Too much Yes led to stress: How saying No improved my work

I remember seeing “Yes Man” back in 2008. Jim Carrey’s character has to say Yes to everything, which starts off great but then soon catches up with him.

An interesting concept I thought, one that surely wouldn’t trip me up ten years later…or would it?

I started working for Deliveroo just over 6 months ago. It’s been fast-paced, busy, and nothing short of exciting so far! I came in full of enthusiasm, keen to get stuck in from day one.

At Deliveroo, we have a person from each discipline (Content, Research & Design) embedded in each product team. I’m the Content designer in the Consumer Experience (CX) team and we work on all things from the point at which a customer places their order onwards. Crafting emails and push notifications, mapping out the best way for customers to resolve an issue and keeping hungry customers up-to-date on their order status; there’s a lot for a Content designer to get stuck into. It was great to have so much to work on, but this made it even more important to manage my workload effectively, which definitely didn’t go to plan to begin with…

Saying Yes

As I was the first ever Content designer working exclusively in the CX team, I made sure my presence was felt. If I overheard someone talking about a project that Content design was not involved in, I made sure it was. If I saw some work over someone’s shoulder that I’d not been a part of, I’d ask them about it and make sure I got involved.

I didn’t want to stall any work, but I also didn’t want any features being shipped without well thought through content, helping the user get the job done. Whenever I was invited to a kickoff meeting, I was there. If a second pair of eyes was needed, I was there. “I don’t suppose you could help us out with this Harry?” became the question and Yes was the answer. Every. single. time.

I’d become a Yes man and I was loving it. I took on every task full of energy and enthusiasm, I’d get home absolutely exhausted but I’d still spring out of bed the next morning looking forward to what was going to come at me next.

Saying Maybe

Soon, all new features were only shipped if they’d been worked on by Content and Design, the team had come to understand the role of Content design and were utilizing my skills accordingly. Happy days, right? Well in the short term yes, but in the long term? Maybe not.

Before long, I had started to struggle. We’re a team of 23 people, mostly engineers, which is brilliant for the backlog but not necessarily me and the precedent I had set.

I was saying yes to things that needed to be shipped in a few days but I couldn’t start looking at until the following week. And if even a little bit of content was shipped without my input I was getting frustrated. I’d gone from confidently barging in on projects offering my assistance to misjudging the scope of projects and how long it’d take me to work on each task. I didn’t want to lose the energy I’d once had. I wanted to make sure I was still a part of every discussion.

As an example, I led a project to personalise our push notifications during the London Marathon. This would tell London customers that their order may take a little longer to get to them due to road closures, but also add to the excitement of the day. I was eager to crack on with this project, however I’d also agreed to a few others. So having started work on this, I had to put it on hold because we were about to launch an entirely new product and this meant that a lot of our help content needed updating. Having blinded myself with the marathon push notification project, I’d given myself little time to prepare for the new product launch deadline.

This was a classic case of me biting off more than I could chew.

I realised I hadn’t really meant Yes when I’d said it, I’d meant Maybe at most. So I started saying that, but nobody wants to hear a Maybe. It’s frightfully unclear and as soon as one Maybe becomes a No, every Maybe will be heard as No. I realised that it was ok to turn down work or to prioritise work where I could offer the most value, rather than provide a little value to several projects. I’d been lacking clarity on what was important and how best to prioritise, so after some hesitation, I started saying No.

Saying No

I’d made my mark. My team knew what I was there for, and I now had the confidence that people knew when content design was needed. With this in mind, I was much calmer, and eventually, I was confident that I could say No to tasks without worrying that I’d be letting the team down.

“No”, despite being a negative response, has opened up new opportunities for me to perform to the best of my ability, it gives me so much more time to plan and execute my work.

Something that I’d just accepted as part of life during my days as a Yes man was the Monday panic, this is thankfully something I don’t have to suffer anymore. I now set aside time each Friday to plan the tasks that I’m going to focus on for the following week and feel confident deprioritising when I have to. I make sure that I leave some time for ad-hoc requests (but don’t tell anyone that!) just in case anything urgent comes up that pushes everything else aside.

I’m now looking forward to what the next 6 months hold, and intrigued to see how my new ways of working can help me create even better content.

Looking for a new role? Yes? Maybe? No? Well, you don’t need to tell us right now, but we’re hiring if you’re interested!