048: Ten Timeless Content Principles

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, touch time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello.

Hello everybody. Welcome back. I am recording this on the other side of a whirlwind trip to see my family. We were celebrating a big birthday for my mom and I had not seen my brother, his wife and their three beautiful children since pre Covid.

So it was really nice to fly. I had not been on an airplane.

Since January of 2020. In response to last week's solo episode 46 Are you drowning, treading water, or gliding? I wanted to say thank you to those of you who wrote in saying.

You could relate, saying it was helpful to hear that someone else goes through the same roller coaster. And even those of you that sent.

Super suggestions and ideas, I just appreciate them all.

It is super vulnerable to come on.

The podcast and share stuff while it's in process and it's not necessarily solved. But as we know, shame lives in the dark. So just bringing it to light and saying this is what I'm experiencing and knowing that I'm not alone hopefully lets you know that you are not alone when you go through dips like this. After I recorded that and spent some.

Time in the clouds, I started to.

Wrap my head around some new systems and new process that I could approach my life and work. A lot of these I'll share in future episodes too. I don't want to overwhelm you. Today I'm going to share a brainstorm I did called 10 Timeless Principles for the Work. I mean this in two ways.

1.

An intention around creating timeless content because timeless content will make your and my life easier.

If we create timeless content, then there's.

Less of the content hamster wheel to be on because we don't have to be always coming up with the new, there's a lot more to recycle, and there's a lot more that can live on, even if our community finds it later down the road. And then the other part of creating timeless content or timeless principles for the work are criteria that are going to help me. And hopefully you find that intersection of ease and joy and falling in love with the work again, as my friend Leanne would say. In fact, I had her voice in.

The back of my mind as I.

Was starting this brainstorm, just thinking, how do I move from that feeling of drowning in the work toward gliding and being in flow when she gets stuck, Leanne asks herself, how can I fall in love with the work again? And if she's revamping a newsletter or her podcast, she says, how can I fall in love with the podcast again? She was a previous guest, so I'll.

Put the episode with her in the show Notes.

So as I was problem solving, I thought to myself, okay, how can I fall in love with a work again? In free time, I talk about getting stuck in the weeds and the metaphor that I use to switch metaphors is the floor is lava. You know the game that we played as kids where you jump on different.

Pieces of furniture in order to stay.

Alive and the floor is lava.

Now Netflix in 2020 turned this into a full blown adult game show with adults jumping across crazy furniture and, you know, simulated lava bubbling below.

Whenever we're too stuck in the business, I consider that being in the lava, the floor is lava. We're just down there and we're not holding onto anything. It's slippery.

Hopefully it's not burning us up, but you get the idea.

Versus working on the business, working on process and working on principles that that help build the furniture as we build the business. So I have been reminding myself the floor is lava. The floor is lava. That sometimes when I get to that state of feeling like I'm drowning, overwhelmed, too much to do. It's also a case that I'm in the lava. I'm in the state of overwhelm. It is hard to shift and really zoom out and take that systems and principles based approach. I'm gonna share with you a list of 10 principles that I came up with so that I could fall in.

Love with all aspects of my to do list again.

But specifically things relating to the book, the book launch, marketing, all the systems and content that I'm creating for that.

And even things like resuscitating my two newsletters, which I am so long overdue on.

It's not even funny. Thank goodness that there are some of you here listening to this podcast because.

This is my only lifeline to the world right now. If I, if I stopped doing this, I I would just go out full on ghost mode. Thank you for being here. Thank you for meeting me where I'm.

At and for your patience. Let's get into principles for creating timeless content and I think this goes far beyond content creation, so apply this to any area that's relevant for your work or your creative projects. Number one Evergreen Moving forward I want to focus on creating evergreen content. That means content that is not time bound, it's not news oriented, and probably it's not going to be laced with too much news or pop culture references, things that would go out of date. I learned this from a friend, Alan Dibb.

I don't know him well, but I'd like to. I'd like to have him as a.

Guest on this show. Every time he sends a newsletter, not only does he make sure that it's evergreen, but then because it is evergreen and it was written that way from the outset, he can add it to probably by now hundreds of email long autoresponder series. That gets him way out ahead in terms of being able to send new subscribers an email week after week. Because he's writing in an evergreen way, he can then again program them so that they just get slotted into this.

Mega email machine that he has. I just think it's a brilliant idea.

You can learn more about Alan and.

Even sign up to experience this. His book is called the One Page Marketing Plan. I'll put it in the show notes.

