I Said Yes to Everything for a Decade and It Was Not Generosity

Through most of my thirties I said yes to essentially every request — committees, favours, extra work, organising things nobody else would organise. I understood this as being helpful. Looking at it now I think it was mostly about being needed, and the distinction matters because the two require completely different corrections.

The tell was how I felt when someone else stepped in. On the occasions when a task I would have taken was picked up by someone else, my reaction was not relief. It was a small, unmistakable deflation. That is not the reaction of a person who is overcommitted and being helped. That is the reaction of a person whose position rests on handling every task.

Once I saw that, advice about holding a no stopped making sense as a solution, because the problem was not an inability to refuse. I could refuse. I did not want to, and telling someone to be firmer when they are getting something they want out of the arrangement does not work, which explains why fifteen years of intending to be less busy produced nothing.

What did work was indirect. I stopped trying to say no more and started deliberately creating things that gave me the same thing more cheaply. Specifically I took on one visible, bounded role that I was genuinely good at, and let it be known that it was what I did. Having an identified thing removed most of the pull toward taking on the unidentified ones — the need to be needed was met, and met by something with an end date.

The second change was mechanical and I would recommend it regardless of motive. I stopped answering requests in the moment. Everything gets “let me check and come back to you tomorrow,” without exception, including things I obviously want to do. Answering in the moment was where the yes came from, because in the moment there is a person in front of me and the cost is abstract. The next day the cost is a calendar and the person is not there.

The third is that I now keep a written list of what I have committed to, with the hours. Not a to-do list — a commitments list. Before the association I could not have told you how many things I was doing, and the reason yes was cheap is that I had no representation of the total. Seeing eleven items on a page did more to make me decline the twelfth than any amount of resolve.

I want to be careful about the framing here, because “your generosity is secretly ego” is a cheap and slightly cruel move and I do not fully believe it about myself. A lot of what I did was useful and I would do it again. But the part that made it compulsory rather than chosen was about me, and I could not fix a compulsion by treating it as a scheduling problem, which is what I tried for a decade.