Deciding what not to do
110 min
Two hosts talk the lesson through. The voices are synthetic; the script was written from this lesson and checked against it, and asserts nothing the lesson does not.
- Produce a written decision to stop or decline something, with what it costs on the other side named, and with what you would need to see to reverse it
- Explain why a list of priorities is not a decision, and say what has to be added to make it one
- Identify, for somebody with little discretion over their hours, what the decision on offer actually is
This is the lesson with the least evidence behind it and, if the rest of the course has done its job, the most use in it. You should know which of those two you are getting before you start.
What is measured here is the destination and not the route. Two reviews of the whole field, fourteen years apart, agree on roughly where time management behaviours show up. Claessens and colleagues, in 2007: "The review demonstrates that time management behaviours relate positively to perceived control of time, job satisfaction, and health, and negatively to stress. The relationship with work and academic performance is not clear."1 The 2021 meta-analysis, over 158 studies and 53,957 participants, found the relationship with wellbeing, and with life satisfaction in particular, larger than the relationship with performance.2
Read that as a description of where the benefit lands, because that is all it is. Nothing this course read in either review tests a method for deciding what to drop. Nothing in either of them tells you how to choose, and this course isn't going to dress its reasoning up as a finding.
So most of this lesson is the course's own reasoning, and it is labelled where it appears.4 You should push back on it. What it rests on is the measurement you took in lesson 2, which is yours and not anybody's average.
Why a priority list does nothing
This section is the course's own argument, and no study read for this course tests it.4
Start with the thing almost everybody has already tried.
You write down the things you are trying to do, and you put them in order. Sometimes with numbers, sometimes in a four-box grid, sometimes just by rewriting the list until the shape feels right.
Then the week happens, and all of them are still in it.
That is the whole problem, and it's worth being precise about why. Ranking is an operation on a list. The constraint is not in the list, it's in the hours, and lesson 2 asked you to count them. An ordering changes nothing about the hours. Putting something fifth does not remove it from the week; it tells you which thing you will feel worst about when the week runs out, which is a different service and it is not a useful one.
So is the four-box scheme, sorting urgent against important, worth anything at all?
Show the answer
Yes, and less than it's sold for. This whole answer is the course's own position, since no study read for this course tests the scheme.4
What sorting genuinely does is separate two things people confuse, which is whether something is pressing and whether it matters. That confusion is real and the sorting makes it visible. If the sort tells you that four of your six commitments are urgent and unimportant, you have learned something you could act on.
What it cannot do is decide. The cases that actually hurt are not urgent against important. They are important against important: the work and the parent, the qualification and the child's bedtime, two things you genuinely want and cannot both have. Both of those land in the same box, and the scheme then has nothing further to say. It has sorted the easy cases and handed the hard ones back.
There is a second problem that is smaller and worth noticing. A box with four things in it is still four things. Sorting makes a list legible; it does not make it shorter, and a list is not where the constraint is.
The books that made this scheme famous are named in lesson 8, which is where this course deals with the trade literature properly. It has not read them and it isn't citing them here.
What a decision actually is
The form below is partly this course's own and partly borrowed, and the borrowing is worth stating here rather than in a footnote.4 The pair is this course's. The shape of naming what the choice costs, what would reverse it, and when you will look again is taken from Using AI Effectively lesson 9, which handles a value question of the same kind and asks its reader for a reason, for what they would need to see to change their mind, and for a date three weeks out.
A decision is a pair. What I will do, and what I am accepting will not happen.
Not a ranking, not an intention, not a hope that it'll all fit. Two halves, both written, and the second half is the one that makes it a decision rather than a preference.
The test is short. If nothing is lost, nothing was decided. A "decision" with no cost on the other side of it is a wish with better formatting, and you can tell the difference by trying to write the second half down. If you can't name what you are giving up, you haven't yet given anything up, and the week will make the choice for you in a fortnight's time.
Three things follow, and they are the practical content of this lesson.
The cost gets written in specific terms. Not "less time on other things". The actual thing: "I will not see Tom this month", "the garden will not get done this year", "I am accepting that I will be the one who has not read the report". Specific costs can be reconsidered. Vague ones cannot, because there's nothing there to reconsider.
The decision gets a review date. Circumstances change and a refusal made in March may be wrong by September. Writing "review in six months" is what stops a decision becoming a rule you have forgotten you made.
It names what would reverse it. One line: the condition. "If the Tuesday group moves to a weekend I will come back to it." This is lesson 2's contested column doing the same job a second time, and it has the same virtue: a condition can be checked, and a feeling can't.
