Yes & No
You have probably heard someone say, “Every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else.” And in general, I feel like most of us would agree with that statement.
However, I feel a lot of us have fallen victim to believing that we can say yes to everything.
But the truth is…
We can’t say yes to everything. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves and others that we can, we just can’t.
When we say yes to one thing, in that moment, we say no to everything else.
And realizing those two things, makes the weight of our yes and no feel a lot heavier.
When we think we can say yes to everything, we end up saying yes and no to things as they arise - depending on our stress level or our mood - going along with whatever we are being told is urgent or important in that moment.
When we think we can say yes to everything, we end up putting the things that we truly value on the chopping block.
When we think we can say yes to everything, we forfeit the ability to choose our yes’s and no’s strategically and intentionally.
Time is our most precious resource. What we say yes and no to matters. But knowing what to give our time and our yes to can be incredibly difficult. So what do we do?
Choose a Focus
Apple came out with a feature a few years ago called Focus. Essentially, it allows you to customize specific things about your phone (who you see messages from, what apps send your notifications, what your home screen looks like) according to the activity you are doing.
You can have a work focus, a personal focus, a morning or an evening focus, etc. The focuses are entirely customizable and designed to help you “focus” on whatever it is you are doing - without getting distracted by unrelated things.
I have been using this iPhone feature for a while in the digital world, but this year I decided to try it out in the real world too.
Because we can’t say yes to everything but there are countless things we want to do or could do, we have to choose what to focus on.
Maybe for you it’s your marriage, your health, building community, starting a business or project, learning a new skill, finding a church, budgeting. There are unlimited options.
The idea is to…
Identify your top priority.
Frame your schedule using that priority as your lens.
You could set a priority every day, week, or month. I have been setting mine quarterly after reading “The Twelve Week Year” by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington.
Why It Helps
Every day and every week, I have so many things on my to-do list.
Some of those things just have to get done. But a lot of them don’t.
And whether you are someone, like me, who puts pressure on yourself to achieve and accomplish or you are someone who needs a little boost of motivation to check some things off your list, I think you will find identifying your focus helpful.
When I am staring at a long list of to-do’s and I know some of them won’t make the cut, having a focus that allows me prioritize what is most important to me in this season and leave the rest for another day has been so incredibly helpful.
An Object Lesson
I’ll leave you with an object lesson I believe my mom showed me when I was younger.
Imagine your have a jar and you are filling it up with rocks.
If you think they will all fit, you will likely just start picking up the rocks in no particular order and throwing them into the jar. When the jar gets full, you may realize that some of the rocks that are really important to you didn’t make it in. Now, they won’t fit.
When we think we can say yes to everything, we will fill up our jar with whatever seems urgent or important in the moment - without taking the time and intentionality to assess whether we really even want it in our jar in the first place.
You have to choose the rocks that matter, and put them in the jar first.
Thank you so much for reading! I will talk to you next week!
Take care,
Caroline
Great