Whenever I release a project publicly, people always have feature requests for it. And because most of my projects are open source, I can usually say yes to building it, or someone can implement said feature, and I can choose to say yes to how they built it.

When I released PocketCal, people wanted more event groups. When I released W-9 Crafter, people wanted it to also generate W-8 forms. When I released Jumblie, people wanted dark mode and a puzzle archive. And so on and so on!

I often genuinely want to say yes to every feature request. Sometimes they’re really great, easy-win ideas and I implement them right away, and sometimes they’re great ideas that… I may never get to, because it’ll just take too long. And also sometimes I just don’t like the idea, ha. I simply can’t say yes to them all, I can’t review every pull request or issue.

The problem with saying yes to everything is that it isn’t… strategic. I don’t mean for like a product strategy (though it could be applied to that), but I mean for a time management one. If you say yes to everything that comes your way, you’re basically letting your inbox (the whole world!) dictate your direction and your time spent, instead of you choosing your direction and time spent.

Anyway, I write all of this to say: be picky with what you say yes to.

And if I don’t say yes right away to your idea, I promise it’s not that your idea is bad, I just have too many project ideas to try out, features to implement, and domain names to use!