Why It Pays to Say ‘No’

On this episode of The Long View, the author and founder and managing partner of SRB Holdings and SRB Ventures, Sahil Bloom, breaks down the ways that investors can better manage their time, and the importance of having curiosity in life, from his new book The Five Types of Wealth.

Here are a few highlights from Bloom’s conversation with Morningstar’s Christine Benz.

Why Is Saying ‘No’ So Difficult?

Christine Benz: I wanted to ask about saying no because I’ve seen that over and over. I need to get better about saying no and I’m terrible about it. Why is saying no so hard? And I suppose it depends on the person, but maybe you can discuss why we struggle with this.

Sahil Bloom: Yeah, I struggle with this mightily. And the biggest reason that I see both with myself and with others is if you self-define as a nice person, you say yes to everything. And it literally is an identity problem because you identify as nice. You think that you are being not nice if you say no to things. And so as a result, you say yes when the social commitments come up, when your colleagues ask you to do something, when friends are asking you for something, when a family member is asking you for things, whoever it is, if you self-identify as nice, you are prone to saying yes to everything. Because when you are nice, everyone wants you to do things, and you don’t create the boundaries around yourself to protect yourself and your own time. That is a really important thing to get past. And I think the separation is between nice and kind. When you’re being nice, you say yes to everything. You don’t create any boundaries. When you’re being kind, you’re actually being kind to yourself. And you are making sure that you create the boundaries so that you can focus on the things and the people that really matter. I say this to my wife all the time.

When I started focusing more on creating time wealth and on really being more ruthless in how I prioritized what I spent time on, one of the things that I had to stop doing so much of was these phone call or Zoom get-to-know-you chitchats, or like brain-pickings, where people message you and say, oh, I want to pick your brain. A lot of the people listening out there probably are doing well in their career and life. And a lot of people reach out to you on LinkedIn or email or whatever saying, hey, I want to pick your brain. Can we do a 30-minute phone call, Zoom chat, coffee? And I just started blanket saying no to all of those. And what I said was I will do things in person, and I’ll have a designated time and I’ll meet you in the city or whatever. But I’m not doing any of the phone calls or Zooms anymore. And when I told my wife that I was doing that, she said, don’t be a jerk. That was kind of her response. And what I said to her was it’s actually a really important change because every single time I say yes to one of those, I am saying no to you and Roman, our son.

And that reframed it entirely in her mind. It’s this idea that every time you say yes to something new, you are saying no to something else. And so if you are saying yes to something, something silly or something low value, and it means saying no to the thing that really matters, like time with my wife and son, that is a terrible decision. I should not have said yes to that thing because your energy and your time is fixed. You’re not creating new time. The unit of time or energy that you just took to put into this new commitment is just a unit that gets taken away from something that really matters to you. So you have to define those things that really matter. Those handful of priorities, the handful of commitments that are truly impactful both in your personal and professional lives. And then from that, it becomes much easier to decide what you are going to say no to, to protect those things that really do count.

How to Deal With Obligations When Managing Your Time

Benz: I wanted to ask, as I was taking stock of the things that take a lot of time for me, I feel like I have some things that fall more in the category of obligations. I haven’t actively prioritized them, but I have people who depend on me to do certain things for them. And so how does that fit in? Because some of those things take an awful lot of time, but I haven’t actively prioritized them. How do I feel better about the fact that those are ongoing obligations for me?

Bloom: I think there are a lot of commitments like that. In particular, I think family commitments, taking care of elder relatives, siblings, children, any of those commitments that are ongoing. I think of those as being much more connected to some feeling of a higher-order purpose as kind of a provider or protector or someone that takes care of your people. It’s sort of part of one of the missions that you’re on in life is to be the family member that I need to be. And I think taking pride in those things is great. I would never advocate for someone saying, oh, hey, elder relative, I’m starting to say no to things, so now I’m not taking care of you. Those end up being fixed commitments that we just need to find a way to create space for. But it means that we need to be even slightly more ruthless in how we think about cutting other areas that free us up then. And look, I think the challenge for a lot of people and for myself on this journey as well is that we often want to blame our time or energy when in reality it is our desire. We make time and we create energy for the things we really want to do. If you have a 6 a.m. flight to go on a vacation you’re excited about, you will get up at 3 a.m. and go and make that flight.

