You can’t make good decisions about what to say yes to until you know what you value.

I’ve found this to be true in my personal and work life…

Every yes has a cost that comes in the form of a finite resource (time, money, attention, energy, etc.).

And that cost either comes out of your margin, or it comes from somewhere else in your life.

People’s lives get sideways whenever they commit to things that they didn’t have the margin to pursue, so they “took” that time from something else.

So how do you know if it’s worth the trade-off?

We usually try to figure out if something is worth the cost by looking at what we could gain. But what you’ll gain is irrelevant if you don’t know what’s valuable to you.

Otherwise you might just gain a bunch of things that you find worthless.

A courtside ticket to the Finals is a bargain to one person and a waste to another. The cost is the exact same, but if you value what that ticket gives you, then it’s worth the cost.

We usually struggle to say no because we haven’t done the work to figure out what we actually value.

In fact, a chaotic life is often just a sign of a fuzzy value system.

Everything seems like a good idea because you haven’t identified what holds value and what doesn’t.

So try this…

Figure out what you value before you start committing to work. We all value certain things more than others, so don’t overthink it, just write it down in a simple list somewhere.

Then once you’ve identified what you value, deciding what to commit to gets a heck of a lot easier.