Just Say No Posted on January 23, 2008 Assess how full your plate is before agreeing to more work, advises Megan R. Gunnar (bio).

That’s a huge career issue, especially for folks as they hit the associate level, because some places are pretty good at protecting their assistant professors, but once you’ve got tenure, then, “Oh, well now we can ask her to be on that committee, or him to be on this, or to take over duty. How would you like to chair the department?”

How you make those decisions? I think that it really does take a good deal of soul-searching. I’ve at various points in my career been part of “just say no” clubs. In other words, informal groups of faculty members who you say, “Before you say yes to anything, you come and talk to me and we’ll talk it out,” and it's sort of humorous, right? And we’ll support each other in saying no.

I don’t believe this is solely a problem for women, but I think it might be a bit more of a challenge for women, that we tend to feel that we need to say yes to things, and that we need to really pull our weight in departments and so on, and it can be a challenge.

Once your plate is pretty full, is anything on, something has to come off. And if you really can’t imagine taking anything off, then maybe you’re already at your limit of what you can do well. You are suddenly hit with the possibility that you could be spending almost all your time doing departmental- and university-related service, or society-related service, and have very little time to really pay attention to whether you’re moving along on answering the big set of questions that you hoped your career would allow you to contribute to.

I have learned it’s not the number of times you say no, because I think many of us have little guilt monitors.

“Oh my gosh, I just said no five times. I’d better say yes.” No, you count the number of times you say yes, because the frequency of things coming at you over your career, and with changes in technology that allow more things, really ramps up. It’s the number of times you say yes and what you say yes to, and not whether you’ve said five no's recently, so, “My gosh, I’m feeling guilty; I should say a yes.”

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