How to Reclaim Your Time and Find Your Focus

So here's a funny thing. On the Food Blogger Pro podcast, I don't often talk about Food Blogger Pro membership. It's a huge part of what we do. And the reality is the majority of our time as a team is spent thinking about and working with the Food Blogger Pro members. So we wanted to take some time to remind people that if you want to take the next step, like go beyond just this podcast, you can join Food Blogger Pro. If you're interested, all you need to do is go to foodbloggerpro.com we're going to tell you more about what a membership entails. And if you're interested in signing up, you can just hit the Join now button. What does that mean? Well, we have a community forum where there's the Food Blogger Pro industry experts, many names from which you probably recognize from this podcast. We also have deals and discounts on some of the most popular industries and important tools for food creators and food bloggers. We have courses that dive deep on photography and video and social media applications. We do live Q&As with industry experts. Like recently we had a conversation with an SEO expert named Eddie from Raptive where he talked about republishing and how to be strategic with your approach to republishing and why that's important. We do these coaching calls where I jump on with a creator and we talk about how we can look at their business and grow their business. And the cool thing is, for those of you who listen to this podcast, we actually have a members only podcast called FPP on the Go where we take some of these video lessons that we're doing, like these coaching calls or these live Q and A with experts and we roll those up into a podcast. So if you don't have time to sit down and watch those, you can actually just listen to them like you do this podcast. But it's a members only podcast. So if you're interested again, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com and check it out. It's a great next step for anybody who's been listening to the podcast for a long time and wants to dive deeper into growing and building and scaling their business.

Hello. Hello Anne from the Food Blogger Pro team here. You're listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. In today's episode, Bjork is chatting with Jamie Campanella about time management, outsourcing, and how to create a structure for your business. You'll hear all about Jamie's journey of finding the balance between work and family in being intentional with Your time is a game changer from conducting a time audit to figuring out how to prioritize tasks. She explains how you can stay on track without burning out and make time for what really matters. Jamie also talks about how you can create a joyful structure for your business, knowing when to outsource, and why documenting processes is key for sustainability. If you're ready to break free from the time scarcity trap and create a work life balance that actually works, this episode will be right up your alley. If you enjoy this episode, we'd really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now, without further ado, I'll let Bjork take it away.

Jamie, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

We're going to be talking about something that we often hear people I wouldn't say complain about, but as an example for Food Blogger Pro, for people who are members of Food Blogger Pro, right. We've had thousands of people go through the Food Blogger Pro program, have learned a lot. One of the things that we do is we do an exit interview. It's a questionnaire and we say, hey, what was one of the reasons why you canceled your account with Food Blogger Pro? Because we want to know better. Like, what could we improve on? What could we change? One of the most common things is people say, I just don't have time. Like, there's so much I have that I'm managing. A lot of times it's people who have kids or you have a full time job or family and a full time job or just like responsibilities and you're trying to build this thing, you're excited about it, but you can't find the time. And we're going to be talking about that today because you have an expertise and a lot of experience helping people find time to do the things that they want to do. But how did you get into this? What did it look like for you to find your own time to build a business around helping other people find time?

Yeah. Thank you for asking. And I think it's so relatable to most bloggers out there. I wanted to start a business where I could be present with my family. I could define this experience of work, life balance that everyone was achieving. This was going to be my, my side gig. And while I was raising young children and I knew that the systems and tools I had learned as a, you know, organizational expert, consultant and time management strategist, would help me in this field. But it was very different once I started my own business because I was experiencing all the time that I was disappointed with how much time I actually had to work on it because I still had the family, I still had the day to day responsibilities. And I was experiencing a lot of success at the beginning as people were referrals and different people were coming to me to work on different things. But I slowly started to lose my purpose of why I was doing it and I started to get intoxicating. And I think this is something that a lot of bloggers talk to me about is like the more I post, the more I do, the more I write, the more opportunity there is, the more money I could make. And I caught, caught in that same cycle. I was doing more, taking on more clients, and then I was just feeling like I didn't have enough time for all the things I wanted to do stop my daily walks, my personal creative time, the future health of my business. And I was tired and overwhelmed and just felt burnt out by this thing I had created, which was supposed to be in support of my vision of my life vision. And so it was in this kind of stuckness, this place of burnout, that I realized there had to be another way to approach this because all these amazing. I was working with people as a time strategist and consultant and people were just suffering. And there has to be another way, there has to be another way that we're not looking at this because we're all successful, we're all ambitious, smart, and yet we're all struggling with time. And so once I kind of hit my own pitfall with it, I realized I needed to change. And once I finally did discover some of the tools and strategies which I teach people, that's where I wanted to help people experience that they could create the best of both worlds for themselves. You can have a successful blog, you can have a successful business and be a present parent or have that other job or whatever the other thing is. It's these things that we create, we tend to let them control us. And that's the first place I love to support people is shifting that perspective of feeling like everything's out of my control to actually I am in control here and I can change the way I'm living.

