STEP 1 — THE WILSON LETTER AND BEYOND - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

“Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!”—then my answer is no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “HELL YEAH!” We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

you’ll look at each task on your to-do list as a “bid” for your precious time. Knowing that not all bids can be accepted, you’ll whittle down your to-do list to only consider the highest-yielding bids for your time. This will take courage, because you’re going to take flak no matter what you decide. Someone’s request will have to lose out in order

Hey there, Tim, Sorry for the slow response and thanks for thinking of me in this context. It has become pretty obvious of late that I’m trying to do too much, and so I started an experiment of not adding anything whatsoever to my “to-do” list, so that it wouldn’t get any longer. The result is that the items that were ALREADY on my “to-do” list onl

6 What Are You Going to Do with This?

My Harvard colleague Robin Bernstein has this great piece on artful ways of saying no, titled: “The Art of ‘No.’”

the more you say no to the things that don’t matter, the more you can say yes to the things that do.