And it names who has to be told, and when. A decision nobody's been told about is only half made: you are still carrying the conversation, and in the ordinary case the telling's the thing that gets deferred until the decision has gone stale.
Worked: a reader with discretion
Marcus is constructed.4 He has about eleven discretionary hours in the week by his lesson 2 sort, and five things he is trying to do with them.
He has ranked those five twice in the past year. Nothing changed either time.
What he writes instead is one refusal, in four lines.
What: I am stepping down from the residents' committee at the end of this term.
Why: It is two evenings a month plus the reading, about five hours, and it is the only one of my five that somebody else can do.
What it costs: The parking scheme will probably go the way I have been arguing against. I will not be in the room when the decision is made, and I am accepting that. I will also lose the one evening a month where I talk to people on this street.
What would reverse it: If the committee moves to one evening a month, or if the parking scheme comes back in the form we were warned about, I will go back. Review in June.
Look at the third line, because it is the whole lesson. He is not telling himself the committee was a waste of time, which would be the comfortable version and isn't true. He has written down that he will lose an argument he cares about and a piece of his social life. He has decided anyway, and now he can act on the decision without relitigating it every month.
And the fourth line is what stops it hardening. Six months from now, June arrives and the decision gets looked at again. That is a very different thing from a resolution you quietly stop keeping.
Before the second case: Marcus had eleven discretionary hours and gave up five of them. What do you expect this lesson to say to a reader who has two, and how much of what you have just read still applies?
Show the answer
The honest answer is that about half of it applies, and the half that does not is the half most books are made of.
What still applies is the form: a pair, a named cost, a review date, a condition. That works on two hours as well as on eleven, and it works on things that are not commitments at all.
What doesn't apply is the assumption underneath Marcus's case, which is that there was a thing to drop. This course expects a reader with two discretionary hours to have already dropped everything droppable, often years ago, and usually without noticing that a decision was being made. That is an expectation rather than a measurement.4 That reader has not failed at this lesson. The lesson has to be about something else for them, and the next section is what.
Worked: a reader with almost none
Ruth is constructed too.4 She works a fixed rota at a distribution centre and cares for her father four evenings a week. Her lesson 2 sheet came back with two discretionary hours, both on Sunday, and eleven contested hours with conditions written beside them.
There is nothing on her sheet to drop. A course that told her to identify her low-value commitments and decline them would be describing somebody else's life back to her, and she'd be right to stop reading.
So what is the decision on offer? Three things, and none of them is a technique.
One: where the two hours go, decided rather than defaulted. Two hours is small and it is real. At the moment they go wherever the Sunday goes, which usually means the washing and whatever is left. Deciding isn't a small act just because the quantity is: it is the difference between two hours that are hers and two hours that are a remainder.
Two: the conditions, which are the eleven contested hours. Every contested hour on her sheet has a clause beside it, from lesson 2. "Thursday, unless my brother takes one week in three." Those clauses are the only things on her week that could change, and none of them changes by being thought about harder. Each is a request to somebody, or a question she has not asked.
Three, and this is the one to have ready: what she would ask for. People do sometimes ask her what would help. A manager, a social worker, a brother on a good day. The answer "I do not know, it's just a lot" is the true one and it does not get her anything. Having one specific, small, costed request written down before anybody asks is the highest-value thing on this page for a reader in her position, because the moment somebody offers is never the moment to work it out.
Hers is one line: one Thursday in three, and I would use it to sleep.
Notice that she has still named a cost. Her brother has his own week, and asking means he does less of something. She has decided that is worth asking for anyway, which is the same operation Marcus performed and a harder one.
What you have already given up without deciding to
This is the mirror of the exercise, and it is the uncomfortable half. It is also the course's own reasoning throughout, including the claim about what an undecided item costs, which nothing read for this course has measured.4
A week with no discretion in it did not arrive that way. Things came out of it, one at a time, usually without a decision being made about any of them. The choir, the running, the friend you used to ring, the qualification you have stopped mentioning.
None of that's a moral failure and this lesson is not going to treat it as one. Most of it went for reasons that were good at the time and are still good. But there is a difference between a thing you decided to let go and a thing that fell off, and the difference matters for one specific practical reason: the things that fell off are the ones you are still carrying.
You'll know the feeling: the low-level sense of owing something to a version of your life that is not currently running. That is what an undecided item costs, and it is charged every week whether or not you do anything about it.
Writing one of them down and deciding, properly, either way, is the only thing that stops the charge. And deciding not to do it is a real answer, which is worth saying plainly because most of the advice you will meet assumes the answer is the other one.
A man, constructed like the others here, has been saying for three years that he will do a qualification. Lesson 4 gave him an if-then plan and it did not work. What does this lesson add?