Yeah, it feels like there's, broadly speaking, when you think of the timepiece, there's kind of those two buckets that you could put people into, one that you alluded to. I think a lot of people can relate with this idea of You've kind of figured some things out and you have some traction and you start to get this feedback loop that feels really good. And it probably has some echoes of addiction, which is you do a thing and then you get this dopamine hit. And if you continue in that pattern, you will be rewarded for that. And to your point, it could be posting to social and seeing people respond, it could be landing a deal and getting money, it could be increasing page views on your site and earning more from ads. And that a lot of times can result in you doing more of that thing that is feeding the dopamine. But what it does is it creates a situation where you've blocked out all of these other things that oftentimes aren't as dopamine producing. It's really great for me to sit down. Like last night I did, it was like probably an hour and a half of stop motion with my six year old daughter. She's been really into stop motion and it's literally me. I have a little thing that sinks over to my watch. Like she moves a tiny character like half an inch and then I take a picture and. And that is not dopamine producing but it's really valuable. And 10 years from now I'm gonna be really glad that I did that from 5 to 6:30 as opposed to tried to land another deal for Pinch of Yum. But it doesn't feed me in the same way. So there's that category of time and considerations. There's also the category of people who are in the startup mode and you're grinding and maybe you don't have the dopamine or you don't have that positive reinforce yet because you're trying to like build the engine up so it's going fast enough. So you do start to build some of those flywheels and in those patterns and it feels like time is of equal consideration for both of those. Do you feel like your focus is more on the former or the latter or maybe both?

Yeah, I was going to say both because in that first scenario you're today you're talking about hustle culture, right? The more we do, the more rewarding it's going to be. The more successful I'm going to be if I keep churning, churning, churning and producing more. But at the end of the day the experience really isn't real success. Like you just said, like if you're not spending that hour and a half with your child and then you have resentment and then you have guilt. So yes, you might be making a lot of money. But the feeling of accomplishment, the feeling of success is just being diminished day in and day out. So.

And that being success and accomplishment more broader. Yeah, as you do have it, you do have a compartmentalized within work. But you're kind of speak. You're speaking to. I am viewing my life as successful because. And you alluded to this for yourself because you had have a purpose that is defined as, you know, being a good dad in my case, being a good mom in your case, or could be different for everybody. But is that what you're talking about within the context of success?

Yeah. There's this intentionality that you have to put forth. What does. If I design my dream life, what does it actually look like? Is it about the numbers? Is it about the feelings, the experiences of having? Is it the memories I'm creating with my children? Or is it literally the bank account numbers? Is it hitting this amount of followers on my blog and people often just have a really big imbalance or disconnection with that. They say, I want my business to look this certain way, I want my blog to look this certain way. But I feel like crap even though I hit those goals because I'm not. I'm not really living my dream life vision. I'm not really in touch with why I created this business or why I'm doing what I'm doing. And they don't feel fulfilled. So that's the imbalance that most people are feeling when they're fighting with time. In the other scenario, you're creating a startup. You might need to dedicate more time at the beginning of something, but that's an intentional choice. And that's the kind of shift is people speak in these scenarios like time is happening to them, time is against them. And so in both, regardless of which bucket you fall in, you have to decide what is the intention. Yes, I understand. I'm gonna put an extra 40 hours up front this week for this startup and I'm gonna make sure that next week I spent extra time with my children, my spouse, or doing my hobbies. That's a proactive approach to time. You're not resenting your startup. You're making a conscious choice. I am gonna give more to this right now, but it's not that I've just gave away so much or I'm exhausted and it took over. No, it's a choice. And I think that's the distinction in all these scenarios that we're out of touch with what choices we're making, which are actually creating the experience that we're having.

And why do you think people end up there? Because if you look inward, you probably have this feeling of this doesn't feel great. But a lot of times we stay in that position longer than we should, knowing that it doesn't feel good. So in your experience in working with people, is it that they lose focus or they shift their focus, suddenly they're looking at what other people are doing, and then they think they should do that. Why do you think people end up in a position where they are maybe their own boss, and we all technically are right when it comes down to it, but you end up in a position where you don't like what it is that you're doing, even if you're kind of deciding what it is that you get to do.

Right. Well, there's a couple scenarios people fall into. One is just. There's a lot of bloggers I work with, they're holding onto the reins so tight, they are afraid to loosen up, they're afraid to let go, they're afraid to outsource. Um, they. It's like their other baby, right? Their business is their baby, and they're so dedicated to it. And so many people are like, I work. I'm exhausted. I'm working around the clock, but I'm. It takes me longer to train somebody to do it if I'll just do it myself. It's going to be quicker.

Yeah.

Or that. That mentality of no one else can help me because only I know how to do this. This is my brand, this is my look. So just really holding on so tight that they're actually preventing themselves from moving forward. So I do see that a lot, that this perfectionist mentality where they just are not willing to. To see where they can take help to actually achieve the experience they want. And then this other cycle is people are. See that they're in that spot, and then they're looking for all these different tools or tricks or ways to. To get out of it, you know, Band Aid solutions. Okay. Or the other side, I'm just going to outsource. But they don't really know how to outsource. And then they end up losing a lot of time and money. Or they're like, okay, I'm just going to revisit my goals. Or I know this one woman. If I could just revise my morning routine, I know everything would change.

If I could put that 10 minutes of meditation in.

