
Say No - wyclif
http://boz.com/articles/say-no.html
======
xpto123
A lot of this is culture dependent I believe, but i am under the impression
that at least on western countries you cannot do this a lot of times without a
high cost, specially if you re not a manager.

If someone comes to your desk directly, you are supposed to stop what you are
doing and give your attention to that person, even if you are working on
something really urgent.

Refusing meeting requests is also not well seen unless you have another
appointment, meetnaping happens all the time.

A lot has to do also with open space offices, where everybody is just sitting
there and makes it even more awkward, and you are right there available to be
interrupted.

Interruptions from persons on your own team are to be taken with even more
priority, the modern open office is just a high-interruption environment and
there is nothing to be done about it.

In the end it might be really a good thing, because if a person is blocked it
walks to the desk of someone else and sometimes can be unblocked and the
company as a whole goes forward.

Doing what his boss did of cutting another person off with a 'not now' is not
something that his boss can get away with a lot of times, even if he is under
pressure: its demoralizing, it just ends up creating a weird atmosphere.

One solution might be: one or two days of remote work a week for everybody.

~~~
bigtunacan
This is company dependent rather than country. When I was early in my career
as a software dev I felt like I could never say no. I would continue to take
on additional work which translated to more hours.

Eventually my manager at the time did the best thing he could for me. He asked
me into his office for a "talk". Then he told me that he didn't want to lose
me because I burned out. He said, "Look, you have to learn to say no to
people. If you aren't comfortable doing that then tell them to run it by me;
and then I'll say no."

~~~
saturdayplace
This is the solution. Your manager understood his job, and its impact on
yours. Everyone should be so lucky. So far, I have been! At my first job, my
boss told me right off not to let everyone who comes by add work to my pile.
It's hard to do at first. After all, your first reaction is to be helpful. But
after a while you see the benefit of being able to to deflect things to your
manager and have him prioritize the workload.

------
Animats
That's Facebook's culture. They're building a new HQ building. It has one of
the world's largest bullpens. Almost everybody is in one huge room.

(Floor plan: [http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2012/08/dezeen_Frank-
Gehry-...](http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2012/08/dezeen_Frank-Gehry-
designs-new-Facebook-headquarters-3_1000.jpg))

Apple is at the other extreme - they keep their groups isolated, often behind
locked doors. Microsoft used to run recruiting ads for programmers pointing
out that their programmers get offices with doors. Google tends to have
medium-sized bullpens surrounded by many small glass conference rooms.

~~~
joezydeco
That floorplan has got to be what Hell looks like. Holy crap.

~~~
Untit1ed
Apart from what appears to be a slippery slide in the top left :/.

~~~
Perdition
That is just how they dispose of the bodies.

------
nowarninglabel
This is also a good reason to make explicit if your "go-to" person in your
organization is on the management track or the technical track. This is
something I think we struggled with for awhile at Kiva where we didn't make
explicit that you could remain technical and still get promoted, so people
would become Engineering Mangers only to then expect to still stay in their
corner plugging away on code in the zone without interruptions. But when you
are the guy tasked to train others and generally help people clear roadblocks
(as managers generally are designated to do), then it hurts everyone when you
instead try to hang on to a "coder only" mentality. You get frustrated cause
you are getting interrupted and the people interrupting you get frustrated by
getting brushed off or feeling like they are wasting your time.

Fortunately, we eventually made it clear that you can move up in title, but
remain focused on engineering instead of management. This helped tremendously
to set it up so we have a set of people who have time set aside specifically
for talking about problems, and you can chat with them in order to solve
problems while leaving the folks solving code problems alone so they can
maintain their productivity.

------
chuckcode
I wish I had a little LED at my desk that would sync with my IM status to show
people when I was busy or available to chat online or in person. One of the
earliest usability features in the online world but still not replicated in
the real world.

~~~
test1235
In my case, that LED is my headphones :)

~~~
Dewie
What if I want to listen to music, but I don't mind someone talking to me if
they need something? What if I want to concentrate with no interruptions,
including no noise/music from headphones?

~~~
heynk
For me - I like having headphones on without music because it's kinda warm and
lowers outside noise. If I want to listen to something and still indicate I'm
available to chat, I only have one headphone over the ear and the other to the
side.

