YOU DREAD SAYING YES BUT FEEL POWERLESS SAYING NO?

The two most powerful words in the English language are yes and no. Unfortunately, they’re also the hardest to master.

Like you, I have more opportunities and requests than time and energy. I’m better than ever at discerning the good from the bad, but I still sometimes agree to a project or meeting, instantly realize the mistake, and wish I had a rewind button for my life.

The only way to keep life from sucking us dry is to change our approach to making decisions.

Lysa TerKeurst in her book The Best Yes, suggests several ideas for sorting the good from the bad and better wielding our yeses and nos. I find these five particularly helpful:

1- Conduct an hours assessment. We only have 168 hours a week, but one reason we misuse yes and no is that we think we have more time than we actually do. 

Lysa recommends listing the main things we do every week and estimate the time they take. It’s pretty easy to see that we actually have far less time than we think.

Lysa recommends we take the margin we’ve identified and schedule it for the things we really want to accomplish and say no to most anything else.

2- Chase down the decision. Our decisions give our life’s direction. Every agreement comes with a trajectory. Lysa suggests pausing before we choose and “chase down” the decision. Where will your decision lead? “And then what? And then? Keep going until you walk it all the way out.”

If the destination is one we’ll regret, the only answer is no. Further, if we’re unclear on the direction we’re choosing, we should probably say no, too. There are consequences for almost everything we choose. It pays to know what they are.

3- Consider the trade. For every explicit agreement we make, there are always dozens of implicit agreements that go along with them. Choices are, as Lysa says, “package deals.”

To make good decisions, whether yes or no, requires we work on making those implicit agreements clear so we can evaluate them. What else is really in this package?

4- Examine your motive for choosing. It’s far too easy to say yes or no for reasons that have little to do with the merits of the choice. Sometimes we’re just afraid of upsetting someone. We want to please, to cajole, or to impress. But as Lysa says, “Those who constantly try to impress others will quickly depress themselves.”

We have to have enough integrity to refuse games like that. We have to look at the real pluses and minuses based on what our existing commitments and goals and then answer on the merits of the actual choice.

5- Recognize there’s no such thing as a perfect decision. Sometimes we fear making the wrong call. So we hold off instead of just saying yes or no. That’s especially true for saying no because we harbor a fear of missing out.

Life’s too short, and stalling is too stressful to do that. Lysa says we have to make the call and trust that God will work things out for our good, as Romans 8:28 says. It’s a liberating message.

If we’re going to get what we want from life, we have to master these two potent words, yes and no. “Every day we make choices,” Lysa says. “Then our choices make us.”

No pressure, right?

Of course we all feel that pressure on the front end and learn to make better decisions. Or, we inevitably feel it on the back end when we’re suffering from dumb decisions we’ve made. I’ll take the first of those two options every time.

These five points I’ve covered here only scratch the surface. Though the target market for The Best Yes is primarily women, we would all benefit from Lysa TerKeurst’s practical wisdom about making decisions.

How often do you struggle with using yes and no? 

THE POWER OF THE MINIMUM EFFECTIVE DOSE

It’s easy for me to overdo things. I know, shocker. What can I say? I like getting things done. But the problem is that when I overdo, I underperform. We need to get to the bare essential of the bare essential.

For people driven to achieve, it’s a common trap. Even if we pare things down to the essentials, we can plow so deep into those that we’re just wasting our efforts, even while we think we’re making headway.

Instead of being satisfied with an effective level of engagement, we go over the top. It might be exciting at first, but it’s not sustainable and will actually set us back.

I’m all for playing full out, but if you play full out on everything at all times, you’ll just burn out. - or lose heart.

• We want to boost sales but wear out our audience.
• We want to lose weight but overdo it at the gym.
• We want to build our platforms but flame out from overposting.
• We want to improve our pace but get injured from overtraining.

So we quit, and I’m sure we can all think of other examples from our lives where we’ve done that. All our productivity was really counter productivity. We need to get to the bare essential of the bare essential.

In the book The 4-Hour Body, Tim Ferriss uses the concept of the minimum effective dose, the MED. He defines it as “the smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome.”

He applies the MED primarily to fitness, but it’s a useful concept in a lot of other areas. It’s a good way to fight back the temptation to overdo something. "Anything beyond the MED is wasteful,” he says, offering this example:

"To boil water, the MED is 212oF (100oC) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it “more boiled.” Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive".

It’s a good example because we’ve all boiled water. We know what the minimum effective dose looks like and how pointless it is to try for more.

The problem is that we also know at exactly what temperature water boils. Our work, fitness, and other areas of life don’t have set levels so we have to experiment to find them. But it’s worth it.

