I spend my life trying to get past gatekeepers. As a consultant, I’ve been trained to sniff out underlings who can only say no (and aren’t authorized to say yes), and strategically work to evade them. But in my own life, as I’ve become increasingly deluged with inquiries of all sorts, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of gatekeeping: a clean, crisp way of whittling down the requests and a solution to the guilt that comes from saying no.