------
thisisboz
For what it is worth, I do think Dustin could have been a little more gracious
in how he approached it and I mention in my note that it isn't meant to be an
excuse to be rude. I actually think it was fine for him to do this to me not
because he was my boss but because we had a good relationship. Still, when
this happens to me, I usually say something like "I'm in the middle of X right
now, can this wait until Y?" \-- this tells them what I am doing (and thus
allows them to say assert that their topic really is more important) and also
gives them a time to follow up.

As a manager of a large organization, I have more respect for people on my
team who say no and assert stronger ownership over their time, ideally by
being transparent about their priorities. At the end of the day, we just look
at impact and managing ones own time is a good sign that someone is focused on
impact. Still, I'm sure that isn't the case with every manager in every
company (or even every manager in my company)

The open space aspect of the FB offices is usually navigated by people putting
headphones on to indicate they are heads down. I do it often even though I'm
rarely listening to anything. I agree it isn't for everyone though.

~~~
softdev12
I had a similar thing happen to me, where I was on the receiving end of "not
now". The colleague was on a phone with their backed turned and head down and
I couldn't see that they were on the phone. And they responded with a mean
"not now". There's just no excuse for it. Even if it's the end-of-world, you
can still just say "not now" without any malice.

I'm sure he didn't mean any harm and was under pressure. People make mistakes.
And compensation is called compensation for a reason - (stock) compensation
for being yelled at, I'm sure makes it feel better - especially when it's
early facebook stock.

------
darklajid
I learned this the hard way. Joined a company and was on-site in a different
country, for 5 days a week, 8 month and we were doing overtime every. single.
day. I'm talking 8am to 1am 3 out of 5 days and the rest wasn't that much
better.

I quit. Did something else.

8 years ago I joined that very same company again. I'm still a 'corporate
drone', a random developer, but I learned to decline and to say no. Both to
your managers and to your coworkers. That single word saved my sanity and
allows me to stay with that company to this very day.

I don't agree that it's a matter of culture (at least not in the culture I am
roughly familiar with) if you can pull this of. It certainly might be a matter
of culture how you need to phrase it.

Fortunately my employer is rather blunt and open internally, so 'No, I really
have no patience for that right now' is - while not the friendliest possible
answer - acceptable and possible.

Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being
old and grumpy' :)

~~~
jsmeaton
> Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being
> old and grumpy' :)

That's the difficult part in my experience. I say no a __lot __. Some people
have the impression that I 'm lazy or privileged because they feel they can't
say no. They certainly can, but they don't want to feel like they're upsetting
anyone.

But sometimes when I say no, I say it in the wrong way, or don't provide
enough context for why "no" is right. This doesn't help me at other times,
even when I've (mostly) effectively communicated that no is the right decision
for the person that's asking me to do something.

