Plus Mark and Jordan's favorite questions to ask when discerning requests for their time
In this episode, authors Mark Batterson (Win the Day and Do it for a Day) and Jordan Raynor (Redeeming Your Time) discuss:
Want to go deeper on these topics? Pick-up a copy of Mark's books (Win the Day and Do it for a Day) and Jordan's (Redeeming Your Time).
[00:00:11] JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Redeem the Day Podcast, a seven-episode series aimed at helping you be more purposeful, present, and productive. I'm Jordan Raynor, author of Redeeming Your Time, and I'm joined by Mark Batterson, author of Do It for a Day and Win the Day.
In this episode of Redeem the Day, we're going to be sharing why Christians need a unique relationship with the word no, the evidence that Jesus himself was comfortable telling people no, and a few of our favorite practices that help us say no more frequently.
All right, Mark, I want to start here. It’s going to come to a surprise to nobody that this podcast on time management has an episode dedicated to the word no. It feels like everybody's talking about this. I think Christ followers know we got to have unique relationship with this word because the modern wisdom on this two-letter word, in my experience, rarely aligns with Jesus’s example.
A couple of weeks ago, I was watching this popular TED talk that I think summarizes conventional wisdom on this idea. The speaker said, “When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than, wow, that would be amazing absolutely, then say no.” This is not the example of Jesus, right? There were times of which he said no, but there were other times in which he sacrificially said yes to things he probably didn't want to do but he did because he loved others. What do you make of this tension? What do you make of Jesus sacrificially sometimes saying yes to things he probably didn't want to?
[00:01:50] MB: Well, I'm going to back up one step. Job 11:6 is one of my bedrock verses. It says true wisdom has two sides. So in my experience, where there is the tension of opposites, you're pretty close to the truth, and you've got to learn to flip the coin. So I'll do a little coin flip right here. Now, I'm not sure who said this first. But when in doubt, probably Andy Stanley. I know he said this. Saying yes to one thing is saying no to something else. So it's living in this tension of what is the best and highest yes and realize that everything is a tradeoff. Everything is a tradeoff. So we are trading our time for something.
I think you look at Jesus’s life, and it's fascinating, Jordan, because he spent most of his time with these 12 disciples. I'm thinking to myself, most of us think we need to influence more people, more people, more people. But he really focused on influencing a pretty small group, and it sure seems to me like it paid off.
[00:03:06] JR: You shared in Win the Day, I think it's related to this topic, how your counselor once pointed out to you that Jesus disappointed pretty much everybody. It seems like this has been a struggle for you and for me too. Just we're perennial people pleasers. So how does that truth that Jesus said no to a lot of people, how does that provide you encouragement?
[00:03:27] MB: Yeah. Well, let me just hop on the couch with my counselor and recreate that moment.
[00:03:33] JR: Yeah, please do.
[00:03:34] MB: I literally said to my counselor, I said I don't want to disappoint anyone ever. There was a pregnant pause, and my counselor said, “Mark, that's an awfully big burden to bear,” and it seems to me like Jesus disappointed people all the time. Jordan, I tend to be a people pleaser, and what I've discovered is that my default setting generally is yes. I'll give a classic example. A pastor at church, thousands of people, on any given Sunday, I might say hi to 500, 600 people. Often, I’ll have several people walk out and say, “Hey, could we grab coffee,” or, “Could we get together?”
Jordan, it's the craziest thing in the world. I find myself in those settings saying yes, yes, yes, yes and without any kind of what do you want to meet about. Maybe I'm the best person maybe I'm not. I think understanding your default setting is a good starting point. Then I know we'll get into some of the practice. But in my experience, because I'm not good at saying no, I've had to employ other people to say no for me and make some pre decisions that make that no for me as well.
[00:05:00] JR: What do you think other than people pleasing? What are the things that keep us from saying no? What is the internal resistance that's happening there?
[00:05:10] MB: Well, we don't want to let anybody down. So are we living through the applause of people? Or are we living for the applause of nail-scarred hands? I think we don't give ourselves a whole lot of grace. I think if people really knew how busy everybody else is, we would be a lot more graceful and we would realize. We think to ourselves, “I'm only sending them one email or one text. Why can't they immediately –” Well, because there's 100 other people who think that they're the only one sending that email or sending that text. So I think we've got to recognize that time is a limited resource. At the end of our lives, by the way, I'm not sure anybody is going to want the distinction of I answered the most emails of anybody. That is my claim to fame.
[00:06:07] JR: All right. So I want to get practical in a minute and talk about tools that we all can use to be better at saying no because while Jesus did say yes sometimes, he also said no. I think we got to get good at developing this habit. But before we go any further, so much of the content in this world helping people better say no is coming from people like you and me, Mark, who are authors. Like we're saying no to different things, and I just want to – We’re saying no to the proverbial coffee meeting of, “Hey, can I grab coffee and pick your brain on something?” I want to look our listeners in the eyes and try to put ourselves in their shoes, like what else are people saying no to? Because most people aren't writing books and have a bunch of people asking them to get coffee. Like what are you finding, at least maybe in your congregation, people are having a really hard time saying no? I know for us it’s extracurricular activities with kids, right? It's a good thing, right? What else are you seeing that people are struggling with here?
