Free Time

Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

Jenny Blake

• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781538702895
• eBook ISBN: 9781646870790
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

“A brilliant, insightful read.”

—MORI TAHERIPOUR, author of Bring Yourself

“Hustle is dead. It never worked very well, and now it's burning us out. Jenny Blake is back with a generous, helpful and more caring alternative.”

—SETH GODIN, author of This is Marketing

“Wildly, wildly helpful. A chill, introvert-friendly birthday party for business owners . . . every page is a celebration. Free Time is, quite simply, a joy to read.”

—SARAH YOUNG, author of Expansive Impact

Time is not money. Time is life force. 

Your time is far more precious than money. It is your presence, your memories, your quality of life. As a business owner, you are already paying a risk and pressure tax. For many, growth fueled by added stress is not worth the trade-off. You have an urge to simplify and streamline instead. 

Ask yourself: Are you consistently doing the work that you and only you can do? Or are you burdened by busywork, the bottleneck blocking your company’s profit and potential? 

Free Time is not about working as little as possible. Nor is it about creating a lifestyle business purely for one’s own gain. It is about creating a life-giving business energizing every single person who is a part of it, from the owner to team members, to clients and community. Free Time is about making small investments now to create greater optionality in the future. 

A more joyful business is within reach. Imagine:

• Traveling, going off the grid, or handling family emergencies without panicking that everything will fall apart while you are gone.
• Working 10- to 20-hour weeks, delegating the rest to a motivated, part-time remote team.
• Answering questions with relief, knowing you don’t have to “own” the next steps.
• Empowering your Delightfully Tiny Team™ to answer their own questions before they even have to ask you.
• Harnessing your creative energy for the strategic projects that excite you most.

Jenny Blake, author of the award-winning book Pivot and co-creator of Google’s acclaimed Career Guru coaching program, is back with her signature blend of heart-based operating principles and practical tools. This book will teach you how to move from friction to flow through smarter systems and the three-stage Free Time Framework.™

Free Time is a playbook to free your mind, time, and team for your best work. This book will teach you and your team to operate efficiently and intuitively, while earning abundantly, so you can make your greatest contribution as a business owner. 

Let’s dive in.

Part 1

Align

Overview

When she was just twenty-one years old studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Wade Brill discovered a swollen lymph node on her neck. She had flashes of déjà vu from her sister’s cancer diagnosis four years prior. When doctors confirmed she was indeed afflicted by the same disease, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she flew home to New York City to begin treatment.

Two months into her six-month chemotherapy process, her mother passed away from leukemia, just two floors down from Wade’s infusion room.

Wade was beyond devastated. She describes that time as feeling like everything around her was crumbling. Her mom’s passing shook the ground beneath her feet, never to be the same again. “Nausea slithered through my bones, swirling with the precariousness of my own health,” she said. “The uncertainty of where I was going to live, how I was going to pay for my healthcare, and who was going to take care of me was overwhelming.” At the same time, Wade vowed not to become hardened or resentful, but to take charge of her life.

The message that life is short took on new meaning. Wade committed to a life and business of purpose, emphasizing health and happiness. She founded an on-demand mindfulness and self-care platform and podcast, Centered in the City, to help others do the same. As she shares prominently on her website, Wade knows deep in her bones that, “We have one mind, one body, one life.” Of her own health scare, and on mourning the loss of her mother, Wade writes:

Life was no longer about surviving. No, it was something bigger: it was about living. Each day became a precious gift that allowed me to prioritize and express my true self. During treatment, I spent my energy and time exploring who I was and what I valued. I steered myself through darkness and uncertainty so that I could find light and beauty again. I may not have been in control of everything that was happening inside my body, but I knew I could control my mindset, what I fed myself, activities I involved myself in, how I interacted with others, and with whom I spent my time. To this day, I work to own and love each breath, taste, smell, touch and sound I experience.

Running your own business presents powerful opportunities to rewrite outdated work rules. As Wade models for her community, you can build in a way that aligns with your health, your values, and your long-term success. No matter how smart your systems, if you build your business on quicksand, it will sink. Quicksand starts with your inner architecture: the values behind your business, how you operationalize those values, your mindset, and how you translate your unique vision and way of working to team members, contractors, and customers.

Once you identify a major point of friction, the first step is to Align: ensure that the projects and revenue streams in your business align with your values, your energy, and your strengths. There is no point in systematizing work you should not be doing. Aligning your business starts with considering three core elements:

• • Values: What are your personal values? Are the core values of your business the same or different? How do your values inform tough decisions, when you or your team members must make a choice? For example, how do you make financial decisions? When a customer asks for a refund, do you default to giving back the amount they ask for, or to saving the company money? How are you operationalizing your values?
• • Energy: Are the revenue streams in your business aligned with what energizes you? Does your day-to-day work energize you? Do your clients and prospective clients have “clean” light energy, or “dirty” heavy energy? Are you running your business in a way that is life giving or life draining? Where are you operating on the spectrum of friction to flow? Are you diluting your focus with distractions, or sharpening it by making clear choices about what is most important?
• • Strengths: What are your biggest strengths as a business? What sets you apart? As the owner, are you doing work suited to your strengths, to make the biggest impact for the business? What about team members, if you have any? How “in the weeds” are you, doing work that you are not particularly skilled at? Where are you tackling tasks that someone else could easily handle, such as scheduling, paying bills, or placing orders?

As a result of her diagnosis and recovery, Wade aligns with her own values, energy, and strengths before taking on new clients. She gives herself permission to pay attention to what parts of her business and offerings light her up most. This improves clarity on what to delegate (for her, activities like accounting and editing) and what is fun and fulfilling enough to keep, such as social media and copywriting. Wade aligns next steps by first asking, “How can I serve?” This question helps her overcome nerves, particularly with sales and marketing.

“I remember I am here to help people close the gap of where they are now and where they want to be,” she said. “When I approach my business from service, I am able to stay in my heart, connected to the person I am talking about instead of feeling overly salesy.”

The chapters in this Align stage will walk you through realigning your business and projects so you can move from friction toward focus and flow. Agile operating principles, combined with a digital externalized mind that contains all context for your company, will create the necessary infrastructure to ensure everyone can work independently and effectively. That sense of ease and joy can then flow to your customers, creating a virtuous cycle of repeat business and referrals.

Align > Design > Assign >

Values

Operating ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Advance Praise for Free Time
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Free Time Framework
• Part 1: Align
• Part 2: Design
• Part 3: Assign
• Conclusion
• On Work
• Acknowledgments
• Resources
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author