The Best Decline Letter of All Time: Edmund Wilson - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

Say “no” to your boss: Explain to your boss that adding more to your to-do list will hurt your performance.

How do knowledge workers decide when to say no to the constant bombardment of incoming requests? In the modern office context, they tend to rely on stress as a default heuristic for moderation.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

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