When You Should Say No?

Many years ago, I was a person trying to accomplish everything at once. I would say yes to everything. Saying YES on everything looks good at a certain point. But you need to understand how much time it is going to cost you.

I have seen this behavior mainly in juniors or freshers. Since they have no idea of the real world yet, they nod on everything seniors ask to do. And on other hand, many seniors would not see how much they are pushing on others. If you are failed to complete the task where you agreed to do, it will be on you. Seniors will put it on you.

Although, it does not mean that this management of time applies only to employees. It also affects everyone working round the clock, no matter in which line you are. Be it teacher, housekeeping, driver to higher positions.

While working on various projects, teams and clients, I have learned some lessons and improved methods to make sure I am not overloaded more than I can sustain.

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The method I started using was to define a priority. Based on the importance and priority, you have to put your tasks into each block. If there is any urgent work which has to be dealt with within today, it should go to High & Today block.

This approach is not hard. It is really simple. Once you start following it for more and more, it will form a habit and you will like it to handle every day easily.

Now, what happens when you get another high priority task. Let’s say live site is not working. Then you have to look at your chart again. When you see there are multiple priority tasks assigned to you or you are already working, quickly go to your senior or project manager. Ask them what is your new priority.

Sometimes, it might be possible that, your current task is also important to complete, then it will be your project manager’s job to decide if they are going to assign another person or your priority is going to change. There is a part of negotiation on priority with client but let’s not go into that more deeper.

After adopting this method, I was able to dictate which tasks I will do today based on priority and which tasks will be moved to tomorrow.

But here, I was still missing one important part. Which is time schedule for each tasks. Multiple times it was happening that my priority task was going beyond my work time.

Cosidering such issues, I started following different approach for my daily work schedule.

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You can download the file from here.

This method works on each day of tasks. Here, type = A, B, C means High, Medium and Low priority respectively. Low priority tasks have possibility to carry forward to next day. You can define types as H1, H2, H3 or H, M, L whatever suits you.

The improvement I added is Estimated hours. When I add a new task in the list, I add approx estimated hours in it. Make the total of all hours and see how much it covers.

Now, when there is a new urgent task come, I check with project manager for new priority and move tasks to next day based on the agreement. Also you can do is to prepare the table for the next day.

If you are good with calendar, you can take this to next level and book your time in calendar each day.

Conclusion:

To make your job proper and not boring, you have to manage your time and say to No. You can say NO only if you have idea on your daily task.