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When you feel like what’s important is too much just by itself, sometimes you need to tighten the scope of what makes something important.¹

Or it might help to recognize that there are ultimately degrees of importance. Those different degrees prioritize different things in different contexts.

What doesn’t fit in the limits of life in one context might still be important. You might just have to put off prioritizing it.

But there’s another strategy you can adopt when a life full of just the important things feels overly full. That is, you can recognize that not everything about what’s important is equally important.

What’s Important Sometimes Contains What Isn’t

In your research, for example, you need to interact with good sources and document them well. A guide like the SBL Handbook of Style might tell you what “documented … well” looks like. But how you get your documentation into that shape is secondary.

So, you could type each footnote one by one and meticulously check that formatting against your style guide. If you do so, your effort has exactly a 1 to 1 correspondence with your results. One footnote typed and meticulously checked gets you … the chance to do exactly the same thing with the next footnote.

Or you could invest a bit of effort into learning a citation manager like Zotero. That’s a bit more complex than typing, so there’s some overhead in getting started.

To cite a source, you can create and meticulously check one Zotero record. But once that record is there and structured properly, Zotero can prepare corresponding footnotes without limit. And it can automatically edit your footnotes if you need to change from one style (e.g., SBL) to another (e.g., Chicago).

What’s essential about good documentation isn’t your method in preparing your footnotes. It’s the copiousness, clarity, and consistency of those notes. And you can make what’s important (e.g., good documentation) less burdensome by optimizing for what’s important about it (e.g., the final product).

Just because something is important doesn’t mean it has to be burdensome. As Greg McKeown helpfully ponders,

What could happen in your life if … the essential things became easier?²

And a prime way they can become easier is by focusing on what’s essential about them.

Conclusion

Sometimes, everything in life all together can just get to be too much. Separating yourself from what’s urgent but not important can help.

But if you find yourself having too much that’s important, focusing on what’s important about it can help lighten the load. It can help you discern where the unimportant or unessential might live inside the important or the essential.

The questions you ask determine the answers you can get. So, as you hone your focus still more on what exactly is important about essential things, you may well encounter answers that make those essential things also more doable.

1. Header image provided by Bekky Bekks. ↩

2. Greg McKeown, Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most (New York: Currency, 2021), 14. This core theme runs throughout Effortless in different iterations in the book’s various chapters. ↩

As you separate from or eliminate the unimportant, even what remains can be a challenge.¹ You can start addressing that challenge by distinguishing interest from importance and focusing on what you can influence.

Beyond that, you can recognizing that there are degrees of importance and that you have some very clear limits. Doing so will help you discern differences in layers of importance in different contexts.

Recognize degrees of importance.

The fact that some things are closer to or farther from being important implies that importance itself isn’t a binary. “Important” and “not important” are helpful core categories. But each of them contains a gradation.

It might be “important” for you to be writing a paper. But when you go into labor—or your spouse does—it becomes very clear very fast that a new baby is more important than a new page of writing.

Respect your limits.

You only have 168 hours in a week. For a good amount of that time, you have a physiological need to be unconscious.

The same was true even for Jesus. Being finite, having limits is part of what it means to be human.

Just because you judge something to be important doesn’t mean you have the bandwidth to invest in it. And if you find you don’t, you may need to recalibrate and tighten up your sense of what it means for something to qualify as important.

As you do, you may find that some things were only just apparently important. But on closer inspection, they’re actually not important.

That status of “not important” might be permanent. You might recognize that you don’t actually need something in your life that you thought you did.

Or the status of “not important” might not be absolute but might, in a bigger picture, just mean “less important.” For example, if your writing a paper gets interrupted by a new baby’s birth, the paper will—at some point—cycle back into being important.

“Important” doesn’t just mean “worthwhile.” Something is important or has more importance only when it’s worthwhile and deserves priority.

You might not be able to give something priority even if you recognize that it’s worthwhile in principle.

If you had no limits, you wouldn’t have to make that distinction. But because you do have limits, what you decide to prioritize has to fit within those limits. Otherwise, you’re back in for the downward spiral of “importance creep.”

Conclusion

Life can easily get quite full. If you’re discerning about including what’s important and excluding what isn’t, that can help ensure everything fits together at the end of the week.

But sometimes “life happens” in larger ways, and even just what’s important can all feel like too much. In these cases, recognizing both the relative importance of different things and the different limits that you have can help you discern and emphasize what’s most important amid everything else.

1. Header image provided by Benjamin Salvatore. ↩

Simply asking what’s important can help you see when some things clearly aren’t.¹ This status becomes still clearer when you look more closely at things like quantity, duration, context, and interest or agency.

For all that, though, what do you do if “what’s important” is still too much?

You’re already avoiding what’s neither important nor urgent. And you’re making headway on saying “no” to what’s merely urgent but not important.

But what do you do if you’re still in a place where there’s too much that you find important to do it all justice?

When what’s important feels like too much …

It’s a good time to pray. As the psalmist says, “by my God I can leap over a wall.”²

But that should go without saying, and it should be a regular part of your spiritual life even when things don’t feel like they’re too much. The reality is that life can go from manageable to overwhelming both slowly and instantaneously. So, you need to navigate the whole prayerfully.

In addition, laborare est orare, “work is prayer.” And here I’ll focus on the kind of work you can prayerfully do when even the comparatively few truly important things get to be too much.

In this context, several particular strategies can help. The first one I discuss more below, and the remaining ones I’ll address in coming weeks.