One of my top principles for this podcast for the newsletters is probably with Pivot, I used to curate a bunch of links, TV shows, podcast episodes. I'm listening to all kinds of stuff from around the web and I really loved that format for a long time. But I'm leaning toward creating more evergreen content. Moving forward and also shorter I am finding that I'm overwhelmed by newsletters. I don't read them. I'm skimming except for my top three.

Favorites, including my friend Sarah Young has.

A fantastic Friday Favorites.

If you go to Zinccollaborative.com you can.

Sign up for that. I also love Tim Ferriss's five Bullet Friday, so there are some winners that I definitely read, but the rest it just gets filtered out of my inbox and I don't read them. So I don't like to create things that I myself don't participate in or I'm not interested in one of my goals is going to be to create.

Iphone or if you have an Android phone, screen sized email newsletters. I don't know if I will achieve.

This, but I was even thinking as my friend MBS and I did the seven sentences challenge where we sent each other about 100 words a day for every day for a whole month to get our books off the ground. I was thinking what if I only allowed myself five or seven sentences to write a newsletter?

How would it change? And then I thought that would probably be a lot harder than writing the long ones that I do.

So these are the kinds of questions on my mind for Principle Number one Evergreen I already started going into Principle number two Concise. I gave myself permission to condense interviews for this show to 30 minutes rather than recording for a full hour or even 45 minutes. Every now and then I'll let episodes go long, but I'm starting to really feel and hear feedback from some of you as well. That concision is nice. It's nice to feel accomplished. I cannot say that I did this with the book. It's probably too long and another author.

Recently told me that's not nice for your readers because they want a sense of accomplishment of finishing something.

But I know that with a 30 minute podcast episode or less, who knows how long this one will end up to be that it's nice. You can check it off, mark it done. It's concise, it delivers, you know, just enough and to take the pressure off of creating long content. Obviously I did just write a book. But beyond that, as I mentioned with the newsletter, playing around with this and just giving myself permission and you as well.

Everything I say here goes for you.

Too to be concise. Principle number three for timeless content is one to many. In free time I talk about answering out loud. I am trying to do this more and more. Instead of having my expertise or ideas or feedback for somebody, just get stuck in one email or one one on one coaching session. I am working to move toward one to many. If you submit a question related to free time, I would love to answer it live on the podcast so that other people could benefit. As a reminder, you can do that.

No one has been submitting lately, but you can do that@itsfreetime.com ask yes you you listening. I would love to know what's on.

Your mind, what follow up questions you have. This used to happen more with my first book, Life After College before I had a podcast at all where people would write sometimes really long in depth emails and ask questions and want all kinds of feedback. And I remember, you know, I did try to respond to every email at that time and then now I'm just a total slowpoke at email.

But even if I wasn't a slowpoke.

I would still want to ask somebody permission. Would you mind if I answered this even anonymously? I always like to give people three choices. Would they want it to be anonymous, first name only or maybe sometimes somebody wants a shout out. They would love a little bit of airtime for their business name or URL. So once I get permission, one of my intentions moving forward and even for this show is one to many. That's also why I stopped one on one coaching in 2019. I had a few legacy clients that were still with me, but I stopped taking on new clients. Coaching was my number one most stable source of income for 10 years. I started while working at Google and then it was the thing that built the bridge into running my own business and it was the thing that kept me afloat through writing my first two books. But I reached a point in 2019 where I really started to what I call go pro and work on the business and not in it, as per.

Michael Gerber, his famous E Myth Revisited line.

And I realized that as much as I did love coaching and it did give me insights into what common challenges were, it was this moment in time that sort of disappeared. One piece of advice that I give to fellow coaches is at some regular cadence, doesn't have to be every time you hang up from a coaching session. And of course doing this anonymously, respectfully, confidentially try to pull out. What templates have you created? What homework prompts have you given? What inquiries have you suggested? What advice have you given?

We know coaching is not just advice.

Giving, not pulling out any information about your clients, but pulling basically the IP that gets developed in the moment. With your intuitive coaching process around what somebody needs, you can start to pull out and create external resources. A lot of the templates that are.

Going into the brand new in progress.

Free time toolkit are things that originally started as homework that I would give to coaching clients. I recommend even if your entire business or services are not one to many do have that in the back of your mind of what can you pull out and then create a one to many resource from principle number four Collection buckets. It's much, much easier to create when I sit down and I have a collection bucket to draw from.

I have collection buckets for many, many.

Areas of my business and my mind. I don't believe that anything should be stored in our mind, as per David Allen and his famous book Getting Things Done. But I realized that maybe I need more collection buckets. So I have as many of you know, I use Notion for absolutely everything.