Yeah. And she's like, okay, I want to journal a wheatgrass juice. A cold plunge. Gratitude. I'M like, you've just added 16 things to your already impossibly full day and you wonder why you feel disappointed. So they just have these expectations. It's not a realistic perspective of where their time is going. I think that's another big, big piece of it. No one is able to look in and do a really audit where their time is going. So they just feel like, you know those days at the end you're like, I know I did so much today, but I got nothing done. It's this loss of perspective of how much time things take where all the time leaks throughout your day. So you're. You're kind of cycling through this disappointment with yourself and time, and that's the expectation you create with time. There's just never enough. It's never going to change. I just have to keep hustling. I have to work late at night. There's no other time. So this. Looking for Band Aid solutions or multitasking, but not really seeing the results at the end.

Yeah, I just had this out the other day. So I use. We use two project management solutions tools, software. One is a tool called Things by a company called Culture Code. That's the one that I use personally. So it's like anything that I'm just doing on my own, I track in that. And then we use Asana. But with Things specifically, one of the. What I try and do is I build out the things that I'm doing each day and kind of create like a list of what it is. And I was having this conversation, so my wife, Lindsay, business partners, we work on stuff together and we're just talking about some work stuff. And I was like, I don't think there's ever been a day in the past year where. Where I've actually done everything that I've put on my list. And I'm just in this perpetual state of feeling like I'm underperforming. And I had this realization of like, that's not a great thing psychologically. To feel like I'm never doing as much as I want to be doing. And what would feel really good is to get to the end of the day and to feel like I did what I set out to accomplish. And the realization that I had, and it sounds so obvious, is I just need to reset my expectations around what I can actually do personally. And if I can't do all the things that need to get done, then somebody else has to help me with those things. Or maybe there are some things that I'm trying to do that Actually don't need to get done and I'm just not doing them. So I can relate to what you're talking about and I'm sure a lot of other people can as well. Where we set out to have these expectations of we need to do this, we need to get this stuff done. And what I came out of it realizing is, okay, I only have so many hours in a day, but if we can be smart about resource allocation, resources being time and money, if we can be smart about resource allocation, there's probably a situation, and it's actually happening right now, today, where we can bring somebody in to help with some things that need to get done that I don't have bandwidth for. And so today my brother in law's over, he had today off and we hired him to do just a bunch of house projects and we're lucky enough to be able to have the resources to hire him to do that. It's another thing if you don't have those resources and you have to think strategically around it. But that's just an example of me real time trying to figure this out. We have all this stuff that needs to get done. How do we get it done with the resources we have, both time and money and being strategic about that. So can you talk about a situation, a scenario? Maybe it's a creator, blogger, social media, you know, publisher that you've worked with, maybe a before and after comparison. Because I think it's helpful for people to hear a story of what it looked like before for somebody, some of the things that they did that changed and then what the result was after that. And then we can talk about some of the specifics of how people can work through that if they're interested in having that transformation.

Yeah, definitely. And the person I'm thinking of that comes to mind, her name is Lisa and she runs a very successful blog. And when I started working with her, similar to you, she had this long, long list of things that she wanted to accomplish. She had lots of goals, she had no structure in her life. So the same experience you had is that you have this long long list but you never get it done. It's dragging behind you. You're resentful because you never feel accomplished. She was working like 60 hour weeks, she never took vacations. She was so addicted to her business and she was sad that she was missing out on her children's lives. She had three children and she was on vacation. The one time, I remember the one time we finally got her to go somewhere, she was checking her Phone the whole time answering comments on the blog. Just totally addicted to work and not able to see another way of running it. Not no systems and no structure and just doing it all herself. She held everything in her head. The whole business, she felt, was reliant on her being online 24 hours a day. And it was costing her, well, being, sure, her marriage, her relationships. And so while she said, I am so happy with the growth that I have in my business, I'm miserable. I'm miserable. And so that's like the starting point of a lot of the bloggers I work with. They are not ready to take help because they don't see how much more they can accomplish or how they can really be satisfying the balance of their. Why they started the blog to begin with, because she wanted to be present with her kids, similar to my own journey. And so that was her crashing point. Okay, I need help. This is not working, and I'm hitting rock bottom. And so the other side of it was creating structure. It's like, when you want to build your dream life, you have to start with the destination first. You have to know what the dream house looks like. What does it look like? What's the blueprint? What's the vision? You can't hire those contractors and people to outsource the different tasks until you.

Know what you want, what you're building.

What you're building, what is it that you're looking for. Otherwise, it's like the bloggers are building bricks by brick by brick by brick. And they're just building walls everywhere.

Sure.

And they're like, this is not at all what I wanted. Well, you never laid out a blueprint. What do you want?

And so is that with Lisa, that's what you started with, is you said, okay, essentially you're saying a year from now, what life that you're living. That is ideal.

Yeah. And she was so clear, like, once we finally got it out, she's like, I want to work four days a week. I want to work four half days. I want my. I want to be producing this many posts per day. I want this much in my. This is like what I want my business to look like, but I want to run every morning. I want to go to my son's track meets. I want to be there for after school pickup. I want to have a date night with my husband. I haven't gone out with him. Like, I'm too tired. I'm exhausted. So once she started to create the vision for her life, then I was like, okay, we can Make a blueprint from here. So then we did the audit. So first is what is the, what is the vision? What is the vision you want? And we can't create structure for the vision until we know what's all on the table. Right. We have to empty the closet. We have to do that audit that I talked about earlier. So we did a comprehensive audit.