Show the answer
Lesson 4 ended on the authors' condition that if-then planning works better where it is supported by strong activated goal intentions,3 and on the course's own diagnostic that follows from it: a plan which keeps failing in the right form, on a good cue, is evidence about the goal rather than about the plan.4
Lesson 4 answered that for a goal he chose, and said crossing it off is a legitimate result. What it handed forward, twice, is the other case: a goal that is not his to drop.
Two honest options, and only two. Do it, which means it goes in the week and something named comes out. Or decide not to do it, and stop carrying it, which means writing down that he is not going to, what that costs, and what would bring it back.
What is not on the list is the thing he's been doing for three years, which is intending it. That has a price, it is paid every week, and it buys nothing.
And note which way this lesson does not lean. It does not say he should drop it. Plenty of things worth doing take four years of false starts, and a person who abandons everything hard won't build anything. The course's claim is narrower: whichever way he goes, deciding costs less than carrying.
The question this lesson will not answer
Lesson 1 said that the question of whether a person should aim to do more or to do less is not one the evidence settles, and that this course would describe it rather than decide it. This is the lesson where that promise gets tested, because everything above is machinery for taking things out of a week, and machinery has a direction built into it.
So, plainly.
The case for doing less is that hours are finite in a way nothing will change, that most of what gets added is paid for by something that nobody notices going, and that the measured benefits of this whole subject land on control, satisfaction, health and stress rather than on output.12 On that reading, refusing well is the skill and the rest is administration.
The case for doing more is serious and gets said less often in books like this one. A life is largely made of what you manage to build. Capacity is real and it grows with use. A great many things worth having are on the far side of a period when you were doing too much, and a person who optimises for a comfortable week can optimise their way out of everything that would have mattered. The wellbeing finding above does not touch this, because it measures how people feel rather than what they made.
This course has no standing to choose between those and is not going to. What it offers is the same in either case: know what your hours are, decide rather than default, and write down what the decision costs. A person doing too much on purpose, with the cost named, is doing something this course has nothing to object to. What it argues against is only the third thing, which is carrying a life you have not decided on and paying for it every week.
And you should know which way this course's own description leans, rather than being sent back five lessons for it. The course summary says most time management teaches you to fit more in and that this course starts from the opposite premise. That is the do-less side of the question above, it is a stance rather than a finding, and it is worth discounting for here more than anywhere else in the course.
Four things people believe about this
"I need to be more disciplined." Your lesson 2 sheet usually says otherwise. What this course expects you to find, rather than anything it has measured,4 is not a person wasting their hours; it is a person with fewer hours than they thought, spending them on things somebody else put there. Discipline is the wrong tool for a week that is full of other people's claims, and it is the explanation that makes you responsible for a situation you mostly did not choose.
"Urgent against important solves this." It sorts. The checkpoint above says what it does and where it stops, and the hard cases are important against important.
"Saying no is a skill I lack." It is not mainly a skill, and treating it as one keeps you practising the wrong thing. It is a decision with a cost, and the cost is the part to write down. This course's reading is that people who look good at this are not better at the sentence.4 They have decided earlier, they know what they are giving up, and the sentence comes out easily because the hard part already happened on paper.
"This is about ambition." It isn't about either direction. The section above says why, and both of the positions there are held by people the course takes seriously.
Practice
Take 35 minutes, with your lesson 2 sheet in front of you.
Pick one thing. It should be real, it should be recurring, and it should be something you could actually act on in the next month.
Three branches, and they take the same four lines. Which one you're on depends on your sheet, not on which is better.
- If you have genuine discretion, pick from the discretionary column, and what you write's a withdrawal.
- If you have very little, pick from the contested column, and what you write is a request. There's a worked version below.
- And if what you have decided is to take something on, which is a decision this course has no objection to and no view about, then write that. The four lines are unchanged and the third one is still the one not to skip: what comes out of the week to make room.
Write four lines, in this order, and do not skip the third.
- What. One sentence. Specific, with a date on it.
- Why. What it costs you now, in hours from your own sheet.
- What it costs to stop. Specific. A named person, a named thing that will not happen, a named consequence you are accepting. If this line is hard to write, that is the exercise working. If it comes out as "less pressure", go back and write the thing.
- What would reverse it, and when you will look again. A condition and a date.
One more input, from lesson 5. Your internal-against-external count is a list of things you chose to do, which makes every internal switch a candidate for this exercise in the same way a commitment is. Look at it before you pick.
Then the fourth line from the body's list: who has to be told, and when.
The request branch, worked, because it is the one the course owes you. Ruth's four lines, in the same form Marcus got:
What: I am asking my brother to take one Thursday in three.
