How to stop overcommitting your day

To stop overcommitting your day, decide what the day is for before anyone asks for it. I pick three tasks each morning. When a request comes in, I count its cost in hours and ask which of my three it would replace. If I can’t name one, the request gets a later date or a no.

Why do I keep saying yes?

At my old job, someone else set the priorities for the week. When I started working for myself, every request came straight to me, and I judged each one by itself. I asked whether it was interesting and whether the person would be disappointed by a no. I didn’t ask what the yes would push out of my week.

Two pressures made the yes come fast. One was guilt about letting someone down. The other was the fear that this request might be the one that changes everything, and that fear gets loud when nobody pays you a salary.

I was also doing two jobs. One was the work I went independent to do. The other was running a business, with its proposals and invoices. The business work usually looked more urgent, so it took the mornings, and the work I cared about moved into the gaps. It helps to decide each morning which of the two jobs gets the first hours. On some days the business should get them.

What does a yes really cost?

A request arrives with a small number on it. Say someone asks me to join a 45-minute panel. Before it come a prep call and a few emails about logistics. On the day there is setup, and afterwards an hour when I’m too scattered for deep work. The 45 minutes becomes three or four hours, plus whatever I would have done with them.

Meeting invites are requests too. An hour in the middle of the afternoon can split the only long block you had into two short ones.

My guesses for these costs run low, and I’m not unusual. In a 1994 study by Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross, psychology students expected to finish their honors theses in 33.9 days on average, and they took 55.5. In a later study in the same paper, the bias went away when people were told to connect their past experiences to the new guess. So when you guess the cost of a new request, start from what the last one like it cost you.

How do I say no to requests at work?

Decide before the request arrives. My three lines are that decision, made each morning before anyone has asked for anything. They are my Daily Big 3. When a request comes in, I go through it in this order.

1. Write down what it involves before and after the meeting or task itself.
2. Turn that into hours, using what a similar request cost last time. Last month’s calendar is enough for this.
3. Ask which of today’s three it would replace. If one of them should give way, it moves to tomorrow.
4. If none should, offer a date later in the week, or say no.

None of this removes the guilt for me, but it gives me a reason I can say out loud. Offering a date helps too. “Not this week, but I can look at it on Thursday” keeps the request without giving up today. A yes you can’t keep this week tends to turn into an old task on your list, and I wrote about clearing those in What to do with a never-ending to-do list.

Three lines also give the day an end. When they are done, anything else is extra, and a new request can wait for tomorrow’s three.

Once a week, look at where your Big 3 tasks came from. Count the ones you chose and the ones that started as someone else’s request. If other people’s requests fill most of your lines, that is the number to bring down.

How Compass does this

Compass gives each day three lines for your Big 3, with Other and Evening below them for the rest. When a request comes in, you can see whether it would take one of the three lines. If you turn on Finn, the optional assistant, its morning brief says when the day’s meetings leave too little room for the plan. The weekly review shows how many Big 3 tasks you finished and how the week split across your pillars.