but that in several weeks or months in the future, eventually that work will happen tomorrow. And you will have to drop everything: teaching, relaxing, spending time with friends and family, then pack, get on a train/plane, and go do it.
This might be a bit of an extreme way to think about it, but I find something particularly appealing about setting a personal threshold that each piece of new work has to meet in order for you to say yes to.
The other tool that I have found massively helpful– especially if you do don’t have a line manager or mentor who encourages a “pro-no” life, is to find a group of like minded career people in order to form a yes-addicts support group. The basic idea is that you get everyone together who sort of knows you, then you let them decide if a new opportunity is worth it. They ideally know you and your career, so when you share it, they give a decent answer.
You ask them, should I…
- Join this service committee for the next two years?
- Agree to this peer review on a topic I don’t know much about?
- Teach this extra class?
and if it’s not a good idea, they hit you with a chorus of no-s. That is, of course, it is so obvious that taking on this new responsibility will benefit you or your community.
I will end with a personal reflection to say that it’s good to cultivate the ability to say no, especially to your superiors, as its a way to set a clear boundary and see if your superior will respect it. If someone gets mad or upset at you for saying no, it could be the case that they only value your relationship because you are a ‘yes-man’ and that you’ll do whatever they ask. If you can, it’s good to avoid these people. This sentiment assumes that you are saying no to work that is going to overwhelm you above and beyond what should be expected for you. You still have to do your job description (which, if is not clear, is how they get you!).
And one more thought now I am thinking of all things “no”. Another lesson I had to learn the hard way, is to be extremely cautious to say yes to people who approach your help in a panic. Admittedly, this is the hardest thing for me to say no to; I really enjoy helping people when I can, especially when they need it. But from my experience, if someone needs help and they need the answer like now , air on the side of no. My biggest yes regrets always come from saying yes to people who are scrambling to find people to do something.
This all goes for “extra” work, which is hard to sometimes quantify and explain to non-academics. When something is a part of your job description, you can’t really say no to it.
That’s why it’s so important to know what is required of your job, how you will be assessed, so you know how to spend your time.
I imagine some of what I am saying might be met with some resistance and what I am describing sounds too good to be true. But the thing is, if you are saying yes to everything being some sort of martyr, it’s my opinion that you are actually making it worse for all of your peers. If there is more work that needs to be done that is out of the scope of what is possible with the resources you have, this is really someone else’s problem. I have seen too many friends now be run to the ground with extra work that, while seemingly noble to do, is deeply unsustainable in terms of intensity and also bad to set that standard, should someone else have to take this amount of work up in the future.
If you find it difficult to say no, it might be worth revisiting this post after reading the rest of this series. One benefit of any GTD inspired system is that it’s bottom up. Which, you will soon find out, means you literally write down EVERYTHING you have to do. A strange benefit of this is that you can look at your absolutely massive TODO list before saying no, even show it to someone who is asking you to do something, and know that you just can’t take on any more at the moment.
Ok, lots of scattered No-related thoughts here, next up is introducing the actual system.