NO

You just said Yes – You just said No revisited

Affirmative action, Delegation, Productivity, relationships

Everything in life has an opportunity cost.

For everything that you say Yes to , there’s something that you said No to , right there. Which could mean that you said Yes to a non essential task which won’t get you anywhere closer to your aspirations. This same time will not be available for you to do a task which could help you meet your aspirations.

I happen to be one of those people who aren’t able to say No easily. Which makes me among the biggest culprits of breaking this rule.

Then you should not be reading this post, because it is only theory, except the fact that I am taking affirmative action to get out of the habit. I have written about how I have eliminated all , but an extremely few apps, from my devices and stopped all kinds of alerts. So now I don’t say Yes to looking at all the alerts from different apps.

The other thing I am trying to measure is a “no” index everyday. This is where I specifically say No to things. I want to see how high can it be taken. Earlier I have tried other mechanisms of saying No, but each time I would do that I would feel guilty. So now I am trying to gamify this. On a weekly basis I am tracking the index like the stock market to see if my trend is climbing up or not.

Being a person who works very hard on relationships, I am now delegating the job of identifying and starting relationships with people to others in my team. I support them rather then get into the activity myself. There are glitches, it also takes more time and I have to do a lot of hand-holding, but I have a feeling its starting to show results for me, because now I don’t have to say Yes , to cultivating every relationship.

If you have found other practical ways to say No to more things, then please put it in the comments below, I would love to learn and practice more productivity methods.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

You just said YES – You just said NO

Affirmative action, dreams

On my smart phone, I used to be inundated with different kinds of pings every few minutes. Initially they were all sound and visual alerts.

Now I have these two bad habits. One I get distracted extremely easily and two I keep saying Yes a lot. I think the second one has to do more because of my stupid EGO. Anytime someone talks about how valuable my input is, I end up saying yes. With Alerts on your cellphone its a double whammy.

The Alerts first of all disturb you and take your attention away from whatever you were doing and second , quite a few times you end up reading the message the alert is showing (which means you are saying yes to reading the message) because it seems to be something important.

About three weeks back or a little more, I read the book Indistractable by Nir Eyal. One of the things with all these Apps that you use on the phone is that the moment you down load an App, by default the settings allow Alerts to appear. Initially there’s one App , then another and then there are another 20 and all of them are pinging you. You don’t realise the damage these innocuous things cause.

Coming back to the book, Indistractable, Nir, simply asked to go to the settings and to switch off the alerts. It took me less than 3 minutes to switch them off – if you. know where to go and do it. Initially for the first few days I was very anxious that I might miss out on something important when the phone didn’t ping.Over a period of the next one week, I got used to my phone not ringing. Now I watch for my SMSes or WhatsApp messages every 3-4 hours. Nothing before that. For some specific sender’s, I have got the alerts still active, but of rat e rest its gone.

What I realised was that each time I saw my phone , I got pulled into something or the other and then before I know, I have already spent another 10-15 minutes on non-essential activities.

Each time I was saying YES to looking at the alert and then the news and then something else, I was saying NO to my concentration, I was saying NO to finish what was important rather than what was urgent for someone else.

This doesn’t mean I have become super effective. Hardly. But this has taught me to start eliminating as many things which cause me to say YES to things which are so called urgent.

At the end of the day, you are, the results you produce. If you end up saying YES to these unnecessary items, you will end up saying NO to getting your results. You will not be able to chase your dreams because you will end up chasing multiple rabbits going in all directions.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!