The difficult part is that you can see a good reason to say yes to each.
One opportunity brings money into the business. The other could help it function without needing you at every step. You want both. For good reasons.
It would be easier if one were obviously a waste of time.
Imagine you run a small service business. A client offers you a worthwhile project. The work interests you, the fee is fair, and you would like to develop the relationship.
You have also set aside time to work with a colleague on how the team prepares quotes. At the moment, even familiar requests come back to you. People know how to do much of the work, but some of the information and judgment they need remain in your head.
The new project would take the time you reserved for changing that.
This is an invented situation, not a client case study. But the question extends beyond business: what happens when two things you value need the same part of your life?
Essentialism came into this conversation through a networking meeting. The task for the next meeting was to recommend a book for discussion, and someone chose Greg McKeown’s.
His argument about trade-offs provides a useful place to begin. In Essentialism, McKeown asks us to make choices deliberately rather than keep adding commitments and let the consequences decide what gets neglected.
A yes uses something: time, attention, energy, money. Whatever it uses is then unavailable somewhere else.
But identifying a cost doesn’t finish the decision. Almost anything worth doing has one.
A worthwhile choice can still cost us something worthwhile.
That is the distinction I want to explore. Can we choose without first convincing ourselves that the thing we leave aside never mattered?
Let’s make the example specific enough to examine.
After existing client work, team responsibilities and time outside work, you have three hours each week available for the next month. This is the time you set aside for improving how quotes are prepared. It includes room for things to take longer than expected.
The new project would need those same three hours of your attention each week. That is an estimate to check, not a guarantee that nothing will overrun.
For this example, you have checked whether the client could start later or accept a smaller scope. Neither works for them. They need an answer by Friday and will look elsewhere if you decline.
You have also checked the finances. Existing work covers the business’s current commitments. This project would bring welcome additional income, but you do not need it to meet payroll or an existing obligation.
That fact matters. Change it, and the decision may change.
You cannot take both commitments at their present size inside those three hours. Doing one in the evenings would mean changing another part of your life. Asking your colleague to absorb the extra work would move the cost to someone else.
Neither change should disappear into the phrase “we’ll make it work.”
There may be a smaller improvement worth attempting alongside the project. There may be another person who could help. Those possibilities deserve examination, including their costs and availability. They are not resources until they actually exist.
In this version of the example, you decide to protect the time for improving the quoting process.
Your reason is specific: you want familiar requests to move forward without waiting for information only you can provide. You are willing to forgo this project to work on that dependence.
You lose the fee. You may lose the chance to work with this client. There is no guarantee they will return next month.
And the improvement may not work as you hope.
That is a more honest account than calling the client a distraction. The opportunity was worthwhile. You chose something else.
You can understand why you chose and still feel disappointed. Disappointment alone doesn’t establish that the decision was wrong. It tells you that something on the other side had value.
Nor does discomfort prove the decision was right. If the choice leaves you unable to keep an existing promise, commitment is no answer to that fact.
Now comes a different question: what will you actually do with the time you protected?
“Make the business less dependent on me” is a direction. It leaves the first action undecided.
In The ONE Thing, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan connect a larger aim to the consequential action you can take now. Their focusing question asks us to look for an action that would make subsequent work easier or remove the need for some of it.
Applied here, that suggests examining one recurring difficulty before trying to redesign the whole business.
Take one ordinary quote that recently needed your help. Sit with the colleague who prepared it and trace where they had to stop.
Did they lack information? Was a pricing rule unclear? Did they know the answer but lack permission to proceed?
Those are different problems. A faster writing tool would not settle all three.
This is also how I approach the work on my website: understand what is happening before deciding what to change. Sometimes the missing piece is a clear rule or a handover.
For the first attempt, imagine your colleague has agreed to a forty-five-minute session, with time allocated within their working day. Spend ten minutes choosing and reviewing the example, twenty tracing the point where it stalled, and fifteen writing the missing information or decision rule in plain language.
The aim is modest: make one recurring decision understandable to someone other than you. If you cannot agree on the rule, that is the work you have discovered. Do not hide the disagreement in a template.
Then, at the next agreed session, use a second completed quote as a rehearsal. Can your colleague prepare it using what you wrote? Where do they still need to ask?
Keep the exercise away from live client promises. Pricing exceptions and consequential commitments still need the appropriate person’s judgment.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow offers another useful perspective: clear goals, feedback, and a relationship between the challenge of an activity and the skills available to meet it.
I’m borrowing that perspective to shape the attempt. One familiar quote gives the task a boundary. The colleague’s questions reveal what the page explains and what it leaves unclear. The next revision can respond to something observed.
That does not guarantee flow. Nor would an absorbing afternoon prove this was the right priority. Csikszentmihalyi also cautions that the experience can serve harmful ends. Engagement alone cannot tell us whether an activity deserves our time.
Keep the conclusions small enough to match the evidence.
“They needed to ask who could approve that exception” is an observation. “The team cannot work independently” is a much larger claim.
One successful rehearsal would not prove the process was ready to run without you, either. You would still need to see what happens with other requests and exceptions.
The remaining time is available for that work and for what it reveals. It does not need to be filled in advance. McKeown’s discussion of buffers in Essentialism matters here: a commitment needs room for things to take longer or unfold differently than expected.
If your colleague becomes unavailable, you can record your own steps. That may help prepare a handover. It cannot show whether another person can use it.
There is a limit to the experiment, too.
You can revise a rule, change the next session or decide that this was the wrong place to begin. A review in two weeks cannot recover the client project you declined on Friday.
A reversible next step can sit inside a decision with an irreversible cost.
Calling the whole thing “just an experiment” would leave out the part you cannot undo.
This is the connection I see between the books: acknowledge the trade-off, find a useful action, and make the attempt clear enough to learn from. That is my application of their ideas, not a single method they developed together.
You can use it on a choice of your own without adopting a whole new system.
Start by describing what matters on each side. Give the unchosen option a fair hearing. A project can mean income, interest and a relationship. Time outside work may already contain rest, care or a promise to someone else.
Then look at what a yes requires. What is actually available? Who would carry the cost? Is there a smaller version worth doing, or information that could materially change the choice?
If the facts are clear enough, choose a next step that fits them. If an essential fact is missing, finding it may be the next step. Keeping a commitment, reducing scope or declining something new are also possible outcomes.
Finally, name what would justify looking again: a changed obligation, a real alternative, an observed difficulty, a result that makes the next attempt clearer.
Back in the example, the client may choose someone else. The first session may reveal that the quoting problem is harder than it looked.
There is no finished success story yet. There is a choice whose reasons and costs you can explain, followed by an attempt you have room to make.
You can give one thing your time without pretending the other stopped mattering.
If a choice of your own came to mind while reading, try One Clear Step, my free companion.
Work through a choice and find a practical next step that fits your life.
It opens in Eden. A free sign-up gives you access; a rough paragraph is enough to begin.