• Watching for importance creep helps you distinguish grey areas at the border of the important and the unimportant.
• Recognizing degrees of importance and respecting your limits allows you to discern differences in layers of importance in different contexts. And
• Focusing on what’s important about what’s important helps you see when things that are actually important sometimes have things that aren’t nestled inside.

Watch for importance creep.

Asking better questions can give you a clearer picture of what’s actually important. But sometimes, the dividing line between “important” and “not important” can still appear blurry.

This blurriness can make us feel that some things are important, even when they actually aren’t. This dynamic is “importance creep.”

Importance creep comes from unexamined bleed over from “interest” into “importance.” It causes you to focus on areas of concern that stretch beyond what you actually have control over—your areas of influence.³

Unfortunately, the more effort you spend spinning your wheels in this margin, the less you’ll be able put into the things you can control.

The result is that your area of influence shrinks and the disparity between your areas of concern and your areas of influence grows. Or you might shrink your areas of concern to match the shrinking in your ability to affect them.

Either one is a downward spiral. So, you need to watch for when you might be considering something as important that almost has that status, but not quite.

Conclusion

Even when you prioritize what’s important and cut what isn’t, life can be overly full. Sometimes, that over-fullness comes about because interest can feel like importance.

But learning to distinguish the two and focus on what you have influence over can help clarify your definition of what importance really looks like.

1. Header image provided by Elisa Ventur. ↩

2. 2 Sam 22:30; Ps 18:29 ESV. ↩

3. For these categories and a helpful description of the basic dynamics among them, see Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 88–101. ↩

Some things are urgent.¹ Some are important. Some are both. Some are neither.

As you consider these possibilities, it’s pretty clear that you want to invest yourself into what’s important—not just what’s urgent.

That’s not so hard for things that are neither urgent nor important. They’re not significant like they would be if they were important. They also don’t press themselves upon you like they would if they were urgent.

So, things that are neither urgent nor important can—and should—fall by the wayside pretty easily.

But the same isn’t true for unimportant things that have urgency attached to them. It’s these things that press for more attention than they’re worth. And it’s these things that require you to develop the discipline to say “no” well.

Saying “No” Isn’t an End in Itself

But saying “no” isn’t an end in itself. Your goal shouldn’t be to have the most curmudgeonly, miserly disposition. That’s not what saying “no” well is about.

Saying “no” well stems from a recognition that “yes” and “no” are inevitably intertwined. “No” entails and enables “yes”; “yes” invites and requires “no.”

So, even if you say “yes,” that very “yes” is also a saying of “no.” And the key is neither to avoid nor to perpetually be saying “no.” Rather, it’s to say “no” at the right times, to the right things, and in the right ways to support the important things that you really need and want to say “yes” to.

As you work to identify what these important things are, questions like the following can be helpful:

1. How much does something matter?
2. For how long does something matter?
3. In what context does something matter?
4. To whom does something matter?

Still, once you identify what’s important and what isn’t, it can be especially hard to say “no” to the unimportant things that remain urgent. That’s why it can be helpful to a student of the art of saying “no” well.

Making a Start in the Art of “No”

A “no” can take any number of forms. But as you’re learning to say it better, you might find some of the following approaches helpful.²

1. Pause or Clarify

Pause or ask for clarification before responding to a new request. The additional information you receive because someone fills the pause or answers your question may help you craft a better “no.”

2. Check Your Calendar

Offer to respond after checking your calendar promptly. Doing so can relieve some pressure for an immediate “yes,” and particularly if you time block, you can also take better stock of how full your current slate of commitments is.

3. Say “No … But …”

Instead of saying “no” alone, say “no … but ….”

This formula can take several forms. You might use it when something isn’t important now but will be important later. In this case, with “no … but …,” you can communicate that you can’t commit yourself to something in one time frame but you can at some discrete point in the future.

I say “discrete point” because you want to avoid the disingenuousness of using “no … but …” to imply a future “yes” that you don’t actually intend to follow through on. As Greg McKeown correctly observes, “Being vague is not the same thing as being graceful, and delaying the eventual ‘no’ will only make it that much harder—and the recipient that much more resentful.”³

Or for something that doesn’t rise to the level of importance (whether now or later), you might use “no … but …” to communicate that you can’t commit in one way but you can in another. Or you might use “no … but …” to communicate that you can’t commit but you know of someone else who might be able to help or another way of resolving the request.

4. Highlight the Tradeoffs

Highlight the tradeoffs of agreeing, and ask whether those are worth resolving. Sometimes, you may receive a request from someone who might not fully understand what the request entails. Once that’s communicated, the request might no longer appear worth while.

5. Consider Pruning Existing Commitments

Explore the possibility of pruning existing commitments. As you do so, you want to clearly do right by the individuals who will be impacted by your stepping back. It’s your commitment, so it’s your job to resolve it and not leave someone else in the lurch or feeling like they let you off the hook under duress.

“Resolving it” might mean giving significant advance notice or negotiating an alternative solution that’s just as good or better for the other party. Or it well mean following through with your prior “yes” to an acknowledged point of completion and being more careful about what you say “yes” to in the future.

Conclusion

Saying “no” is never an end in itself. It’s a means to a different end. But it’s also an indispensable means.

Without saying “no” in a way that corresponds to and supports the “yes” that you wan to say, your days are likely to get filled with the urgent—but not necessarily with the important.

1. Header image provided by Florian Schmetz. ↩

2. For the basic suggestions that I’ve summarized here, I’m grateful to Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), 108–10; Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 140–54. ↩

3. McKeown, Essentialism, 139. ↩