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I remember attending a lecture about how to do well in the academic world well back at university decades ago, where the lecturer quoted another (famous) researcher who had a personal rule for incoming requests. Either he did it now or he did it never. Now is not literally now, but close. Just saying no and not pretending that you might do can also be helpful in other ways. For instance, you or someone else might then realize that to get something like this done, it needs to be made much easier to do. I've personally just finished planting 450 meters of windbreaking bushes around my orchard. Now, I should have done that four years ago - but I came up with a fancier plan, to put it on top of an embankment, and it would get rid of some of the traffic noise, and I had a guy with lots of soil in spare - great plan, except that person was really slow to respond and was actually depending on another person, and I had to get the municipality to agree, and... as it turns out, the required level of social energy to push this through was just not happening for me in my spare time. So after four years, my wife made me scrap the idea, then I almost immediately realized that hey, I could just plant the damn bushes, and here we are, a few months later, and they're out there and looking great, eight different species, future homes of birds and other wildlife. |