------
placebo
While I agree it's important to learn how to say no sometimes in order to keep
priorities and deadlines, I feel though that what is missing in this advice is
that you should also learn how to say no in a manner that doesn't generate
negativity and a tense atmosphere. It really doesn't take that much to add a
sincere smile and say you're busy right now, perhaps a bit later.

~~~
thisisboz
I agree!

------
pjlegato
As an east coast transplant, I am still utterly amazed that this sort of thing
actually is normal on the west coast: someone is seriously shocked and hurt
because someone else "shut you down" by saying "not right now" when you want
to interrupt them to draw their attention to yourself.

Not that they don't want to talk to you at all, they just want you to wait
till they finish what they're doing first. This is apparently considered
"socially awkward" in California.

Not only that, this person then went off and introspected on the broader
meaning of this "watershed moment," and concluded that "socially awkward"
things like occasionally saying no to someone are sometimes actually OK and
good...

------
enraged_camel
My previous employer refused to make this culture shift. This was terrible for
us engineers because we were supposed to "make ourselves available" to
everyone in the company, especially the sales team, when they had questions
about the product. The upper management's rationale was that if one of our
Account Managers was talking to a prospective customer on the phone and they
had a technical question (e.g. "can your solution integrate with Software
X?"), being able to answer that question then and there (even if it meant
IM'ing one of us engineers) was better for conversion because it gave the
customer the impression of competence. On top of that, it was an open-office
setup, so there was continuous chatter all the time.

After fighting this culture for years, I couldn't handle the constant
interruptions anymore and quit. I have a home office now and I control all the
variables in it. I couldn't be happier.

------
PeterisP
The todo-"avoid at all costs"-list is an extension of this same concept
(recent post at [http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-
productivity-t...](http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-productivity-
trick-2014-9)).

In essence, whatever is at #6 or #10 at your priority list is not something
that's somewhat important and should be tackled from time to time - it's the
very thing that's stealing your time and attention away from your #1 and #2
things, a dangerous distraction that you should consciously limit and either
avoid or schedule to a specific time.

You don't have to worry about priority #1001 taking your time - you don't want
to do it and so you won't; but things that are seemingly good often lead to
"yak-shaving" at the cost of what's truly important for you.

------
lifeisstillgood
In my experience Muskovitz was probably three weeks to three months too late
in saying no. It's a really hard thing, culturally, socially shutting down
people face to face like that is something we are all wired not to do, on top
of which he probably derived a lot of personal identity and kudos from being
the goto guy - hard to turn off.

But the pressure had to be immense to react like that - and one suspects that
it's only because of good well balanced people around that they could take the
social shutdown and come back to work still focused instead of suddenly
fostering a poisonous atmosphere - something that can easily happen if the no
was taken as "no I don't value you" instead of "no we have to find new ways of
working"

Would be interesting to hear others views of this formative time.

------
umurkontaci
This is actually pretty important, and actually you can do this (probably in a
more polite way) to your manager as well. Not wanting to be interrupted =
focused. focused = more progress in development.

If you are interrupted in while working on a very complicated subject, going
back to the same focus level takes up to 30 minutes for me. The time I could
spent on fixing stuff.

I am happy that most of my employers / managers understood and appreciated
this.

You can explain them with this comic as well: [http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-
is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...](http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-
shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer/)

------
LatencyKills
At Microsoft we called this "Red Time / Green Time". I had a card on my door
that I could flip to either color. If the card was set to the red side people
wouldn't interrupt me. If it was green it was fine to just walk in and start
talking. We were required to have a certain amount of green time each day.

------
angersock
Notice that if your development team uses chat or ticketing or email or some
async communication mechanism a lot of these issues go away.

~~~
goshx
Not always. If the people don't understand that someone can't give them
immediate attention they are going to email you, send a chat message to say
that they emailed you and if you don't reply in 2 minutes they will call you.
If you don't answer they walk to your desk, and this was for something that
could wait. I have experienced that issue quite a few times already.

------
Scalar
I'm willing to give Dustin some sympathy, I don't think any company could ever
relate to the amount of rapid growth that was experienced within Facebook back
then and is still continuing today. I was put in a similar situation to a much
smaller extent and as the team grew it honestly felt like the majority of my
job was babysitting rather than accomplishing what I had set out to do.

At the same time it's important to understand that for every no there should
also be a yes, and it's just as easy to gently put people down rather than say
something that could be construed as rude.

------
minusSeven
In my company we have exactly the opposite. We have a rule called "there are
no stupid questions". If you get stuck at what you are doing you should ask
for help(this goes for senior resources too).

In fact if you had got stuck but didn't ask for help and for some reason the
work got delayed this will get escalated and you will be blamed for not asking
for help. I just think thats the way it should be.

------
overgard
I think a corollary is that, it's surprising how much you can say no to (if
you're polite about it). I notice the dynamics are different in a really big
company versus a small one though. Like if you're in a large company, meetings
tend to cast a wide net and usually it's impossible to get 100% attendance
anyway, so it's a lot easier to hide (metaphorically). Especially if you've
sort of built a mystique of having a lot of fish on the fryer. On the other
hand, in a small organization people are pretty aware of each others business,
so it's a lot harder to pull the "gosh I wanted to attend but I had this other
thing come up..." card. Then you have to be a little bit more direct with the
"I have things to do and this isn't that important' deal.

If I were to wear my slightly evil hat though, I would say it's useful to
occasionally decline meetings. It doesn't hurt to remind people your time is
of value.

------
blazespin
This is why scrum masters were invented. It's there job to say yes, while
everyone else says no.

------
mb_72
I work from home now, but in my days in an office I adopted the following
system - a small box on my desk with a green tick on one side and a red cross
on the other. Green tick = I can be interrupted at any time, red cross =
please interrupt me only for critical emergencies.

In both the old office and my home office I made / make a real effort to set
the box to an appropriate value, i.e. don't have the red cross showing all the
time or it loses it's meaning. These days it's only my wife who is looking to
interrupt me, fortunately, but this system works well. And, hell, one of the
benefits of working from home is having your wife 'insist' on taking you away
from a 'red cross' task once in a while, heh-heh.

