How to say no to projects

While it is important to say yes to almost every opportunity at the beginning, it is equally important to learn how to say no, especially to yourself.

The curse of creativity is that we have ideas every three seconds, and it’s very hard for us to properly weight the cost of taking on something new.

The cost is that any new project comes at the expense of either a project you are currently undertaking or your free time. We tend not to value our free time very highly, but it is one of our most precious resources.

I force myself to examine my schedule every time I want to take on a new project.

I am very good about blocking out my schedule and being protective of my free time already, but when I want to take on a new project I ask myself three questions.

• Is this project worth the effort it will take to complete?

Most projects sound good at first blush, but during exploration, they turn out not to be worth it. New projects are always sexy because you haven’t put in any work.

By developing a plan for a new project, I start to bring it into reality and most of the sexiness wears off. It’s a very rare project which will still ignite my imagination after I’ve thought about it.

If I say no, then it dies there. Some pop up again and again, but usually, they never come back up. However, if I answer yes, then I ask myself the second question.

• Is this project BETTER than anything I have coming up?

Now better could mean more profitable, or more in line with my audience, or any number of factors. However, I have to answer YES to that question. Otherwise, it usually goes in a discarded folder I keep on my desktop, which I examine once every six months.

If I answered YES to the first question and NO to the second, I ask myself a third question.

• Am I willing to eat into my free time to work on this project?

This is a big one which weeds out almost every other idea, because I like my free time. I am very protective of it, so I say yes to almost nothing in this category. There are some projects that are so important that I need to eat into it for a short period of time, but those projects are very rare.

I have as many ideas as anybody else, but the way I’m able to be productive is in saying NO to almost everything. Not just projects that people offer me, but also projects that I offer myself.

This process funnels out almost every project, leaving me time to focus on what’s important. Everything has a time cost, and if you aren’t ruthless with your time, you will find yourself drowning in a sea of mediocre projects.