I argue for the future so much. I hope to be able to at one point get rid of my anxiety about it. But:
> Also when you say yes to people, a lot of time the other person never actually follows through the thing you didn't want. Otoh if you would argue or say No beforehand it always has the opposite effect.
I recently started doing this and it's amazing. I was the one saying 'no' to so many 'offers' (as a full stack developer, from idea people), and always ended up being the negative guy that doesn't want to do things.
Recently I've started enthousiastically saying "Yeah, that sounds great! In order to get started, I'd need <whatever_thing_that_they_need_to_do> from you.". Up till now no one has followed up. When we talk about it next, I am as excited as in the beginning and mentioned the thing that they need to do again, and they usually go like "Oh yeah! I need to do that." and then I never hear about it again. It's a shocker to me.
It's really easy for people to put stuff on your to-do list, reflecting even a tiny task on them before you accept it makes so many requests go away.
Related to this for me, I generally make it clear that sending an email request does not mean a task is transferred to me. We need to have a conversation and agree before it goes on my list..
Scott Adams goes in more detail on this in his "How to Fail" book. He says that after Dilbert, he got tons of requests to meet with amateur comic artists. He said the best filter was to ask them to prepare a list of questions for their meeting and that filtered out 98% of the people who contacted him.
He also noted that the people who actually did it would follow through and one such person was the author of "Pearls before Swine".
Just a tiny clarification that requires 20 minutes of work is plenty.
Yes to this too! Conscious business taught me all about the difference between reasonable and unreasonable requests how to make reasonable ones. There's more pieces than I expected.
People like dreaming more than they enjoy actualization. Pulling dreams into reality is hard work and necessarily heartbreaking as reality and dreams don't match.
> Also when you say yes to people, a lot of time the other person never actually follows through the thing you didn't want. Otoh if you would argue or say No beforehand it always has the opposite effect.
I recently started doing this and it's amazing. I was the one saying 'no' to so many 'offers' (as a full stack developer, from idea people), and always ended up being the negative guy that doesn't want to do things.
Recently I've started enthousiastically saying "Yeah, that sounds great! In order to get started, I'd need <whatever_thing_that_they_need_to_do> from you.". Up till now no one has followed up. When we talk about it next, I am as excited as in the beginning and mentioned the thing that they need to do again, and they usually go like "Oh yeah! I need to do that." and then I never hear about it again. It's a shocker to me.