John Jonas explains how he says no to almost everything except family time to protect his productivity and mental energy. He treats time as irreplaceable, unlike money, and credits this discipline to living a four-hour work week.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 312 learning to say no to everything. Recently I had another episode that where I talked about in a series of podcast episodes about how I live the four hour work week. This is my second installment in that series. So how do you live the four hour work week? One of the keys to me is learning to say no. So I say no to almost everything that comes my way. I say no to business opportunities. I say no to feature requests, I say no to bug fixes. I say no to content to create. I say no to we should do this. I say no to hey John, what about this opportunity? I say no to customers, to requests, to phone calls, to ways to grow the business, to Facebook and Instagram, the latest and greatest marketing technique. I say no to extended family group chat. I say no to almost everything. And here's why. To me, well to you, there's only so much time in the day and, and the one that most people miss is there's only so much mental bandwidth that I have to be able to deal with the things that I have to do. So even if there's more time in the day available, potentially the mental bandwidth isn't there. And if I add one more thing to my, to my responsibilities, then other things are likely to suffer. It makes me you less productive by adding that one more thing by saying yes. And the money I would make from that thing is not worth that less productivity. I found that customers, employees, clients, social media group chats will just endlessly take time and mental energy. And so for me, I say no. If you're interested in living the four hour work week, you've got to learn to say no. It works. Now there are some things that I don't say no to. I don't say no. Well, I don't say no to my kid, to time with my kids. I don't say no to time with my wife because those are my priority. Those are the things in my life that feel give the biggest long term return on my investment is time. With kids and wife, you can't get time back. And so I'm very, very careful with how I spend my time. You can make more money, you can get money back, you can make up lost money. Time doesn't work like that. So for me, anything that is going to add responsibility time to me, I say no.
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