Day 368: Saying No

I’m thinking about saying no to everyone I don’t already know who want to meet over video chat.

1. I don’t like video chatting and strongly prefer in-person interactions
2. Now that I’m in Taiwan, I have the potential to meet people in-person and have been doing so
3. Very, very few meetings over video chat have turned into long-lasting connections. I value cultivating fewer strong ties over many weak ones.

Saying no is hard for me because I don’t like rejecting people. For some reason, I’m getting a lot of inbound requests these days, and it feels a lot harder to do the kind of deep work (writing, building products, etc.) that made all these people reach out in the first place.

At the same time, refusing everyone feels perhaps too extreme. Maybe I can carve out a week out of every month or alternate months where I take digital meetings.

Ryan Holiday’s post about saying no resonates a lot. It’s difficult to convey how expensive context switching feels when your primary output require deep focus.

Maybe until I establish a work schedule here (I’ve done zero meaningful work since getting out of quarantine), I’ll just turn down all requests, both in person and digital?

This is hard.