And what does, when you say audit, what does that look like?

Let's put everything on the table. Lisa, what are all the tasks in your business that you're doing? Writing posts, photographing posts, editing, social like literally every single task. Let's put them all on the table, let's organize them. We don't even know where your time is going because you're context switching all day. That's what we discovered. One thing. You know, she didn't, she wasn't batching her tasks alike tasks together. So of course she was distracted in between things, there was no focus time. She was just ping ponging from one thing to the next all day, holding tons of information in her head. She did not have a sauna before we started working together. So we did the audit personally and professionally. Putting everything on the table. Let's organize.

How do you do that? Like in a scenario where somebody is ping ponging and all over the place, how do you actually extract what they're working on and when they're working on it?

Sure. Well, I lead people through a lot of specialized exercises to, to kind of get to that. So from all starting big picture, what are all the categories of your life? Let's put. Then we have to double click. We have to unpack what each and every. And that's a hard category to do.

Kids, home, kids, work. Like what would those categories be in.

Laws, vacation, house, taxes, finances. Will like think of all the big buckets of your life that you're like, damn, I really wish I was had a plan for any of these things. But we're so insular. We're just thinking business, family, oh, gotta get the dryer fixed. Business. This like or whatever it is.

This morning it was like our windows are fogged up and so I'm having to reach out to the window company and it's like our water. I have a to do for our water softener and.

Right, exactly. So all the things you probably are not categorically looking at, but they are important. They weigh on you and then it becomes like little fires that you're constantly putting out. So it is very holistic and specialized. We go through every single category of your life. I give you examples because some people are like, oh, I can't think of anything when it comes to that. And they're like, oh, a will. Taxes, business taxes. Oh, wait, like all the doctor's appointments for the kids. Of course those are all important. I do those in my sleep. Or all the invisible to do lists that people hold. Oh, like the lawn care that you know, all those annual things. So got to get them out of your mind, because that's what's fueling the feeling of overwhelm.

David Allen, who we interviewed on the podcast, I'm sure you know, from getting things done, he talks about how terrible the brain is as a storage.

Exactly.

Facility. He doesn't use that word. But it's really bad at holding tasks. But it's really great at being creative. But in a situation like this where you're talking about for Lisa, like, if she's holding all of those tasks, that squeezes out all of the room for creativity. So you go through the process, all of these categories. It's putting it down on paper. Digital paper.

Yeah.

Making sure that you name it and you look at it. Oh, my goodness. There's a lot of things that I do in a given day, week, month, year. Everything from the three times, once every three year air duct cleaning to the once a week updating of plugins on my site. Everything gets documented. And are you just doing that on like a Google Doc or where do you put that?

So when I get started with someone, it's in a Google sheet, which they have shared access to. So this is a brain dump. It's a glorified brain dump. Getting everything out. So first is get everything out, how much time it takes to. And then we have to prioritize it, categorize it and prioritize it so we can look at one area of your life really holistically. And then we create structure. Okay. For we have this big, big, big list. What is the time you actually have available? What do you want your time to look like? So for Lisa, she says, oh, I want to work four days a week from 10 to 4. I have a really clear structure that we're starting to set into place. Because in the ideal, she has the time before and after for other things. So we have to create the structure, create the blueprint, and then we have to prioritize all those things that we unearthed. And that's where we can make conscious decisions. These are things like she. I remember she said, I hate video editing, but it takes me three hours a week. Okay, good. We're taking that off your plate.

Can't do that. Yeah, let's get that off the plate.

Take it off. It's like the first thing. What are the tasks that you enjoy doing that bring you joy, that light up your spark for why you started the. And most of the time, 100% with all the bloggers, they love the creative work. She's like, I love taking the photos. I love cooking. Just hate all the admin that goes along with it. Okay, so let's take some of that admin off of your plate. So we go through this whole process of prioritization, then looking at the structure, the ideal structure, what fits, what doesn't. And then we make conscious choices. What are you gonna outsource? What are you gonna consciously just put on hold? No more. No more resentment. It's just a conscious decision. This project is on hold. We're gonna relook at that.

It's not never. It's just not now.

Exactly. And then we come to the time time structure specific. You know, you had mentioned that long list that you had, and Lisa had a similar one. And you wonder why you're not getting everything done in the day is because you don how much time these things take. So we have to put in a realistic time block for the things you are going to do. We have to create the structure that's going to support you to feeling accomplished at the end of every day. I actually did what I set out to do.

And you can't do that if you don't have a realistic understanding of how long something is going to take. And if you're like, I want to work four days a week, half day each day, and what your list requires of you is actually 50 hours a week. You're just going to be in this perpetual state of like time debt or project debt. So within that spreadsheet, you start to categorize and you look at it and say, okay, this is something that we know is high priority and high interest. You continue to own that. Then how long does that take? Is that the next step is trying to get accurate with. With time.