I used to recommend blogging five times a week. For some time now I’ve blogged once or twice a week and have seen the same level of reader growth. By cutting back the frequency I freed myself up to do other things.

Your MED is probably different than mine. But your MED might also be less than what you’re doing right now. Wouldn’t you like to save that time and energy for something else? To make progress on the things that matter most, we can’t afford losing ground by trying to do too much, even if we’re trying to do the right things.

What’s one activity you could reduce by half and still get the desired results?

FOUR REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP TACTICS

When we think of leaders from America’s revolutionary era, our minds jump to military commanders like George Washington, political organizers like Samuel Adams, and rousing orators like Patrick Henry. In the hierarchy of the Revolution, these men stand atop the loftiest rungs. For good reason!

These men accomplished amazing feats against incredible odds. But they could not have done it alone. Like executives in a successful company, they required the service and sacrifice of others to achieve their goals. They required effective lieutenants, like Paul Revere.

Everyone knows Revere for his famous ride. Most are, however, unaware of the vital “midlevel” leadership roles and functions that he played in the buildup to Independence. In researching his life for The Revolutionary Paul Revere, I found four tactics that made Revere indispensable to leaders revolutionary efforts - tactics that can also make you indispensable in your organization.

1. Take the Initiative

Revere was a blue collar guy, an artisan. Unlike other revolutionary leaders like John Adams or John Hancock, he received a minimal education and was entitled to none of life’s higher stations in colonial Boston, his hometown. That didn’t stop him from serving the cause. He led from where he was.

A goldsmith by trade, Revere led where he was able. One example: During the British military occupation of Boston following the Tea Party, who helped to organize a spy ring of workaday patriots to keep tabs on the redcoats and their commanders? None other than Revere - repairman of silverware by day, cloak-and-dagger coordinator by night.

Anyone can fill time and work a to-do list. Taking the initiative to lead is what sets apart someone truly valuable to an organization.

2. Leverage Your Strengths

Everyone brings unique talents to their situations, because everyone’s unique. The trick is in leveraging those strengths. Revere was a sociable fellow; he joined several different local clubs and associations and could regularly be found in the taproom of the Salutation or Green Dragon taverns. Connectedness was one of Revere’s strengths. So he used it.

Historian David Hackett Fischer sorted the membership lists of seven different Boston political groups and associations. He found 255 members in all, of whom 94.1 percent were in just one or two groups. And at the other end of the spectrum? Only Revere and his friend Joseph Warren belonged to more than four groups - in fact, each was a member of five different groups. Revere’s network made him useful as someone who could link disparate revolutionary parties, and his connectedness applied in other areas as well, including his role as an express rider.

Whatever your unique strengths, leveraging them in a leadership capacity increases your worth to your organization, especially if you excel at the third tactic.

3. Be Reliable

When Sam Adams needed someone to send word to New York that Boston patriots had just dumped several hundred crates of tea in Boston Harbor, he sent Revere, who was also one of the likely participants in the destruction of the tea.

That was 1773. He served as an express rider through start of the war in 1775. In one of countless messages Revere carried to New York during this period, Boston patriot Thomas Young referred to Revere as “Steady, vigorous, sensible, and persevering.” Whether it was riding express or printing money or casting cannons or even figuring out how to manufacture gunpowder, Revere was tapped time and again because patriot higher-ups could count on him to get the job done, whatever it was and even if he’d never done it before, which oftentimes he had not.

That last fact highlights Revere’s strength at creative problem solving, something he reliably leveraged every day. It’s also one area that every leader at any level in an organization should cultivate.

4. Cultivate Creativity

Human creativity is life’s only truly renewable resource. The more you use it, the more you get. In his business life, Revere was constantly creating and developing new methods, fresh approaches, and ingenious applications. He transferred that facility into the patriot movement. Whether it was unknotting technological problems for the patriots or coordinating communications, Revere reaffirmed his value at every turn.

Take the ride for which he’s famous. Revere realized that if the British were to seize the powder stores at Concord, they might try to lock down Boston to prevent any word about the assault from spreading. Revere’s job was to spread the news, so coming home through Charlestown several days before his fabled ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, he contrived the one-and-two lamp signal from North Church tower. That way if he were unable to get back to Charlestown, the patriots there could still get the news and spread the alarm.

Revere’s fears proved true. When the Brits did move, they seized almost every boat in town and placed sentries along the roads. Revere was able to get out by one of the few undiscovered boats, but the people in Charlestown already knew about the troops when Revere arrived because he’d charged someone with hanging the lights in the tower. The solution worked.

If it’s true that most of a leader’s job involves problem solving, then one of the most important things you can do as a leader is to follow Revere and cultivate creativity in the endeavor.

Does this approach to leadership inspire you as you think about your unique position and opportunities?