[00:07:05] MB: Well, I think we're all going in so many different directions. That's part of the challenge. It's not just sports. It's music lessons. If you have a child with special needs, that entails a lot of extra effort. I think it was Elizabeth O'Connor, who this moment when Jesus cast out a demon and the demon’s name was Legion. Of course, Legion would be a reference to a military unit in the Roman army, consisting of about 6,000 soldiers. In other words, this person was pulled in 6,000 different directions. Elizabeth O'Connor basically said all of us are Legion.
So we go in so many different directions that I think there are seasons in life where, hey, we need to just cut back on the extracurricular. Our kids aren't going to suffer too much if they're in two sports, instead of three. Then it's even travel leagues and the way that athletics has evolved. Even since when I was a kid, it’s like next level. If you aren't playing a sport year round, it's like you're falling behind. So it's the proverbial hamster wheel, and all of us get on it, and it's really hard to get off of it.
[00:08:27] JR: Yeah. In Win the Day, you mentioned your stop doing list. I, in business, have had stopped doing meetings with my team, where everybody has to look at each other's to-do lists, not their own, and say, “Hey, listen. Based on the goals we defined,” which if this is a struggle for you, go back to episode three. Based on the big hairy audacious goals we define, that on your to-do list is not aligned with where we're going. You need to kill it, right? I think we got to do the same thing in our families, right? We need to schedule stop doing meetings with our spouses, with our kids. Take out our to-do lists and our calendars, especially the recurring items, the weekly stuff, the monthly stuff. Just ruthlessly kill some things that just aren't essential, right? What's on your stop doing list? I'm curious.
[00:09:17] MB: Well, it's always under evaluation. I would say, though, Jordan, the big picture for me, redeeming my time on an annual basis actually begins with an annual retreat that my wife and I do. We go over budget and calendar, often word of the year, verse of the year. Go over a gratitude journal from the previous year. What it does is allow us to prioritize, and we do what Stephen Covey advocated in Seven Habits, this idea of putting the big rocks in the jar first. So you begin to schedule out a year, and then some things fall off the list. I'm not going to have time to do this or that. Then you begin.
A lot of it is calendaring. If you don't control your calendar, your calendar is going to control you. So I even recognized, hey, during a writing season, which for me is my birthday, November 5th until Super Bowl Sunday. So I give myself about three months to actually write a book. It starts with a retreat. It ends with retreat. But I do less preaching and I don't take meetings, generally speaking, outside of our staff during that season. So it's about proactively making those pre decisions in order to prioritize that goal that you have. That's really – It’s the only way to do it. Otherwise, you're going to try to be all things to all people, and you're going to become nothing to nobody.
[00:10:55] JR: I love how all these episodes are connecting together because on the next episode, we're going to talk more about our calendars and our time budgets for our days. But this is also connecting to something we talked about in episode three. That if you get really good at setting big goals, the rocks for your life, and putting those into place in your calendar first, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to say no to lesser things, right? So you mentioned the annual retreat, Mark. On a daily, weekly basis, what are some other practical things that you do that you have found helpful to say no to requests for your time?
[00:11:31] MB: Well, I made a decision years ago. I asked our stewardship team to put limits on me. Limit the number of days that I can travel. Limit the number of boards that I can serve on simultaneously. Why? Because they're making that decision for me. I try to empower my assistant to say no for me, and sometimes people take offense at that. But here's one little trick of the trade, Jordan, that I think you'll enjoy, especially, but I think listeners will enjoy this as well. I call it doing the math. I once calculated number of people who attend our church times a half-hour message and kind of that total time. If I remember right, it was something like 271 days of collective listening time for one 30-minute message.
Then I did it for writing, like take my bestselling book times the five or six hours that takes the average person to read it, and I think it adds up to like 1,741 years. I do the math because it motivates me, Jordan, to leverage my time to those highest ROI activities, the things that are going to make the biggest difference. Now, don't get me wrong. A one-on-one meeting can be life-changing. But it's also one hour times one person. So what I want to do when I write a book is give a lot of people the best six hours I have. It'll take me three months to give you the best six hours I have, but I'm going to spend six hours with you, and you're going to get the best that I have. It’s almost like a Jedi mind trick but it allows me to prioritize some of those big rocks, and make sure that I focus my energy and time on those things.