How long does this actually take you to fulfill, to complete this? You love doing the cooking. It's your favorite part of the business. You want to keep cooking. You don't want to outsource that to anyone else. You're clear. This is your passion. I need four hours a week. Great. So let's put that as a priority time block. Every Wednesday in the morning for four hours. This is your cooking, your batch cooking. You're not cooking a thing here, there throughout the week where you have to clean up and restart. Every week we're gonna do one big time vlog of cooking on Wednesdays.

Sure.

And so then we start to create like a metrics, a puzzle, what are all the pieces of high priority, of high interest and create your ideal schedule and then we see what's left. And then we can always make different decisions, but we wanna always lead with what brings you joy first, what is the priority and what is fulfilling. So we create the structure and just fasting. Fast forward to the results of all of that. When I look at Lisa now, she is working those four days. She does have an amazing team. She does use asana. We did a whole asana build out. So she didn't have any systems. And she at first was like, I don't know, learning something new. She was very resistant. But then she, now she's like, how was I ever doing task management any other way with the team? Her income has more than tripled, literally, because she didn't. She was able to produce so much more for her business with people helping her that wasn't attached to her time. So her results just. I remember the first year she's called me, she's like, you're not going to believe it. I have a team, I'm working less and my business has doubled. The next year tripled. So it was just upward growth. And she's taken so many vacations. She's a present parent. Her whole life is completely different because she put in structure, she put in systems, she learned how to outsource at the right time in the process. Some people try to outsource.

What do you mean by that when you say outsource at the right time?

Well, some people try to outsource at the beginning, but they don't know what to outsource. They don't know how to outsource. So you're looking at everything on the table and you're like, oh, did you do this? You do that? But it's all piecemeal. There's no system in place to even monitor that. So now you're like, okay, now I'm managing what tasks, I'm giving away, how they're doing it, bringing it back. So if you do it too soon in the process, it's like hiring the builder to build your house without having the blueprint laid out. They're just. You're having people work and work and work, but you're not getting the results you want.

So can you do, can you describe what it would be like to do it at the right time. What does it look like to do that? Well, when does it happen and what does it look like?

Yeah. If you think about it in this whole house analogy or in Lisa's analogy, first you need to know what you want. What experience do you want to have? What is the vision for your time? Why are you hiring a team? It's so that I can go running, so that I can work on my pottery or write a book or whatever it is. I want to free up more time in my own life. So be clear about your why. That's first and foremost. And then you have to be clear on the blueprint. What is your business working towards? If you're not clear about why you want people and what they're meant to do, it's a waste of time and money. I had this. This one person come to me and say, I'm just ready to outsource. I just need a VA to help me to give some tasks away. They paid $5,000 a month for a year. And they're like, it was such. I didn't. I didn't even know what to give the va. I was so disorganized and all over the place. I wasted so much money. Because they never did an audit. Everything was piecemeal. The person was just waiting around for tasks. But they hadn't done the audit. They hadn't created the structure. They weren't clear about what they wanted to do, what they didn't want to do. So once you have all, I always feel like it's very linear vision, structure, and then you can give things out very systematically. Then you can hire the builder. This is the look I want. This is the design I want. This is the goal. Now build it.

Yeah, that's great. Before we continue, let's take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clarity. Here's the thing. We know that food blogging is a competitive industry. So anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better. And wouldn't it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? Or. I know some of you have done this. Create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that's soon to be outdated anyway. That's why we created Clarity. To save you time, simplify the process, and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clarity, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized, like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text, maybe there's no internal links, or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus, you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here's a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from WanderCooks. They said with GA4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, Clarity has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process. That's awesome. That's why we built it. And it's so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, you can sign up and get 50% off your first month of clarity. To set up your account, simply go to Clarity. That's C L A r I t I.com food that's clarity.com food thanks again to Clarity for sponsoring this episode. I think that idea of having a really well defined outcome, task, project, whatever it might be that you give to somebody so they know here's specifically what I'm doing As opposed to bringing somebody in because you're burnt out or you're just tired and kind of hoping that they fix it for you, you have to create the structure that is going to fix the thing to then give to somebody to execute on. There are probably some scenarios where you just have somebody come in and be like, I just need you to do this. But that is almost a different hire. It's almost like what people do when they hire you. They're not having to. Somebody who works with you isn't having to come up with the process for figuring out how to shift and adjust their time. They're hiring you as a consultant to come in, work with them to do that. There's a premium for that versus somebody who's going to execute on more of a playbook that you've created to take care of something that you're doing on a recurring basis. My friend Barrett Brooks, he was previously the CEO COO of ConvertKit. Now Kit helped them grow from I don't know what it was 3 million to 30 million or something like that. And so he went through this really interesting transition from a business and I was having a conversation with him and he talked about this idea that businesses, startups, what we're doing is essentially experiments and processes. And what we are doing as business owners is we're experimenting. Hey, we think this might work with Pinch of Yam. Recently it was a new video format. Hey, there might be something here. Let's change this up a little bit and do this experiment. Okay. Now that we've done this experiment, do we think that it worked? Yes, we think that it did work. Now we create structure around it, we create a process around it so it becomes a repeatable thing. Here's what the videographer does, here's when we shoot, okay, everybody comes in on this day. Here's what it looks like, like for groceries to come in that day. And you build a system around it after you do that experiment. And I really love that idea of thinking about business as experiments and processes or you could say experiments and systems. But the hard part is I think some of us are doing experiments, we're learning and then we just are grinding on them on our own without creating that process. So what does it look like on the process side of things? Even if you don't have a team, it's probably something you should be doing. How do you do that? Well, you mentioned Asana. I think people like to hear tools, but there's also more probably philosophy that you could speak to as well.