------
wh-uws
I learned how to say know early on. I've been freelancing since high school.
Nothing will teach you to say no when you are over extended faster than
failing to deliver well for a client.

------
kin
It depends on the situation but I pretty much agree. For example, sometimes
coworkers will come up to me to discuss or ask something that'll take less
than a minute. These minutes can add up to suck all the productivity out of
your day, especially with the context switching.

On the other hand, something that could take a minute for me to answer could
take someone an hour to figure out, thus thwarting productivity on the other
end.

------
misiti3780
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But
that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good
ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the
things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to
1,000 things." \- Steve Jobs

------
methodover
I'm rather surprised at some of the responses here.

For many people, especially when they're working on difficult or complex
tasks, an interruption will cause them to feel a bit angry or frustrated. This
is completely 100% normal.

They don't mean to hurt your feelings. They just need some space to focus.
Give them a bit of space, and think nothing else of it.

------
RoboTeddy
I like this:

> Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your
> attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of
> that area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize. It
> will tell you whether you are able to maintain focus on the important or
> whether you get distracted by the urgent.

------
applecore
_> Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your
attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of that
area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize._

And when you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

------
free2rhyme214
Dan Kennedy already summed up time management in several of his books. Saying
no is another way of staying focused but I can tell you it's much harder to
implement in real life if you don't have the right habits in place to do so.

------
pokedotjon
Isn't this Covey's quadrants all over again?!

[http://www.eitanbirshan.com/blog/time-management-
covey%E2%80...](http://www.eitanbirshan.com/blog/time-management-
covey%E2%80%99s-4-quadrants/)

------
ereyes01
This article has inspired me to say no to Hacker News for the rest of day...
:-)

------
princip3
That's just rude. A short and polite "I'm a little busy, can we talk later"
would require no more effort or concentration than just saying no.

~~~
Preseed
We don't quite agree. It is upon the person who is taking it wrongly - that is
negative on their part. Everyone should practice saying 'no' without having to
explain themselves.

~~~
famousactress
Unlearning your advice is probably the single most beneficial thing I've done
during my career as a programmer. While I at my core tend to think exactly the
way you do about this, it's a righteous stance that only did me a disservice
before I decided to take more responsibility for how I'm heard.

As the person delivering information, you by definition have more context than
the person or people you're delivering it to. Asking the world to figure-it-
out and expecting them to do so correctly is a path that I think is likely to
net-cost you.

------
elwell
> they would simply edit files live on the Harvard server and shout out what
> file they were changing to avoid conflicts

That's awesome.

------
moonlighter
"Say No to things that are urgent but not important."

This captures the essence of the post, and is almost universally applicable.

~~~
fwn
Yep. If the article would have been linked under this sentence instead of the
clickbaity "Say No" I would've saved time and energy today by not reading
about this annoyingly simple notion.

------
pikachu_is_cool
Not right now, I'm going to hit this blunt and hang out with my girlfriend
instead of mercilessly chasing the dollar via software ventures.

------
thallukrish
I wonder how you say 'no' to HN.

~~~
illicium
You can't say 'no' on HM without being downvoted by the hivemind for not
having an agreeable opinion.

Then the "why is everyone being so negative and critical?" comment rises to
the top.

------
mkramlich
Learning to say No and learning better about _what_ to say No to is definitely
a helpful life strategy, in my experience.

For example, saying no to PHP -- whatever it's merits -- means being able to
say yes to Java, Python, C, Go, Clojure, whatever. Saying no to Windows means
being able to say yes, more, to Linux. Saying no to meetings means saying yes
to writing a new feature or fixing a bug. Saying no to interruptions means
saying yes to focus. And so on.

You have only so much time in the day, week, year, rest of your life. It's not
that there's no value, benefit or use to the thing you're saying no to, it's
that the alternative will often give you _more_ of those things, or otherwise
help make your life better in some strategic long-term way, or in some non-
tangible way like making you happier.

------
thecynic
I have a different theory of what was going on in the early days of FB in
regards to the author's claims.

Dustin probably started saying "No" not so much because his time was being
monopolized by technical issues, but because other engineers (including the
author) were trying to curry favor with him as they saw the status of the
social network start to rise.

------
yth
nice!

