On Saying No More Often
I used to say yes to almost everything. Drinks I didn’t want to go to, projects I didn’t have capacity for, favours that cost me a full evening. I told myself it was generosity. I think it was mostly conflict avoidance.
The turning point was a therapist asking me: “When you say yes to something you don’t want to do, what are you saying no to?”
The answer, once I started paying attention, was: sleep, the book I was reading, an evening of actual rest, the work I cared about. Every yes has an implicit no somewhere.
I started small — declining one optional social event a week, saying “let me check my schedule” before agreeing to anything, being honest about capacity at work. It felt uncomfortable and slightly rude for about a month.
Then it stopped feeling that way. And the people worth keeping around didn’t mind at all.
A few things I learned:
- Most people respect a clear, warm no more than a reluctant yes.
- “I can’t make it work right now” is a complete sentence.
- The discomfort of saying no is usually shorter than the resentment of saying yes when you didn’t mean it.
I still say yes plenty. But now it means something.
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Network Entropology (n.): The study of chaos in data network systems; the discipline concerned with understanding how order degrades, complexity accumulates, and entropy propagates across connected infrastructure, and the practice of bringing order back to it. A field that exists whether or not its practitioners know they are in it.