Yeah, no, definitely. You need a system to hold the processes from your experiment for this to be sustainable and repeatable, especially if it was a success. And I think that's the thing with the, the bloggers. Half the time they started it not necessarily thinking this was going to be their full time business or turn into a big thing. It's like I just love creative writing or cooking or you know, some people are intentionally starting it and some people started it as a hobby and saw growth and possibility. And those are a lot of the people that I have been working with recently. And they, if, even if they don't have the team yet, they're holding all those processes still in their head. They're just repeating and oh, what did I do last time? What did I do last time that worked? So Asana is something I encourage people as a great project management tool to start to document it, make it repeatable, give you automatic reminders, create templates so you're not constantly recreating the wheel every single time. You need that structure, that system to keep your experiment going. Otherwise it's just you feel frazzled and all over the place. And even if again, when you're in success, you're like, I don't know what I did last time, or constantly wasting so much time and your energy trying to create the same circumstances when or other people are just doing everything on autopilot and they're like, I don't know how I'm doing it. So I can't train another team member because I don't know what I'm doing. So getting those systems down and making them repeatable is a huge, huge part of sustainability and growth in this area.

Do you feel like there's a little bit of a decision around what type of business you want to have? Because I think of the spectrum from pure artist to pure scalable systems business. And one of the things that's interesting in the world that we operate in is it's not people who are just operational. I want us build and scale a business. But it's also not just pure artists. It's not people who are just painting because they love to paint, or photography because they love to do photography. Oftentimes though, it's somewhere in the middle where there is art. And so I think sometimes some people might have reservations around saying, I'm going to build a system around this thing that I feel like I'm an artist and I. Artists don't have systems.

No.

And, and, and I feel like that would be a hard even I think of for Lindsay. I think she's relatively like organically process oriented. Hey, we're going to batch video shoot on this day. She's not going to load that into Asana and use that as like a project management tool that she works through. I think she's just naturally, that's who she is. But I think there's even people on the other side of Lindsay who the idea of creating a system around their art feels almost like, like a, it's, it's, it's discrediting the art that they are creating. Does that make sense?

It does. And I think that's, that's. So when you go into business, you need to know your wheelhouse. Whatever you're doing, if you're creative, you're creative. And that's, I think a lot of the reasons why people have resistance or pushback to creating the structures. You're like, well, that's not my thing.

Yeah.

Or when I talk to the bloggers, they're like, asana project. That's not my thing. I just want to like cook and take the photo and be creative. So I think that that's a, that's something that's going to hold people back from, from growing, from repeating, from continuing that success. You artists are amazing and they're creative and I don't necessarily have those skills on the other side of systematization and organization, but I know where I Come into the picture. I'm not going to try to say that I'm going to do the most creative piece. I'm going to stay in my wheelhouse. And I think people who want to succeed and stay in their creativity, that's where they need to know up front. My vision is not to be doing business operations. My vision is not. That's why you have a partner who does it. Or you know, up front. If I want to grow, I'm going to outsource a team because I want to stay in my lane of creativity and I don't want to give focus or time to any other aspect of what it would take to run a business.

Yeah. And I think that one of the traps potentially is there can be this transition from maker. We could also say artist from maker to manager. And I think in that transition you could potentially become miserable. Like you could free up your time and you could create systems. But now you've moved away from making to managing. So it seems like one of the keys for somebody who's looking to scale an artistic or maker or personality driven business is to have somebody who is more manager than maker. You kind of alluded to it, you being an example of that. You're somebody who's systems oriented and operational. And my guess is there would be a thousand people who would dream of you being their partner because you would be able to create that structure and manage it without them needing to do it. And I think sometimes people fall into these partnerships by luck to some degree. An example would be Lindsay and I. I'm not like purely operational, but I do more of the boring behind the scenes stuff, like a monthly meeting with our CPA and like fractional CFO as an example, HR stuff, things like that. And. Which allows her to stay more in the creative world. But for somebody who doesn't have a partner from the get go, how do you advise them to transition into a business that has strong structure, that has strong processes, but doesn't put them in the seat of operations and manager? Do you look to hire that person right away? How do you find those people? What does that look like?