[00:13:22] JR: In Redeeming Your Time, I offer eight questions for readers to help them say yes or no to requests for their time. One of them is, is this the most generous use of my time. This is such a great example of what you're talking about. If I came to DC, it was like, “Hey, Mark. Let's grab coffee.” The most generous use of that hour is actually not you saying yes to me, right? It's a no so that you can more generously serve the other people you're called to serve in your work. That might be true for you, listener. If somebody is asking you to volunteer at church on Wednesday nights, that might not be the most generous, highest leverage use of your time. It might be serving your family or serving your neighbors that you're called to minister to.
Mark, I want to go back to something. You basically have other people say no for you, right? Stewardship Committee at the church, your assistant. For those who don't have an assistant, I'm trying to think out loud about what are some tools our listeners can use to employ this same principle of allowing other people to say no for us? Like one thing that pops into my mind is sharing your calendar with your friends and putting a rule in place to say, if I got a request from my time that's going to take more than x number of hours, three hours, whatever, I go to my friends, this list of friends, and ask them if it's a good use of my time. I'm just thinking out loud but any other ideas here for people who don't have an assistant or a board to say no for them?
[00:14:52] MB: Well, if you have a spouse, that's a good place to start. You have to be careful. You don't want us stress out your spouse with 1,000 requests because that can turn them into your assistant. In my experience, Jordan, that's not going to end well.
[00:15:13] JR: Yes, that’s exactly right.
[00:15:14] MB: But I do think you want to prioritize together and always try to bounce significant things off of my wife. By the way, for speaking engagements, I only do seven overnight speaking engagements a year. My oldest son lives in California. There's a pretty good chance that a few of those are going to be in California, near where he lives. So you find different ways to what are the priorities here and what are the high leverage points, and you use your time for those things that are going to be the most fulfilling and also the most impactful.
[00:15:57] JR: One practice I've started in the last few years that's been really helpful is I just delay my response, especially to things that look like really great opportunities. I think you struggle with this, like I do. Everything looks like an amazing opportunity. For those in particular, I sit on it. I make myself sit on it for 24 hours before I respond. I just won't respond to the email. If it's in person, like if somebody – I don't know. I'm at church, and they’re like, “Hey, you want to come to, I don't know, Puerto Rico next weekend?” I'll be very tempted to say yes in the moment but I'll use the old spouse excuse, which is glorious. It's like, “I got to check with my wife,” and I'll wait 24 hours. Usually, the excitement and the luster wears off in one day. It allows me to say no a heck of a lot more.
[00:16:45] MB: Yup, I love it, the old 24-hour rule. Yeah, I think you have to sleep on it and then you have to figure out how is this going to – Am I going to be energized by this a month out, two weeks out, one week out? Or is this something that is going to stress me out? It’s not always easy predicting that. But I think over time, you get a little bit better at those filters.
[00:17:10] JR: Proverbs, I can't remember exactly where it says this, but it says it is foolishness to quickly make a vow and only later reconsider it, right? That's what this is talking about. Delay your response. So I mentioned one of the questions I love that helps me say no. Is this the most generous use of my time? Are there other questions that you've got in your head or maybe even written down somewhere to help you say no?
[00:17:34] MB: A lot of them are these internal filters that are intuitive over time. I'll give an example. I used to love being on the big stage. More and more, I enjoy spending time with leaders or pastors where it's going to be a smaller gathering because I know it's going to be less taxing in terms of preparation, and it's going to be more life-giving, and there's going to be more dialogue. So it's almost learning your preferences over time and knowing those environments that are going to energize and those that aren't.
I have to say, though, I love that generous question. Probably my equivalent would be is this going to be life-giving for me and for the people I'm with? That’s not always easy to answer. But in a sense, I think I get pretty good at that. It’s another occasion, Jordan, where I don't want to beat a dead horse. But this idea of do the math has really become a matrix for me. It’s not just with sermons or with books. If I'm with 10 leaders, but those 10 leaders lead organizations or churches that number in the thousands, if you do the math there, you're actually with 10 people that are impacting tens of thousands of people. So I see that as a high leverage point, and that helps me maybe justify, hey, I'd rather hang out with these 10 people than even be on a stage with 1,000 people.
[00:19:18] JR: Great. Yeah, I'll just offer one more question for listeners to think through when they're trying to decide whether to say yes or whether say no. Am I trying to do good or make myself look good by saying yes to this request for my time? Because, for me, a lot of times if I'm honest, I'm just trying to make myself look good, and that's a lame reason to say yes to something.
All right, guys, hopefully that gave you a lot of practical tips to help you say no more frequently. But remember, we Christians ought to be marked by a unique relationship with this two-letter word. Yes, we got to get better at saying no, but we've also got to embrace the tension that sometimes the Holy Spirit moves us to say yes sacrificially, right? I'm praying that perspective and these practical tools served you guys well.
Hey, up next, the final episode of the Redeem the Day Podcast. Mark and I are talking about how we can embrace productive busyness while ruthlessly eliminating hurry from our lives while eating frogs. I promise I'll make sense in a minute. You don't want to miss that final episode. We'll see you there.
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