CUT THE AMOUNT OF EMAIL RECEIVED BY 85% IN LESS THAN A WEEK

Lousy communications is one of the biggest challenges any team faces. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost files, even whole conversation threads, in emails. And no one likes triaging an inbox, even with a good system. So what if we had a better solution?

We do, thanks to a team of online video game developers. After pulling the plug on an unsuccessful multiplayer game, the developers at Tiny Speck Inc. - now called Slack - turned their attention to fixing the communications problems that undermined their own efforts. And I’m glad they did.

We all know that email is out-of-control. I have a public email address and a private one, and even the private account used to get unwieldy. When I dug deeper into the problem recently, I discovered 87% of my messages were related to team communications. I don’t know about you, but I love emails for what they do well - it’s just that team communication isn’t one of those things.

We’ve all felt the frustration of trying to keep up with complicated, disorganized email conversations, or the panic of lost files. We’ve all tried unsuccessfully using our inbox as a staging ground, workspace, to-do list, and so on. Worse, as email gets crazier on us, we try other solutions to cope - instant messaging, chatrooms, project management apps - which have benefits of their own but which also fragment our discussions and workflow even further. Pretty soon it’s all like some overgrown tangle of weeds.

What to do? Pat Flynn, a digital marketing entrepreneur has the answer. He suggests we try Slack, a communications and workflow app he’s been using for a few months now. The concept is simple. It folds together all the functionality of email, instant messaging, file sharing, and more into one system that’s actually fun to use. Instead of team communication about your projects and initiatives mixed up with random messages from friends, unrelated requests from clients, and funny cat memes from your aunt, you can keep it all separate. Even better, it’s highly searchable and fully integrated with your mobile devices.

You can set up conversations (“channels”) around certain projects or interests and keep all relevant parties on the team updated, swap and store files, even message team members individually as needed.

Think of it this way: Email is like a phone call to someone in another building. Slack is like a conversation with someone in the same room. The first is great for folks outside your team, but the other is ideal for the collaborative communication teams need to succeed - especially if everyone is working remotely.

My Experience So Far

I got my team on board immediately after checking it out. I sent an email saying I wouldn’t respond to emails or texts. If they wanted to reach me, I’d be on Slack. I also sent instructions for joining. Some members were resistant, but it wasn’t along before we were all using it. One told me afterward that if you know how to send a Tweet or a text message, you can be up and running in a few minutes. The result is that my incoming email is now less than 20% what it was, and the communication with my team has improved dramatically.

Right now we have five team members involved in sixteen different channels. The setup was nearly instant and the structure came organically. We have channels for initiatives like webinars and my writing projects, for calendar and event coordination, and even for sharing cute pictures of our kids. We’ve only been using Slack a little while, but the result is a virtual environment that feels like a large, open office with conversations churning on all the stuff that matters most. So far, it’s even been fun.

Five Tips to Get Started

If you want to quickly improve team communication and workflow, Slack is the ticket. Whether your team is already working in an office, or everyone’s virtual, here are five tips to get you started fast and effectively.

1- Keep it direct. Have your team use their first name as their username, unless you have multiple folks with the same first name. The idea is to have a one-name identifier. They can add their full names to their profiles, along with their photos.

2- Keep it tight. Only invite people you interact with on a frequent basis - usually this means your staff, direct reports, or key clients. Email or texting is fine for people outside this circle, but to maximize functionality and efficiency, keep the Slack team tight.

3- Keep it focused. Only set up necessary channels. Use the default “General” until you start seeing a line of messages that should be segregated. Channels can be areas of focus, like administration, calendar, etc., or specific projects, events, conferences.

4- Keep it central. Start pulling all the relevant conversations, files, action plans, and decisions into Slack. It’s all searchable so if you start using it almost exclusively, you’ll have access to most of the key elements of your business within a few clicks and taps.

5- Keep it everywhere. Download Slack to all your devices from the App Store or Google Play. You can use Slack via the browser interface if you want, but I prefer the Mac desktop app. (If you use Windows, you’ll have to use a browser. There is not a dedicated Windows app.) I also use the iOS app on my iPhone and iPad. Everything stays instantly synced between all my devices.

My team and I have nowhere near tapped what’s possible with Slack. It can, for instance, integrate with all sorts of commonly used services like Twitter, Dropbox, and Stripe. You can even use it with services like IFTTT or Zapier to forward emails to it or ingest RSS feeds. We’re just getting started with this.

Like I said at the beginning, email still has its uses - and for some of them email is the best solution. But based on my experience so far, the best way to simultaneously manage your inbox and improve team communication is to save email for outside communication and use Slack for everything in house.

What’s the most frustrating communications or workflow problem you and your team face?