Yeah, I mean online business manager. It's like it's a. When you get to a certain point, I mean, I think at the beginning a lot of people hire virtual assistants because it's like just someone to get the tasks done, to get things off of your plate. But then slowly that creative realizes now they are managing a team and a lot of their time is managing the VA and those tasks and then that's where that resentment builds. No, I just want to be in the creative. I don't want to be people, management and HR and paychecks and all those things that come with having a team. So there's that creative who finds themselves already there and they're like, I gotta get out of here, I'm not painting anymore, I'm just leading. And so that's where it's very clear at that point, if you have the resources and you're ready to expand your business, that's when you would bring in an online business manager so that you can stay creative and you can have the right person to supervise the VAs and get all the back end processes done, create the structures, create the systems, bring in a consultant if you need to. But usually a creative is like, I want to be creative and I want someone else who's going to oversee all the operations, who I have, who understands my vision and why I'm doing this work and then can execute on all the, the back end, the systems, people, management, the infrastructure, the tech. You know, everyone's website needs this and that and they're like, I don't want to deal with another plugin, I just want to take the picture, I just want to cook the food or I want to whatever it is. So it is important to have the right people in your team so that you can continue to stay focused on what really does make you passionate about your work.

And it seems like there's probably seasons that you need to go through if you're interested in growing your business or evolving your business where you might need to endure a non desirable thing for a season. For example, you might be early stage and you say, I want to be at a point where I have an online business manager who's overseeing a team, I connect with them and then they manage directly from there.

Right.

But you're not going to get there in six months, it might be two years, but you know that you're going to work towards it. And in a season you might be the one managing, keeping track of the tasks, keeping track of the systems, even though it's not your optimal zone of genius. With the idea that when the resources become available, you can bring somebody in to help with that. But that's where it feels like it's important to come back to that mission, vision, purpose.

Exactly.

To say, this is what I'm working.

Towards and there's value in that too. When you're growing, you know what goes into it. You've rolled up your sleeves, you've gotten it Done, you're doing it. You know, what goes into being successful and running this business successfully. And now you're at a point, you're like, okay, I'm ready to give this all to someone else. But you've done it. You know what to expect. So there is beauty in that, in, you know, starting from the bottom of what you're creating and, and making sure you're clear about your standards and your expectations so that when you do give it to someone else, you're really clear what you want of them too.

Yeah, that's great. One of the things that you talk about is this idea of time scarcity trap. Can you define what that is and how do people know if they're in that trap?

Sure. So this scarcity trap is this limiting belief we have about time. And I see this day in and day out that, you know, we talked about this at the beginning of our conversation. People expressing, I wish I had more time. They don't have enough time in the day. They ran out of time. I'm constantly late because I ran out of time, or I forgot to do that. I just didn't have time. So these common beliefs that they're holding about time, you know, time is doing something to me. Time is against me, Time's out to get me. This is constantly living in a time scarcity trap. There's not enough scarcity. There's just not enough time. So when I see if you people will probably resonate with half those statements I just made, you wish you had more time. You ran out of it. You don't have enough. That is you expressing that you're blaming time. If you think about those statements, time is doing something to me. Time's out to get me. I'm always running out of it. You're acting like a victim of time. And that is what I see of people in this trap, is I'm trapped in it. I don't have enough of it. But this is just the way it is. And that was part of my impetus, is like getting people out of that trap, how to get back more into control of your time. I think when you hear it now, you'll notice it more in conversations. People blame time all the time, as if it's something this cloud of time that's just happening to you that you have no responsibility with. And so I feel that even before we talk and when I do work with clients one on one, before I talk about structure and vision and systems, I talk about time mindset first. Because if you are in this time scarcity trap. It really doesn't matter what I teach you about systems or how are you the most amazing team in the world? If you're in this trap, nothing will work in the long run. It's just a band aid mentality. So I think time mindset is the foundation. If you don't change the way you think about time, your experience of time will actually not change.

That's interesting. Yeah. One of the thoughts I've had recently is this idea of time is infinite. And what I mean by that isn't for me, but there's, I don't know, however many billion people in the world and they all have 24 hours. And if I have a goal to do a thing, one of the the considerations is how much time does it take to do it? Not my own time, but just how much time in general. And we have friends who are building a wedding venue as an example. They're not doing the building. There's a huge crew of people who are taking their time to build this wedding venue. And that's an approach to business building where they say, we think this is an appropriate risk given the potential reward. We're going to use the collective time of these people to build a thing which we think then will be an asset in the world. And so much of what I feel like I do, and really what we do is we need to become expert traders of those two resources of time and money. And are we willing to trade our money for this time? Like for me today, having our brother in law, my brother in law come and help, like turn over the garage for the winter in Minnesota, get the winter tires out. Yeah, that was an appropriate trade for me given the restrictions that I have right now. Similarly, we need to figure out if it's worth it to trade the time that we have for money. Like, are we going to do this job? Are we going to dedicate our time for it? And if we can start to think strategically about where we are trading and how we are trading, it feels like that's where there starts to be these opportunities where time doesn't become this limited thing. I only have four hours in the day. Time is actually unlimited. If you think of it as trading. Even insofar as maybe you have a recurring Netflix subscription and you're paying $20 for it. Is there a trade in your life where by canceling that you are trading up by hiring somebody for $20 a month to come and do a thing? Maybe. Or maybe you work an extra three hours and you're able to have somebody Come and help and do five hours of work that you otherwise would have been doing. It seems like there's a lot of opportunities for us if we start to think about time differently and change our mindset around it.

And I would take it even a step further because when you're talking about trading it, you already know you have a choice about it. Like, it's tradable.

Yeah.

