Weekend Musings + Getting Better At Saying “No”

Hello, happy Sunday, and welcome to my weekend musings. Right now I’m sitting in our office in downtown Austin working away. I’ve always found that Sundays are a great day to get work done with minimal interruptions and today has been no exception. I absolutely love what we are doing and wake-up so excited about it I don’t want to wait until Monday, I want Monday to come sooner, hence working on Sunday. Here’s a photo of what I’m looking at right now:

working-on-sunday

You’ll probably also notice the fancy elevated monitor stand we put together in our office. Yes, we’re a startup so that means spending every penny wisely, and as a book-lover we happen to have a lot of books in our office.

One thing that I’ve had to get a lot better at in this phase of my life is saying no. It’s something I’ve always struggled with but in order to achieve the level of focus that I need, I need to say “no” a lot more than ever before. I wrote an article on Medium about the importance of Focus which is also directly related to saying no. It’s been incredibly hard but now I have to say that I’m getting used to it and it’s incredibly liberating.

Alex Iskold, the MD of Techstars New York wrote a great post today about goals, milestones and tasks, and I think he really nails it:

“We spend a lot of time talking to Techstars founders about focus. We talk a lot about saying ‘no’ to things that don’t matter. We talk a lot about not chasing too many things at once. We try to give founders tools for deciding what’s important. We try to give them a framework for how to get things done.” (Source – Alex Iskold’s Blog)

I still know people that like to brag about all the different things they are doing, I used to be one of those people, now I’m proud to be putting my time into one thing not a million different things. Of course that means saying no a lot more. I can’t go to every meetup group, dinner, happy hour, conference, etc. Instead I want to be here in the office with our team, if I travel it has to be for a very good reason.

I strongly believe that what we are doing right now in life will change the world forever, and that means staying focused, saying no, and knowing that that’s okay.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton