When "no" doesn't mean "no"
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You get a request from your line manager and finally gear yourself up to say no.
You’ve rehearsed it in your head. You’ve read these newsletters and maybe a book about it. You’re ready. The next request comes in and, you say it, you really say it! No!
And then… your boss comes back with, “OK, but what about this instead?”
So your no just bounces right back at you.
We were discussing this in The Sisterhood recently. Saying no often doesn’t end the conversation, rather it just shifts the shape of the work. And the additional problem is that this makes boundaries feel ineffective, exhausting, and a bit pointless. Which in turn feeds the cycle of overwork and guilt. It’s not that we lack the courage to say no, we’re trying! It’s that the system often tries to sidestep or re-route their no.
Here’s why it’s such a problem in academia:
Some things are actually part of our workload allowance. Our line managers can ask us to do extra admin, teaching, or other service. If we refuse one, they’ll usually hand us another.
On the other side of the continuum are goodwill extras— summer schools, community events, the stuff that eats up time but we could actually push back on.
The problem is, the line between those two is so murky. Where does taking over a sick colleague’s marking come? Workload models are supposed to help, but most of the time they’re opaque, under-costed, and leave us with the general unease that we might not be doing enough, or as much as others. That constant sense of unease that drives people to check email at all hours, just to show they’re “on it.”
It feels like the expectations are not as vague and woolly in other jobs. A friend of mine (a highly successful academic and HoD at one point) left academia for the civil service. Within days his boss said: “How are you? Do you have too much to do? Too little? Can I help?”
He realised no one had EVER asked him those questions in a decade in academia.
So yes, learning to say no is important—but the deeper issue is that academia never tells you when enough is enough. No one says, “That’s plenty, stop there.” And so we overwork, over-check, and over-give, just to fill the silence.
If this resonates, here’s a starting point:
Differentiate workload vs goodwill. Is this task in your contract or is it voluntary? Your strategy depends on the answer. And you can ask!
Audit alignment. If the model says 30 hours but you’re spending 100, that’s not a personal failing. It’s a mismatch worth raising. Some things you could consider raising with your line manager:
“This task is under-allocated, and it’s eating into other parts of my role. I suggest upping the allocation from X to Y. Here are the benefits of this for the department. What are your thoughts?”
“I’m allocated 100 hours a year for this task but I find I’m spending more than 2 hours a week on it. Am I missing something? What are your thoughts?”
“The opaqueness of the workload model means I’m uncertain on whether I’m allocating too much or too little time to this task. I spend about 4 hours a week on it. Can you advise?”
Release the guilt. The silence around capacity is systemic, not individual. You’re not broken for not knowing where the line is. But let’s start getting specific with all these vague requests which just expand to fill the space, especially if we’re procrastinating on opening a challenging review, or submitting a grant application that feels confusing.
