Apply the extreme criteria filter ("If not hell yes, then no")

Raise your acceptance threshold so high that only clearly excellent opportunities pass.

Why it works

The brain defaults to "good enough" comparisons: an opportunity that is moderately appealing beats the status quo, so it gets accepted. This systematically crowds the calendar with B-level commitments. Setting an extreme threshold — the opportunity must be an obvious yes — shifts the comparison set from "better than nothing" to "worth the opportunity cost of everything I am giving up." The mechanism is deliberate opportunity-cost accounting, which intuitive yes/no decisions typically skip.

How to do it

1. Before saying yes to any new commitment, ask: "Is this a clear yes or a slow yes?"
2. If it requires extensive persuasion or caveats to reach yes, treat it as a no.
3. Write down what you are implicitly saying no to by accepting — make the trade-off visible.

Evidence

Opportunity-cost neglect is a documented finding: people focus on the value of a choice in isolation and ignore what they give up. Making opportunity costs explicit has been shown to shift decisions toward more deliberate trade-off reasoning. (observational)

The "hell yes or no" heuristic is McKeown’s practitioner synthesis, not a studied treatment. The underlying opportunity-cost mechanism is well grounded.

Sources

• Frederick, Novemsky et al. (2009), "Opportunity Cost Neglect," Journal of Consumer Research

Common mistake

Applying extreme criteria only to large commitments while accumulating dozens of "small" yeses — the calendar fills through the small ones.