When it comes to both your team and your peers, one tactic that you can use is appealing to time and budget. Lay out the current workload in plain terms, and show how there is little room to maneuver. Sometimes this is coupled with “not right now,” another somewhat passive-aggressive way of saying no. “Not right now” implies that you might agree with the idea but can’t do it at this moment, so maybe you’ll get to it in the future. This is frequently true, and so it’s easy to fall back into “not right now” mode. But as I discussed earlier, when you give an implied promise that “not right now” means that you’ll seriously do something “later,” you need to be sure that later can actually happen.