☄️ Joy in Saying No

I am, to put it mildly, a fan of the "closing loops" method. I believe it to be one of the highest impact productivity tools one can implement, based in no small part on my own experience. I used to get really frustrated with having a lackluster memory, but this system has fundamentally shifted how I think about "remembering" in the first place.

The tool is blessedly simple. When a task pops up, some part of your brainpower is automatically utilized to think about that thing. You can close that cognitive loop by:

(1) doing the underlying task immediately, or

(2) by writing down a reminder to do the task in a place that you know you will review at a later time.

Closing loops saves cognitive capacity for other things, like thinking. It's all about thinking.

…but have I been missing a step all along?

This weekend, I dove into Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks. It's one of those books where I can't stop highlighting and jotting down notes because it resonates with something I've been thinking about for a long time: our time on this earth is finite, and focusing on a narrow definition of time management concerned only with how many tasks you check off a list is, well, a waste of time.

The problem, Burkeman writes, is that even when off-the-shelf productivity systems do work, "you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result."

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Agreed. That's what the "wrong" type of productivity produces, which is why I'm insistent that there has to be a broader view of getting things done that is based on one's three-dimensional identity.

He goes on to explore the "efficiency trap," where demands on your time increase the more efficient you are at getting things done. It's the pie eating contest adage — what do you get as you are winning such a contest? More pie.

The practice, then, is in saying no to things. He writes of the need to develop "a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges—to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in."

"Saying no" is one of the more common productivity practices, probably because it works. But rarely is there ever discussion about the need to sit with the discomfort of doing so.

Eventually, he suggests, one can develop a type of "joy of missing out," which stems from a recognition that time is definitionally limited and we should therefore relish the fact that we aren't doing certain things at any given time.

I dig this, even if I haven't fully internalized it yet.

Back to closing loops. There's an implicit step that perhaps should be made explicit. Before you (1) do the thing or (2) write down it down as a task, you need to determine if it's a thing worth doing at all. The decision tree at that point leads to a different outcome. It's only if you say "yes" that you need to (1) do or (2) write.

I'm not quite sure what happens from a cognitive loop perspective if you mentally decide not to do something — does it continue to occupy any of that precious brain space? It's easier to say no to things you don't want to do than things you do want to do, so logically it would be easier to stop thinking about some things compared to others. Maybe a literal "stop doing" or "said no" list would be helpful.

I don't know the answer yet. But I am sure that there's something here, and it's something I intend to explore further.

I'll keep you posted.