Why: I am there four evenings a week, and Thursday is the one I could hand over.
What it costs: He does less of something, and his week isn't empty either. I am asking anyway, and I am accepting that he may say no.
What would reverse it, and when I will look again: If he says no, I ask the social worker what else exists, and I ask him again after Christmas.
Notice that a request still has a cost and still has a condition. What it hasn't got is a withdrawal, which is why the reader with no discretionary hours writes the same four lines about a different kind of act.
Keep the sheet. Lesson 7 writes this into an actual week.
Take 25 minutes. Do this one whether or not you've discretionary hours, and especially if you have none.
Write down three things that used to be in your week and are not any more, and that you never actually decided about. Not things you chose to stop. Things that just fell off.
For each one, three lines.
- What it was, and roughly when it stopped. A season is precise enough.
- Are you still carrying it? One word. Be honest: the test is whether you would feel something if somebody asked you about it tomorrow.
- Decide, now, in writing. Three endings, and all three are real. It comes back, and something named comes out of the week to make room. It comes back as a request, if there's nothing of yours to take out, with what you would ask for and who you would ask. Or it is over, and you are writing down that it is over, with what that costs.
This course expects one of the three to want to come back and the other two to have been over for years without being allowed to finish, which is an expectation rather than a measurement.4 Finishing them is the point of the exercise, and it is the cheapest hour in this course.
Connections
Back. Lesson 2's split into fixed, discretionary and contested is what both exercises operate on, and the contested column with its conditions is what makes this lesson possible for a reader with no discretionary hours at all. Lesson 4 established that an if-then plan does nothing about whether a goal is worth holding, answered that for a goal the reader chose, and handed forward the goal that is not theirs to drop, which the second worked case here is about. Lesson 5's count of internal against external switches is the other input to the first exercise. From earlier Core courses: Using AI Effectively lesson 9 handles a question of the same shape, where the decision is the reader's and the course's job is to name what each choice costs, and the form here is borrowed from it openly.
Forward. Lesson 7 builds a week with this refusal written into it, so that the plan records a decision instead of a wish. Lesson 8 is the trade literature, which is mostly about this lesson's subject and mostly without evidence, and it names the books that popularised the sorting scheme discussed above.
Go deeper
- A review of the time management literature (Personnel Review, 2007). This course has read the abstract and pages 255 to 257. It is the closest thing this subject has to a textbook chapter, and the honest thing about it is the abstract: read that alone and you will know more about what is established here than most of what is written about the subject will tell you.
- The pooled evidence on whether time management works (PLOS ONE, 2021), open access. This course has read the abstract, the effect sizes and the limitations. Come to it from this lesson for one thing: what a pooled correlation between a practice and an outcome can say about a decision you are making, which is very little and is worth feeling.
Sources
- Brigitte J. C. Claessens, Wendelien van Eerde, Christel G. Rutte and Robert A. Roe, "A review of the time management literature", Personnel Review 36(2), 2007, pages 255 to 276. Read in part: the abstract and pages 255 to 257. Supports the quoted sentence about perceived control of time, job satisfaction, health and stress, and about the relationship with performance being unclear. Scope: a review of 32 or 35 empirical studies, the paper's own two figures disagreeing, whose respondents were mostly students in psychology classes and employees.
- Brad Aeon, Aïda Faber and Alexandra Panaccio, "Does time management work? A meta-analysis", PLOS ONE 16(1), e0245066, 2021. Abstract, effect sizes and limitations read. Supports: 158 studies and 53,957 participants, and the finding that the wellbeing relationship, and life satisfaction in particular, exceeds the performance relationship. Lesson 1 carries the figures.
- Peter M. Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, "Implementation Intentions", posted by the US National Cancer Institute, pages 1 to 4. Read in full. Cited here only for the condition lesson 4 established, that implementation intention effects are stronger when if-then planning is supported by strong activated goal intentions.
- Most of this lesson is the course's own reasoning and says so in its opening section and again at each point of use. No source read for this course tests a method for deciding what to drop, defines a decision as a pair, recommends naming a cost or a review date, or evaluates the urgent-against-important scheme. The two reviews above bound the lesson by saying where the measured benefits of this subject land; they do not support the method. Marcus and Ruth are constructed, along with every figure attached to them. The form of naming what each choice costs is taken from Using AI Effectively lesson 9, which is this institute's own earlier handling of a value question, not an outside source.
Check your understanding
This lesson has a 6-question quiz. Pass it and the questions come back on a schedule in Review, so what you learned stays learned. Your progress is saved in your browser; no account needed.