It replaced Google Docs sheets.

Evernote replaced pretty much everything for me, although I still clip articles into Evernote using the web clipper. But in Notion I have these different collection buckets. Not only tasks, I have a tasks board, I have a book marketing tasks board, I have Pivot Podcast production free time podcast production newsletter prep bucket, and then for free time there's a collection bucket. And for Pivot there's a collection bucket. When I want to do solo episodes on the podcast production board, there's a solo episodes status or category where I can collect ideas with Notion. You can now also sync your Kindle highlights to a Notion database. So I have a reading record that tracks what I'm reading. I have my Kindle highlights, which I don't read every single book on Kindle, but a lot of them are in there. I have a synthesis folder where I'm.

Collecting little factoids and ideas.

I have a story worthy bucket where.

I collect personal stories that's from the.

Book Storyworthy where I got that idea. What the author Matthew Dix calls Homework for life. So I have collection buckets all over the place.

If you can imagine.

It's almost like our mind is a.

Leaky house and it's not holding the water.

So you gotta set up buckets in every room of the house to catch all the water. And then that water is clean and delicious and can be repurposed for drinking and sustenance. How's that for a metaphor? So part of creating timeless content is have many collection buckets for every single area that you would ever want to draw from or create content around. I will also tell you my story worthy collection bucket. My homework for life of every day. Trying to capture one moment of insight or aha. Or transformation or even disappointment. That came in really handy. I gave my first keynote in person keynote at Mike Michalowicz's ProfitCon event in New Jersey earlier in I believe it was in Gosh, time is a blur. What does Michael say? Time is a flat circle.

It's all blending together. Who knows? Earlier this quarter, it wasn't too long.

Ago I had all my opening anecdotes. I had actually really fresh in the moment little jokes and stories and even photos that I could share that helped craft this. So as I was brainstorming how to customize the Speech for the audience, which is a room of accountants, bookkeepers, coaches, just financial experts. Kind of centers around Mike's book Profit First. I could link and connect all those story worthies and narrow them down and craft something much more easily than if I was sitting there kind of with thinker's block looking at a blank page, wondering what I should say. Principle number five, a cascade of monthly or quarterly themes. And these themes could be internal with the team or external with content. Someone I know who does this really well is Tara McMullen. She runs a podcast and a community called what Works. Tara is really strategic. She's another just uber systems thinker and I love her idea. And I also learned this from Gia Bianchini of Mighty Networks as a platform for connecting people, that setting monthly themes could cascade across everything you create. So if I set a monthly theme of abundance, then all four. Well, I do eight episodes right now.

At the moment for free time.

So I could have four guest interviews about this theme. I could have four solo episodes about this theme. I could run my private Q and A call that I do with the BFF community. We could do something around that as a theme and hot seats around abundance and so on. The newsletter, the resources I refer to, I don't currently do this, but what I love about it is that it's making one decision that cascades for that month or that quarter that frames the thinking that puts some constraints in order to really dive deeply into topics. So I'm pretty sure that Tara uses her monthly theme to plan her podcast episodes or what's happening in her private community, what's happening in her newsletter. And then what's nice is that it all connects. You could also do monthly or quarterly themes with your team. So maybe Q1 is strategic marketing, maybe Q2 is content creating. Maybe Q3 is fix it. All you do over the summer is.

Fix it and clean house and. Or maybe that's in spring. Who knows? Spring cleaning. You get the idea.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Principle6 Let it be easy. Let it be fun this is not.

A new JB principle.

I've had this one for a while. It never ceases to come in handy. This goes with Leanne's inquiry of how can I fall in love with this again? When I recorded episode 46 and I said, I feel like I'm drowning this week, I knew. This is one of the chapters of the new book. This is one of my mantras that I've had for years. That was ringing in my mind because I was thinking, where did the fun go and how do I get back to it? And I know so many of the projects that I want to do for the book are in my zone of genius.

They are what I love to do, build things.

I'm creating this whole toolkit, as I mentioned in Notion.

I can't wait to show it to you.

This is my favorite thing to do.

I literally just don't notice time passing.

When I'm creating stuff like this. All these hyperlinks, all these tools and templates and resources and hopefully knowing how.

Much time it's going to save all of you by using it.

So I had to kind of remind myself, duh, Jenny, let it be easy, Let it be fun. Find the easy stuff, find the fun stuff or find ways to make it fun. And the stuff that is not fun, delegate it. I guarantee there is probably someone else who finds it fun. So for example, I'm going to be adding a forum to the BFF with Jenny Blake community. We used to be on a large social media platform that I'm so happy we moved off of and we're just gearing up to get going on circle circle so you can check it out. I know that I am a terrible community manager, prompter, responder. Let's say this is not my zone of genius. I love attracting amazing, brilliant, generous, awesome, kind, smart people.

