Say No by Default

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes. And as always, I'm joined by the cofounders of thirty seven signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. In their book, Rework, they write about saying no. In fact, they say it's even more important to say no more often than actually saying yes. In fact, they write, quote, you rarely regret saying no, but you often wind up regretting saying yes. Guys, I thought we would talk about it today. Not only making decisions in terms of the products, what you're saying yes and no to, but also in terms of your business, what you're saying yes and no to. I don't know who wants to jump in on this in terms of the product first maybe. I think the point about regretting yeses is actually a good place to start because that's, in many ways, more interesting to me than the saying no part. Saying no obviously is a very, very specific instrument. When you say yes to something, it's kind of a blunt force instrument because, in effect, you're saying no to maybe hundreds of other things that you could consider because you've already taken something on. And oftentimes, what we found is that when you take some things on, you you can end up with a lot of regret down the road. You know, you experiment with something because you think it's a cool idea, and then you're left with sort of the remnants of that idea sort of baked into a website somewhere, or you have, like, seven additional pages on your website you didn't know about or had some, like, pricing thing you implemented and forgot about, or the person who was doing that is no longer here, and now there's this thing that's sort of hanging out there in the wind. And that is one of the biggest penalties are saying yes to too many things, is is that you end up having a few too many things going on. You can't really keep track of all of them necessarily, and they end up increasing the surface area of the business, of a website, of a product, whatever it might be. And you look back on that a year later and you're like, not only do we wish we didn't say yes to this, but now we have to unwind it, which is additional work. So is all the work you put into doing it, now you have to unwind it. Or if you don't unwind it, which most companies end up not really unwinding it fully, and we're guilty of this too, again, you end up with these sort of artifacts that you don't even know about, kinda hanging around. And then when you wanna make some changes later, you're like, we can't or we can, but it's gonna be a real pain in the ass because we've …