How to Say No to More Work

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2016

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Karen Dillon, author of the "HBR Guide to Office Politics", explains how to gracefully decline excessive projects–and thankless tasks.

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you work with early career professionals, my colleagues at
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0:08.4	Young Professional's Guide to Building a Meaningful Career on your own terms.
0:11.9	Share New Here with the Young Professionals in your life. a meaningful career on your own terms.
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0:15.9	Listen for free wherever you got your podcasts.
0:18.6	Just search new here. Welcome to the H-B-Ridea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael. HBO as well as with Clay Christensen, the forthcoming book competing against luck.
0:44.6	Karen, thank you so much for talking with us.
0:46.2	Oh, it's pleasure, thank you.
0:47.8	So today we're talking about a topic probably most of us have faced at some point in our
0:51.6	work lives, which is saying no to more work and yet
0:55.2	even though we may have faced this a lot it's still hard to say no to a new assignment
0:59.2	what are you know just in the beginning to avoid giving this kind of the knee jerk no or the knee jerk yes,
1:05.6	how should we be assessing these requests before we decide what to say about them?
1:09.9	Well the key thing you said there was before, should take time it's really easy in the
1:15.0	moment to kind of panic with something that looks like extra work and imagine all
1:19.1	the reasons that you can't possibly but I really advise you to take a minute to think about it if you can actually say,
1:25.0	can I just look at my schedule and get back to you or can I think about it and talk to you this afternoon or could
1:31.2	be discussed what that might involve? All those things allow you a little bit to you
1:35.0	a little bit of time to take a step back and actually consider first can I really do this
1:40.0	everybody I think as we as we continue to get better and better at our jobs we should be able to be more and more efficient with our time so your instant reaction maybe no I can't but maybe when you think about it I can that's the first thing the second thing is think about it, I can. That's the first thing. The second thing is, think
1:54.3	about what that does for you. Is it an interesting assignment? Is it an
	...

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