Setting Your "No" Goals for '26
Creating a Cut List to Start Your Year Out Right
Most goals are drawn up as lists of things we mean to do. Fewer are written as lists of what we mean to refuse. But the refusals matter just as much. Call it a cut list if you like: the deliberate pruning of a life that has grown too crowded. You don’t only build a good life by adding to it. Sometimes you have to take a knife to it.
With age, I’ve learned that a fruitful life isn’t mainly about doing more or straining harder. If that were the case, the most frantic people would be the wisest. The real work is learning which things deserve your strength and which ones don’t. That means cutting away habits and commitments that take plenty and give almost nothing in return.
Time and focus are the two things you never get back. Time spends itself whether you’re paying attention or not, and unlike money, there’s no way to earn more of it. Everyone wakes up with the same daily allotment. The difference is how it’s spent. Focus works differently. It’s closer to a muscle than a currency. Neglect it, and it atrophies. Train it, and it will carry real weight.
I’ve come to believe that the highest form of self-discipline is using your best hours for the right work. For me, those hours are in the morning. I used to belong to the night, but about ten years ago that changed. My mind is sharp early now. When I guard the hours between five and ten, I can do in one morning what used to take most of a week.
That’s why my cut list is ruthless with anything that dulls those hours or steals them outright. Some things aren’t evil. They’re just expensive, and they cost me the part of the day when I’m most alive.
A cut list isn’t about minimalism as a lifestyle or an aesthetic preference for having less. It’s about subtraction in service of obedience. Before asking how to do something better or faster, you ask whether it should be done at all. Many things that feel like discipline failures are really permission failures. They crept in quietly. You never meant to say yes, but you did, and now they sit there demanding upkeep.
The real question isn’t whether something is good or useful in the abstract. Plenty of good things are wrong for you right now. The question is whether it belongs to the calling in front of you at this moment. Good things crowd out better ones every day. Harmless things are often the most dangerous, because they don’t announce the damage they do. Over time they don’t just cost you output. They blur your thinking and dull your edge.
This is why a cut list is harder than a goal list. Cutting feels like loss. It feels negative. But every serious “no” is really a way of protecting a more important “yes.” In practice, a cut list usually includes things like:
Commitments that once fit but no longer match your present responsibilities
Projects that drag on without ownership, urgency, or a clear end
Meetings and conversations that consume energy but never produce decisions
Inputs that pretend to be preparation, news, reading, scrolling, but leave you scattered
Late nights that borrow against the clarity of the next morning
For me, this shows up most clearly around my mornings. Those hours between five and ten are when my mind is clean and my work carries weight. Anything that consistently clouds those hours, poor sleep, unnecessary evening commitments, mental clutter I haul into the next day, goes on the cut list. Not because those things are sinful or worthless, but because they cost more than they’re worth.
A productive life isn’t built by heroic bursts of effort stacked on top of a crowded schedule. It’s built by guarding a small number of priorities with unreasonable seriousness. You don’t become disciplined by adding rules everywhere. You become disciplined by protecting the few places where time, focus, and obedience actually meet.
P.S. I’ve been heavily influenced by Essentialism by Greg McKeown and Deep Work by Cal Newport. I recommend all their books. If I were to start with one, it would be Essentialism.