What do you do if you're overloaded? What is the one time management technique that works when you've exhausted all of the others, and you can no longer squeeze any more productivity or efficiency out of your work? The answer is simple. Or at least, it's simple to state. It's not always quite so straightforward to do. And that is to say, No.

Now, people don't like saying no, largely because it sounds negative. And in fact, if you think about how you got to where you are today, any measure of success you have at the moment is almost certainly due in large part to your ability to say yes, to say yes and to deliver on your commitments. And so you Yes has been a very useful strategy for you know, is the radical opposite, if feels very risky. So, whilst there are a lot of things One could say about saying no, I want to give you the absolute gold dust. I could fill a whole course on saying no. And I have, and there is another course available to on this platform about taking control of your life and saying no, but the core of that course, is your ability to start thinking no as a positive thing.

Because as you have more and more responsibilities, and you get more and more senior within your organization, more and more status within your chunk of society. There won't be fewer things to do, there will be more and yes will cease to be a viable strategy. So No has to start to become positive. And we do that by recognizing that no, in the English language is not a word. It's an acronym. It's two letters.

And oh, that stand for noble objection. A noble objection is what we make when we choose to decline a request for a good reason. You see, if you're one of those people who says yes to everything, people will love you. But you will eventually become a bit of a doormat. People will trample all over you. They'll take advantage of your willingness to say yes.

And eventually there'll be so many yeses, that you will not be able to get your head above them and deliver on all of them. So you'll start letting people down. Saying yes, may make people like you, but it certainly won't make them SPECT you on the Hand, if you're a person who can make the right strategic choice and say yes to the most important things and deliver those confidently and can say no to the things that would get in the way of the important things that will garner people's respect. So no is a noble objection and what could be more positive than something that's Noble. But to be noble, it must fulfill two criteria. Firstly, it must be motivated by a positive intention to do what's right to make the right choice.

Your job. Whether you're employed by a company, by political authority by a voluntary sector, organization, maybe you're even a volunteer, your job is not to do everything you could possibly do. That's not possible. Your job is to do the most valuable things with the time available to you to use your time emotionally. For way, that means making choices and that means declining options. So, a noble objection is noble if it's motivated by positive intent to do the right things, the best things the most useful and valuable things.

It is also noble, if it is done in a courteous and respectful manner. A noble objection is not a license to say no to the things you don't want to do. It's not a license to be rude to your colleagues or your boss. But it is a recognition that when we are overloaded, and we reach the point where no more can be fitted into our schedule. The most valuable way to control the use of your time is to control what you use your time for. And that means saying no to things that do not contribute enough to make them as worthwhile as other things that contribute more