And you’ll be excited doing it. But when it comes to building the life you want, building the business that you want, working out, taking care of your people, doing the things that are going to create value in your life, we point to time or we point to energy for our inability to do it. When in reality it’s a desire problem, we need to want the thing enough. And so I think there’s a little bit of giving yourself grace and then there’s a lot of holding ourselves to the fire when it comes to making these changes in our life, when it comes to creating space for the things that we really care about that we’re really trying to build.

How Time-Blocking Can Help You Use Your Time More Efficiently

Benz: You discussed the value of time-blocking in terms of time management that we should try to cluster certain types of activities in an effort to reduce the mental switching among different types of tasks. Can you discuss that and maybe share some examples of how that would work in practice?

Bloom: I’m a big believer in using your calendar to manage your life. I think that if there is one fast way to improve your life, it is to create more structure in your days and how you’re approaching your days. And one of the ideas that I offer in the book is this idea that there are four types of professional time, and you need to create space for all four of these types. They are management time. That would be things like emailing, meetings, basic processing. It’s frankly what most of us spend the vast majority of our professional time on. There is creation time, which is when you’re actually building things and creating things. Whether you’re writing, whether you’re coding, whether you’re creating presentations, whatever it is, actually actively creating things. There is consumption time, which is when you are filling the bucket, as it were. That’s when you were reading, when you’re consuming things, when you’re listening to things, when you’re hearing things. All of the ideas that come in upstream in your life. And then there is ideation time, which is the time when you actually give yourself space to think, to actually contemplate and think about some of the bigger-picture questions in your professional life.

Most of us, when you actually go and look at your calendar, if you were to color code things on your calendar for a week, according to what type of time they are, I would guess 80% of your time is going to be management time and about 20% is going to be creation time. And there’s basically no time in there for consumption. And there’s basically no time in there for ideation. All of us can benefit from reducing the amount of time on management things by shortening the windows and being really focused in how we approach them, increasing the amount of ideation and consumption time, like actually having discrete blocks of time when you’re going to think, when you’re going to consume and read and learn, and then increasing a little bit the time for creation, when you’re actually going to be creating things. The most effective strategy for unlocking that is to leverage what’s called Parkinson’s Law, which says that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. So if you give yourself six hours to do your email inbox, it’ll take you six hours.

If you tell yourself, you have an hour to do it, you’ll somehow get it done in an hour. We just allow work to expand if we have more time for it. So with management time in particular, give yourself focused discrete blocks when you are going to do those management activities, and you will get them done much faster and more efficiently than you thought. That unlocks, that quite literally creates time that can be redeployed into these other types of time, that can be redeployed into actually thinking about some of the bigger-picture things, to consuming and learning new information, to creating new things. And that is a really powerful unlock for a lot of life.

How Ideation Time Builds Your Mental Wealth

Benz: You discussed that ideation time, and the shower idea is that great metaphor for how that works. But do you have any other strategies about how to make better use of ideation time, how to make sure that we do come up with some new thoughts about things?

Bloom: Yeah, I have a practice that I share in the book in the mental wealth guide section. So at the end of each type of wealth section, there is a guide for actually building that type of wealth in your life. And in the mental wealth guide, there is one in particular that I call the “think day,” which is an adaptation of Bill Gates think week that he used to do—or that maybe he still does—where he would take a week and go off the grid and just read and learn and think. None of us, I don’t think have time to do a full week doing that. But we can carve out a day once a quarter or once a month to take four hours, take a few hours and ask ourselves some of the bigger-picture questions. And so the “think day” guide item in the book has a series of question prompts that you can ask yourself on those days and journal on, think on, write about that will force you to think in the more 10,000-foot view about your life, about your professional pursuits and allow you to unlock some of these things that you’ve previously been blocked around.