I love New Year’s resolutions. As a stereotypical type-A personality obsessed with self improvement, I am an earnest nerd — the kind you roll your eyes at when I talk too fast or loud about the mundane things that I love: lists, organizing, setting goals. Every December, I use my best handwriting to write those goals out on a clean, blank sheet of paper where I can sit back and lovingly admire them as the ink dries and their letters stand proud and seemingly infallible. Of all the holiday rituals, New Year’s resolutions is the one that I spend the most time on, thinking about and scheming on.
In the month of December, I like to ask other people — friends, baristas, Uber drivers — about their New Year’s resolutions. I enjoy hearing all the things people vow to themselves. Interestingly, I’ve noticed a rise in the resolving of a specific resolution, a resolution to ‘Say Yes’. These resolver want to drink in the whole world and they explain to me that in order to do so, they are going to ‘Just say yes’…to everything. Over the past couple of years, we’ve found more of the internet also saying yes. A quick Google search shows everyone from Shonda Rhimes (whose 2015 book ‘Year of Yes’ was an instant bestseller) to Eric Schmidt, Runner’s World, and God blogs propounding the wisdom and delightful chaos that comes from opening your heart. Here too, is 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon just saying yes.
To me, it seems that glorifying ‘Saying yes’ perpetuates a culture that demonizes saying no. This is especially true for women, who, through traditional gender roles, are taught to be agreeable for the greater good, even when it means sacrificing something personally. Sometimes we say yes out of sense of obligation. Sometimes we say yes because we feel like we’re supposed to, or because we want to be nice and feel that we are nice. There is also evidence to show that women who say no in the workplace are marked lower on performance evaluations than male counterparts — social punishment for the disagreeable woman. This social pressure to say ‘yes’ is nothing new but it seems that we’ve begun to collectively shifted towards a belief that yes can only result in deeper opportunities. It seems to ignore the fact that by saying yes, you are inherently saying no to time you may have already planned, since time on one thing necessarily takes from time on something else. We’re never just doing nothing.
As a naturally ‘Yes, and’ type, I’ve found myself drowning in too much yes over the past couple of years. And so, in 2017, my resolution for myself is to say no. By doing so, I hope to be able to more thoughtfully and actively set the boundaries on my time so that I can dig deeper and more richly into less.
2016 was a big year for me — I opened my own small business, San Francisco Pole & Dance, and for the last seven months, I’ve hustled to build it. When I started, I thought that building a business meant saying yes to everything. At the same time that I opened my studio, I made a conscious decision to keep my job working in tech and to continue volunteering with the SF Bar Association, where I work on credit/debt defense and child custody cases for low income residents of San Francisco. I determinedly wanted to do it all, mostly because I enjoy it all.
But just one month into starting the business, I found myself unable to put as much time as I wanted into it because my time was being eaten up by the responsibilities of my day job and pro bono work. I’d work during the day, teach at night and then catch up on phone calls and emails between 5–8am and after 9pm. I’d use my lunch time to walk around the block and take client intake calls. At the same time, saying yes to more work had me constantly cutting out all of the creative work that feeds me; writing and performing and competing.
Lucky for me, my position at the startup that I worked at became dispensable almost overnight and I was compassionately fired in September. Though I was still building my studio, I let my ego and FOMO take over and began interviewing at other San Francisco startups almost immediately. Within two weeks, I had two final stage interviews that promised more money and more responsibility than I had previously had, on teams of people that I was certain I could learn from and grow with and that I was excited about.
At the same time, my husband and I went on vacation where we spent hours scuba diving every day. There, on the other side of the country, I had a solitude away from the constant chatter of my day to day. With nothing to do but listen to my own breathing, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do with my life. I thought about a memoir that I’d wanted to write and without even trying, it started to write itself in my mind, at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
Suddenly, all of the creative work that I hadn’t had the freedom to spend time on began pushing into my head and I realized that I simply had too many competing interests. I needed to prioritize, to figure out what to say no to. I learned that in a world where there are so many interesting projects and work to be done, the saying no may actually be the hardest work that there is.