So, like, when I think about time mindset, I even go a step further in terms of the way you approach it, because I think one of the most immediate changes somebody can make listening to this podcast today if they really want to change their relationship with time. Before you even start trading is thinking about your language around it. Like you said, like thinking it's infinite. I have a lot of it. I have enough time to do anything I want to do, because you can trade it or whatever you decide to do. But if you can stop yourself from saying, I don't have time, it really changes your whole perspective of your day and of your life. Because when you tell people you don't have time to do something, you're usually failing to take responsibility for how you are using your time in your day. You know, you said we only have 20. We all have the same amount of time. But the language we use to describe our time really does shape the way we think and feel and interact with the world. So if you could simply just stop saying, I don't. I don't have time. It's a very powerful action in the experience you have. Like, the more power you have to make a trade, because I know what I have, I know the value of it. And people don't. Aren't really in touch with that. And that's why we're stuck in that time scarcity, because we just keep telling people we don't have enough of it. We believe that to be the state of affairs. So I could offer a quick tip of just how to reverse that so that you feel like you're in more control. And it's really simple. And a simple way to replace this vocabulary, you know, by not saying, I don't have enough time. It's by simply saying it's not a priority for me, or no. Yeah, you know, both of these. So simple. But these statements bring responsibility back to you. It puts in your seat, again, how you own and control your time. It's not. Time's not happening to me. I'm making a choice about it. So if you think about the most common thing somebody might say in a week, oh, I don't have time to exercise. If you couldn't say that and you had to say exercise is not a priority for me, you have a gut reaction, no pun intended, a gut reaction right away that that's not true. Exercise is a priority for me. So if I keep telling the world it's not, I'm never going to make time for it. I'm never going to trade someone doing this admin so I can go exercise. You know the whole trading analogy you made. So before we trade, before structure, before systems value it, stop saying you don't have it. It's like the whole law of manifestation. We talk about that when it comes to money. If you speak positively about money, the more you'll be able to manifest in your life. It's the same of time. If you make it wrong, if you constantly think you don't have enough, that will be the experience.

Yeah, that's great. And I like that idea of wrestling with if it actually is a priority or not. Because I think if you say you don't have time for a thing, it allows you to not have to sit with your priorities.

Exactly.

And if you start to say this isn't a priority for me and that feels incongruent, then you have to sit with it and say, if it is a priority, then why have I not gotten it done? Maybe I need to change how I'm prioritizing things. And that's the issue as opposed to how much time that I have, which I think that mental shift is an important one for anybody, but especially for entrepreneurs who have all of these demands on time. We can't do everything we want to do. And so we need to figure out what are the priorities, what's most important, and how are we going to get those done. Yes, you work with folks that listen to this podcast, people like this on your website. The H1 says, Revolutionize your relationship with time. I help moms and entrepreneurs take control of their time so they can balance motherhood and their professional life and be great at both without feeling guilt or compromising on their well being. You do it in a few different ways. If anybody's interested in working with you, can you talk about how that that could happen in ways that they could reach out?

Yes, absolutely. So I have a lot of different programs available depending on where you're starting, and I'd love to have a consultation call with you if you're interested in changing your relationship with time. Whether it's through Time mindset, I have online courses available, or through doing the work that I described today with Lisa. That's my signature time Power program where we do that audit together we create that life vision together, we prioritize, we create the structure so that you can actualize the blog of your dreams to have the balance of both. And it's a really hard process to do on your own. And that's why I love doing this. Because you do see results. You do have a new sense of feeling in control. If you're ready to outsource, if you're ready to change the way you're running your business right now to feel like you have more time freedom, then I suggest you check out my website jamie campanella.com set up a free consultation or take one of my free masterclasses to to learn a little bit more about practical ways that you can go from feeling like you never have to feeling like that CEO who has time for everything that matters.

That's awesome. Jamie. Thanks so much for coming on sharing your story. Like I said in the beginning, myself included and a lot of people listening to this podcast are going to benefit from it because it's such a common thing that we're all dealing with. So appreciate your expertise and thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Foreign.

Hi, Hello. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. Since we are kicking off a brand new year and a brand new month, I wanted to pop on and fill you in on what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. We like to kick off every month with just a little summary of what you can look forward to in the membership. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com membership to learn more about joining. We would love to have you there. We have already pressed publish on a brand new coaching call with Penny from the Generations Cook. That coaching call went live on January 2 and members can find it in the Food Blogger Pro membership on the Live page or on our members only podcast Food Blogger Pro on the go. Next up we are really excited to be hosting a public live Q and A with Kate all from Simplepin Media. This Q and A is open to the general public. Anyone can attend. You can head to the link in our show Notes to register to attend. It will be on Thursday, January 9th at at 1pm Eastern and 10am Pacific and that will be with Bjork and Kate and they will be chatting all about how to unlock success on Pinterest in 2025. Last up, we'll have a brand new course on January 23rd all about substack. We know that a lot of food creators who aren't as interested in SEO are exploring Substack as an alternative to share recipes with their community. So this will be a really great course to learn more about Substack, how it works, how to grow your following, everything you need to know. We are really looking forward to this month. Lots of great content coming up and we will see you back here next week for another episode of the podcast. Make it a great Week.

Sam.