A plan to simply become too unpleasant to be bothered, it seems, isn’t sustainable. There are only so many times you can offer an unqualified no without either losing your job or being sidelined as an unreliable curmudgeon. This leaves us with a more nuanced option for limiting projects: appeal to the hard but unimpeachable reality of your actual available time. If someone asks you to do something, and you appeal to some vague sense of busyness to get out of it, you’re unlikely to consistently succeed. “We’re all busy,” they might reply, “but I really need you to do this for me.” If you
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