‘Just Say No’ Is Bad Productivity Advice
You’ve probably read this advice before: “The best thing you can do for your productivity is to say no more often.” By freeing yourself from unnecessary tasks, the thinking goes, you can spend more time working on the things that really matter.
At first blush, this sounds smart. Many things people ask of you aren’t really necessary or can be accomplished more efficiently by someone else. But in practice, this advice often backfires. After all, while you can set boundaries around your work, you can’t straight-up refuse a task when your boss asks you to take it on. In the same way, simply bowing out of a partner’s requests to share the household labor won’t exactly make for a happy home.
But you can figure out a better question to ask, which will in turn lead to an actionable solution. Here’s how:
Figure out what kind of worker you are
There are two types of workers: schedule-makers and schedule-takers.
Schedule-makers go to work and decide how to spend their time and attention every day. Knowledge workers tend to fall into this category — salespeople, marketers, managers, software engineers, and most other white-collar jobs are schedule-makers. If you have a say in how you…