That night, I sat down with my husband (he’s a nerd too) and we collaborated 0n a Google sheet that we titled ‘Fantasy Life’. On it, we listed out the hours of the day and the days of the week and the activities and work that we would do if we could do whatever we wanted hour by hour, putting aside all guilt about what we felt we were supposed to do or worry about what makes the most money. When I tried to fit everything in on that spreadsheet, my startup work just didn’t fit. And it was the first thing I took out. Deciding that a startup career wasn’t my priority gave me room on that Fantasy Life calendar to calendar in time writing everyday, scaling my business, and taking on more pro bono cases. That night, I emailed the startups that I was interviewing with and cancelled my final interviews. I said no. Most surprisingly, the saying no didn’t make me feel guilty or like I was missing something. I went to sleep that night with a sense of relief. I thought I’d had it all figured out.
A few weeks into returning home to San Francisco, I quickly found my real life more messy than that Fantasy Life spreadsheet. While writing my Fantasy Life helped me to prioritize what was most important to me, it didn’t help me account for all the random yes’ that we say everyday — the friends who need small favors, the coffees, the lunches to just catch up, the scheduling and rescheduling, and the waiting for always late people (because, San Francisco).
In my exuberance to go all in on my studio, I also added new classes but I made the mistake of not doing the more efficient, longer term work of adding new staff. Within a month, I was teaching 22 classes a week and spending 4+ hours a day on the business side of growing my studio, Monday through Sunday. I said yes to most of my client’s requests, sometimes even when it didn’t make good business sense. The more I said yes, the more requests I got from other people. These were all good problems to have because they got me to profitability very quickly, but they also weren’t sustainable as a one woman show. Soon enough, I found that the time I’d scheduled for writing and pole routine development were the first chunks of time to be sacrificed The creative process doesn’t require a response the same way people do. Writing doesn’t ask you how the writing is going. Again, I knew I had to change something.
Based on a recommendation from a friend, I used a professional services company called Hire My Mom, to find a social media manager and right hand woman to help me with the business, administrative, and social media side of running the studio. For one month, I invested time working closely with her until she was trained and working mostly autonomously. I hired seven new instructors and have begun training five new substitute teachers so that I can pass the baton for my beginning and intermediate classes and focus my studio time on advanced performance classes, class development, and the operational work of scalability and growth.
During this same time, I found that the more I talked with people about the pro-bono legal work that I was doing with the SF Bar Association, the more I’d receive inquiries from friends wanting legal advice for themselves and their businesses. These were not low income people, but instead former colleagues — the technorati of San Francisco. I made the mistake here too, of always saying yes to this work because I was genuinely interested in the legal issues that so many people brought to me. I underestimated how much time each issue would take me to work on and I soon found myself waking up at 5am on Saturday mornings to work on contracts and Visa questions before going to the studio to teach for 8 hours. Here too, these chunks of legal work cut more and more into the time I was purporting to set aside for writing and creative development. I began to become frustrated with myself for not setting the boundaries on my time more effectively. In mid-December, I realized once again that I needed to rebalance my time and start saying no to most of these requests.
And so that brings me to now. In 2017, I want to get better at protecting my time — to saying no. On the days when I follow the slightly modified hour-by-hour Fantasy Life spreadsheet that I wrote for myself in September, I feel like I am living my most magical life. I feel purposeful and less reactive. My enthusiasm and energy peak when I fall into bed at night on these mostly full but balanced days of writing, growing my business, teaching and training pole, and representing pro bono clients.
In 2017, I want to better balance these competing priorities, and follow through on the time that I’ve set aside for each of them. In order to do so, I’ve decided that I need to say no to very specific things, and in very specific ways. Here’s my guess at those specifics:
- Focus on hiring and training new instructors before adding new classes to my studio schedule
- Hire and train a personal assistant to work on logistics of personal trips and event organizing for my studio
- Set defined boundaries on the specific work that I will do for my pro bono clients, and interrupt phone calls that end up being more life coaching than lawyering
- Just saying no to new legal work for friends. An unapologetic no
- Schedule a defined 2 hours per day of writing time into my calendar at the beginning of the day and spend that time writing offline and with my phone turned off
- Schedule in 3 hours a week of ‘freestyle/fuck around with creative ideas’ time at my studio
- Say no to coffee, drinks, and lunch with acquaintances, unless it’s related to defined prioritized goals
- Resist the temptation to interview at other new startups. There are always more startups.
I’m sure that this saying of nos will be a never ending process of calibrating time but I’m excited to see where it takes me. If you’ve ever dealt with this challenge or read quality content about someone else who has, please share! I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks for reading, ❤.
