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I said yes to a favour in a Monday morning corridor conversation-a colleague needed me to review a 40-page document before Friday.
I said yes because I didn't want to be unhelpful and because, in that moment, Friday felt distant. By Wednesday I'd pushed two of my own deadlines and stayed until 8 p.m. to get the review done.
The document wasn't in my area. My feedback wasn't going to be that useful. But I'd said yes, so I followed through.
I remember sitting in my car at 8:45 that night thinking about all the things I hadn't done that week. The favour had cost me roughly twelve hours across three days.
My colleague thanked me in a brief reply email and moved on. The version of me that said yes on Monday had absolutely no idea what he was agreeing to.
That Wednesday evening changed how I think about every request that comes in.
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What every yes actually costs
Attention is not unlimited. Cognitive scientists have been describing it as a finite resource since at least the early 1970s-one that gets drawn down by demands and needs time to restore.
Every request you say yes to isn't just taking your time. It's drawing on the same pool of focus that your most important work depends on.
Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, found in her studies of workplace interruptions that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to a task after being pulled away from it.
Not three minutes. Not five. Twenty-three. So, a single extra meeting, a favour you felt you couldn't decline, a phone call you took because it seemed quick-each of those isn't a ten-minute cost. It's closer to half an hour of real working capacity gone.
A friend of mine, Marcus, runs a small product consultancy. Two years ago, he was saying yes to almost every client who reached out.
Coffee meetings, intro calls, requests for 'quick advice,' all-hands invitations from clients who wanted an extra voice in the room.
He was busy in a way that felt important. But his actual work-the strategy documents and plans that clients paid for-was being written in evenings and at weekends. He wasn't protecting the time the good work needed.
He made one change: he created a single written rule for himself. Any request that wasn't directly related to a live client engagement had to wait 48 hours before he responded.
If it still seemed worth doing after 48 hours, he'd accept. If the urgency faded, it usually wasn't worth doing at all. Within six weeks his weekday evenings were largely his own again.
The client work didn't suffer. Several things he'd been about to say yes to simply didn't come back.
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The people who seem to have more time
When Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were once asked independently what single factor most accounted for their success, they gave the same one-word answer: focus.
Buffett has said that the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.
His own calendar, Gates noted after visiting Berkshire Hathaway, had stretches of almost nothing scheduled-not because Buffett was idle, but because he understood that his attention was where his edge lived. He wasn't going to hand it out to anyone who asked.
I'm not suggesting you run your schedule like a billionaire. But the underlying logic transfers: the people who seem to have time for the things that matter have usually said no to enough things that don't.
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You probably can't say no to everything. Neither can I. But most people are saying yes to far more than they need to, and the cost is invisible until you stop and count it.
This week, before you say yes to the next request that comes in, give it 48 hours. Just one request. See if the urgency holds.
Reply to this email and tell me what you decided-and whether the thing came back. Those are always the most interesting replies.
— Prompt N Productive