Ep. 107 - Free Time: How to Reduce Overwhelm, Burnout, & Busywork - with Jenny Blake

Find Us Wherever You Listen To Podcasts

Jenny Blake is an author and podcaster who helps entrepreneurs move from friction to flow through smarter systems, powered by Delightfully Tiny Teams. Her third book, “Free Time,” launches March 22 — and it’s just in time for me!

It's easy to get caught up in just getting things done without really stopping to think how it could get done faster or better, or if you're really the right person to be getting it done at all. And "Free Time" is made specifically for people who are struggling with busywork, what Jenny calls the bottleneck in the way of your profit and potential.

After reading the book, I've been thinking about my business and what I do in it completely differently, and I'm so excited for the rest of the world to get ahold of this.

Anyone who preorders a hardcover or ebook edition prior to 3/22/22 is eligible for the Buy One, Get One, Give One bonus. They can submit their receipt to receive instant, early access to the audiobook edition, with instructions on how to gift one early copy of the audiobook to a friend.

What is “Free Time?”

We talked to Jenny back in episode 76 to discuss career pivoting, a topic that only got more important as the pandemic continued and we saw some huge changes to the workforce. She offers an easy-to-follow framework with The Pivot Method, and that’s one of the reasons we really appreciate Jenny as a podcast guest and an author — she always offers concrete systems and tactics that anyone can leverage.

“Pivot” was about adapting to change. If change is the only constant, how do we get better at it? And how do we more strategically map what's next, particularly by starting with small pilots and experiments.

“Free Time” is about optimizing what's here now. So within our current role, how can we reduce the level of overwhelm, burnout, and busywork that we typically face in our business?

Many business owners and even leaders of organizations have had this need to control everything where we become the Chief Everything Officer. There is often a fear that if these activities are not within our domain of control, then we're not going to get to the outcome you want. Which then leads to stress and stress is a systems problem.

The ultimate goal of “Free Time” is what Jenny calls High Net Freedom. This is freedom of choice; what we work on, when we work on it, and with whom. You’re optimizing for time and energy, not just money.

The “Free Time” Framework: Align, Design, Assign

The Free Time framework is composed of three stages intended to help you spot important trends in how you work so that you can simplify, streamline, and de-stress.

1. Align. The first stage is about aligning a project or an area of the business to your values, energy, and strengths. The goal is to understand what is giving your energy and what is taking it away.

It’s about figuring out, should you be doing this in the first place? And if something about the work is not aligned, how can you realign it and recalibrate? Think about how you are systematizing the spirit of your business and remember there's no point in optimizing something that no longer needs to be done.

Your values are an important piece of this because they provide the logic for you and your team to make the relevant tradeoffs and decisions when there are tough choices to make. But it’s important to communicate that logic to everyone else because they have to understand what those values truly look like in practice.

2. Design. The second stage asks us to be really intentional about the ideal outcomes and impact, and even designing a process for how you want to work on something. This is where you start to think about how to map out what to do and how to do it.

You can’t just decide you want to stop doing busywork and drop it all. You have to be intentional and design how your team, possibly a new team, is going to tackle the work.

3. Assign. This stage is all about helping us stay really focused on the work that we're uniquely gifted to do and not the other tasks or activities that take away from it. Remember, the goal here is High Net Freedom.

And it’s such a gift to yourself and your team when you can accomplish this. Not only is everyone more effective, everyone’s happier. I think this is going to be a critical change for the organizations that succeed in the new world of work.

Delegating & Onboarding

To understand what you can truly delegate, what you can assign to other people, document what you do every day over a two-week period. Once you have that written down, then you can identify who the right people are to help.

The onboarding is the hardest part, so be prepared for investing a little more time and money in the beginning. But in the long run, this is necessary if you want free time.

Consider hiring specialists, especially people who are better than you at something that you don’t want to do. The first time most people do this is with an accountant. But a world with remote work and virtual assistants allows us to delegate almost any task.

And onboarding gets easier the more you document. As the business owner and for your team, document everything that team does so that you have an internal manager manual. This way, if someone transitions out of the business, you have a foundation from which a new person can be easily onboarded.

And here’s a little secret — you don’t have to be a business owner or have a team to delegate and get things off your plate! If you can go through this process to identify and document what needs to get done and what you no longer want to do, you can find and train someone. You might be surprised by how quickly you can hire a talented virtual assistant.

Jenny Blake & Career Success: How Her Definition Has Evolved

“It's so much about learning, growing, and knowing that I'm making an impact, and those themes have been present as a through-line. I think where I'm the unhappiest in my career is where I feel like I'm not leveraging my talents, where I'm doing busywork.”
“Success is clearly communicating ideas and sharing ideas that specifically are going to be really helpful for other people. So I find that if I struggle with something and I don't find the resources that I need, if there's a way that I can make things clearer and then solve it, not just for myself, but share it back out with others, that’s success.”
“So my greatest success is knowing that when one person puts the book down, they enjoyed it so much and they benefited so much that they tell a friend. And that's how I define success. It’s that I've created something so helpful that people can not resist telling their friends.”
“Success is feeling healthy, present with my friends and my family, and engaged in my work, but not engaged in my work at the expense of any of those other things.”

Jenny Blake’s Work Advice

A yoga teacher at Google, Kim, once told Jenny, ‘Don't get overwhelmed. Just take the next step. You've always known what to do after that.’ And it was just the reminder that you will always figure it out in the moment and all you ever need to do is take the one next step. “Then the rest will come, the answers will come, and intuition will enter the picture, but just one next step. And you'll always know what to do after.”

Key Takeaways

Remember the 3 components of the Free Time framework:
- Align - should you be doing this in the first place? And if something about the work is not aligned, how can you realign it and recalibrate. Think about how you are systematizing the spirit of your business and remember there's no point in optimizing something that no longer needs to be done.
- Design - Get clarity and be intentional in designing how you’re going to tackle the work before you start.
- Assign - Ensure you can stay really focused on the work that you’re uniquely gifted to do by delegating everything else that you can.
To understand what you can truly delegate, document what you do everyday over a two week period. Once you have that written down, then you can identify who the right people are to help you with these various tasks/initiatives based on this information.
- Realize that there are startup costs when you do decide to bring someone on board and that it will be a tremendous amount of effort to onboard someone. But spending the time up front will ultimately free up your time in the long run.
Hire people better than you and consider specialists vs. generalists because it’s in their ‘zone of genius.’ It's so much more frictionless to hire specialists as they know what they are doing and you’ll even learn from them.
Remember stress is a systems problem, so make sure to take a step back, identify where you get stuck, and design important processes and systems to reduce the burdens you face. In the end, you’ll be able to give yourself back time and not be the bottleneck for everything.

The ideal team size, based on research, is about seven, 10 max, which has to do with the complexity of communicating with the team.
- If you end up having teams of 10+ then it’s smart to organize them into pods/divisions of the business.
- However, what you still need to take into account is your energy. Ask yourself the following questions and be honest with yourself on the level of complexity you want to take on:
  - What is your ideal team size?
  - What energizes you?
  - And at what point are you dealing with too much complexity?
Each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it. And get your team in the practice of doing the same. Train them to think this way and document any time they have to ask me a question.
As the business owner and for your team, document everything that team does so that you have an internal manager manual. If someone transitions out of the business, you will have a foundation from which a new person can be easily onboarded. That knowledge shouldn’t live only in your or in anyone else’s head.