And that's who is in this BFF.

Community that I feel is a strength. I love shaping content. I love facilitating calls. But I am not going to be good at keeping the forum software, the community, the asynchronous offline kind of that piece of it going.

I'm just not good at that with notifications and being timely and I'm not good at it.

So I'm going to bring on a small team to help with that and I'm so excited and we can announce that soon. That's something that I solved just in this last week, being in between episodes. As I reflected on this mantra. Let it be easy, let it be fun. Principle 7. I mentioned this in the intro when work on process, not in the task. Back to floors Lava. The biggest place that I have to.

Remind myself to apply this is processing email.

I had about 400 emails that I was working to get caught up on after just all my deep immersion with writing and editing and shipping the book. So in the last week this has been a big theme and it's been.

Kind of fun, kind of a little guilty, you know, some of them. Oh my gosh, I'm embarrassed to tell you, but there were definitely emails that had the date of 2020 still in there.

As I was working, I made a note anytime I needed a new process that there was actually a process behind an email that I hadn't designed yet. I made a note of it. So for example, if you submit a question or comment@itsfreetime.com ask we have a process for that. We get an email from Speakpipe, the tool that we use to power that and then that gets slotted into notion and our process isn't perfect because sometimes I'm really slow with those and I miss them. So we have room for improvement there. But that's an example where just because an email came from Speakpipe doesn't mean that I need to handle it in a one off way. It means we need to create process around this. If this then that. So as much as possible, even when it feels like I'm working in a task like processing email, I'm always at the same time or let's say on my better days and and shout out.

To my brother and his wife for.

Really reminding me to do this is working on process.

My brother gave me a framework for email.

He said does this email excite you or not? And if not, he made this whole.

Decision tree about who to delegate it.

To, how to assign it, how to.

Have somebody else doing the initial processing. I thought that was interesting. I've never thought about email processing with that framework at the top.

Does this excite you or not?

And I thought that was. That's going to be a really interesting.

One to try.

Delegate as many next steps as possible, one for every project.

This is so crucial and this is.

One of the things that I really committed to do. When I had that drowning feeling, I reminded myself it's so easy to forget and it's so easy to just get buried by stuff and tasks and adulting and household stuff. And I just had to remind myself, jenny, for every area of life and work, pick a person and delegate. Delegate 1 Next thing for every big project. So I got the ball rolling with the Together Agency. You heard the episode recently with Adam Chaloiaci on creating some physical collateral for mailing books like free time, branded envelope or stickers. Okay, great.

Check. I got in touch with Stephanie Houston.

Who runs her own coaching and consulting business about helping with the community that I mentioned.

Okay, check.

I even submitted an inquiry on a service that my friend Laura told me about called gosquaredaway.com for a type of assistant. I'm thinking not just help with my inbox, but possibly a household manager role. The question will be whether that can happen remotely or not. But I know that I have a very tiny team right now and we probably have room to expand a little bit. You know how I am.

Nobody works full time.

Most roles on my team are five max, ten hours a week. We almost never hit that point of 10 hours a week except during a launch. This principle for timeless content and just sanity management is delegate as many next steps as possible, one for every project.

And yes, that can include cleaning the house. So we had our mold inspector come yesterday.

He does not think there's mold. But the report, we still have to wait a week. He said the culprit could be dust and dust bunnies. So there's my PSA for those of you listening, he actually said that in humid climates, I live in New York City, that it's good to have a dehumidifier because if it's humid, dust loves to propagate itself. I didn't know that.

There's a fun fact for you on dust and dust management. I'll let you know as I learn more.

Principle number Be less precious. This goes with principle number two around be concise, be less precious. As my friend Patrick Culver says, the world needs your imperfect voice more than your perfect silence. Be less precious. Pretty much nothing that I do is ever perfect. I never really think that it is. And I just have to let it go.

Let it go.

There is just too much to do when you're drowning, when you're feeling like you're drowning or even treading water. Scale back on the preciousness any area that you find yourself grasping to that. The one thing I'll say here is that with rare exception, it was important to me to be meticulous and uber detail oriented about the book. Part of that is that once it is done, it is done.

I recorded the audiobook And I found.

100 edits that are already being printed in 10,000 copies as we speak. So if you get one of those.

First 10,000 hardcover books, you and only you are going to have a fun typo hunt.

Not all of them are straight up typos.

Some of them just needed to be changed or hyphens that needed to be taken out.

But there's things like a close parenthesis.

Mark but there was no open one.

The open one had gotten removed or or a line break where it didn't belong. Or just straight up words missing style typos. They will be fixed for the audiobook and fixed for the ebook. But those 10,000 readers of the hardcover are going to know all my embarrassing mistakes. So if it's something as permanent as a book or what feels as permanent, yes, it's okay to get out your fine tooth comb and be precious. But up to a point, at some point, you still got a ship.

This is where I do think deadlines and working with accountability buddies or a.

Team that is holding you accountable is really helpful. 10th principle of the Work Add Blocks to Calendar I got this hit of inspiration from listening to Cal Newport's Deep Questions podcast. One of his listeners wrote in and asked him about juggling. And I really love how succinctly he put it. He just said, create ritual. I think this person was juggling graduate school and something like writing a book, something that was just complex or having a side hustle. And what he said is pick the same time in the same place, create a ritual around it and add it to your calendar. Probably all of us have heard this before, but I felt like the reminder was so good. So you know what's not on my calendar? Creating my newsletters. It actually is, but I got to start ignoring it. I did that bad thing where I.

Added it to my calendar and I just proceeded to just ignore it week after week. This doesn't work if you break your.

Promise to yourself and you stop trusting your reminders to self. But maybe you would set up an accountability appointment with a friend and you actually both get on a zoom call and you go, okay, we're going to.

Write our newsletters right now. I might need to do this.

Something that I find is sometimes I like to have some kind of reward ritual. I don't bother getting blowouts anymore. But there was a time pre pandemic where I used to go to dry bar and I remember telling myself, okay, Jenny, if you're going to get pampered.

Then sit in the chair and do.

Email for an hour. And so I started to look forward to it. And sometimes I would get coffee if it was in the morning, sometimes I would get champagne. I would only get blowouts for speaking events. Now it's, come on, who's even. I'm barely wearing makeup these days, let alone high heels or getting a blowout. I wonder how Drybar is doing. But it was a nice ritual that when I would have to go in because I was getting ready for a speaking gig, that it actually had me looking forward to a task that I didn't always make the time for. I'm going to give you one more bonus principle that I'm thinking about, about how to fall in love with all the work again. And that is find ways to work on mobile. And to enable this. I shared this in one of my working from home pandemic episodes on the Pivot podcast. But I don't know about any of you. Sometimes I feel allergic to my laptop. I don't want to open it. I don't want to look at it. It's the only separation I have. Being a business owner means that our business is always hovering. It's always in the back of our mind. There's no off. We don't leave it at the office. There is no office. It's in our head and it's all the time. So it takes a tremendous amount of discipline not to be thinking about business or money or whatever. 24 7. So for me, I only use my laptop for business. I don't watch shows on it. I don't. I don't watch YouTube. I don't go on social. You know, I don't go on social at all anyway. But I. I don't procrastinate on my laptop. When my laptop is open, I'm sitting there and I'm working. If I'm reading on Kindle, that's on my iPad. And I also don't like thumb crunching on mobile. That's really annoying to me. But I do like sitting in a relaxing space, like a comfy chair or a cafe, and being able to move things forward without being at my laptop.

Now, this is a bonus point 11 because I may be the only one with these quirks, this laptop allergy, but.

I know that if there were a way to move certain things forward on mobile, then I can feel like I could sit anywhere and do it. Or when the weather's nice, sit at.

The park, or again, go to a cafe.

And this isn't to feel a need to work constantly. That's not really what I'm saying. Like oh, I'm standing in line at the pharmacy and let me just cram out five more emails. That's not my style at all. Rather, how can I take some of my more in depth projects on the go, even brainstorming solo episodes like this one? I first jotted down some of these principles in a notebook, took a photo of it, uploaded it to Notion, typed.

Out a few more things, and kept.

Building on it throughout the week. So there you have it. Those are my ten Timeless Content principles. Let's do a quick review and then I want to know what am I missing? What helps you fall in love with your work and produce timeless content? Here we go. 1. Evergreen 2. Concise 3. One to many 4. Collection buckets 5. Cascade of themes 6. Let it be easy, let it be fun 7. Work on process, not in task 8. Delegate one next step for every project 9. Be less precious 10. Add blocks to calendar Create ritual Same time, same place and bonus. 11. Enable work on Mobile what'd I miss?

Let me know.

Send me an email hitime.com or leave me a voice memo. As I mentioned, it's freetime.com ask. I'll put all the resources that I mentioned in the show notes. You can always find those@itsfreetime.com episodes thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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