056: Set Your Compass—Systems vs. Goals

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, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello friends. Happy New Year. I missed you while I was on my holiday hiatus. Thank you for your patience and part of me wasn't sure if you needed yet another goal setting podcast episode in your queue. So today's will be a little bit different. I'm sharing my free time compass for 2022. More on that in a moment. First, a few quick announcements. Number one, I want to give a super warm welcome to all Cal Newport Deep Questions listeners. Many of you are new to the JB world thanks to Cal Helping kick off the free time podcast tour, he released an episode on my grandma's 90th birthday December 20, which I think of as very good luck because I dedicated Pivot to her as one of the most agile people I've ever met. She is just truly an angel in my life and I was with her on her birthday and then we started to see the Once Cal's episode with me went live, episode 157. Jenny Blake help me do less. We started to see all these pre orders start rolling in and it was so cool that my grandma could be there and participate in that excitement. I hadn't seen her in two years since Pre pandemic. So if you're here, you came over from Deep Questions. Thank you so much. And to all of you who have pre ordered the book and submitted for early audiobook access, the thank you. Like I said, it was just so fun. When I was with my family over the holidays I was a little worried that the episode would go live then because of course I wanted to be present with family but also make sure that all of you are getting squared away and it ended up just being this really fun moment that you got to see a window into my world. And to this next book launch. Thank you. Welcome. I am rolling out the red podcast carpet for you and I hope you stick around. It's been we have a lot of great stuff coming. One of those great things is that I am just announcing the Freetime book launch team doors are now open if you want to join us. This is totally free. You just have to pre order the book which many of you have already done and you'll get access to 5Live Ask Me Anything Q and A calls between January and May about the book writing, editing, organizing, launching, publishing process. These should be really fun. I just want to give those of you who are interested in this book in particular or the writing process. Maybe you want to write a book someday/in 2022 give you a backstage pass. Kind of behind the book maybe. Certain things I wouldn't think to share here on this podcast and you'll also be part of a little pop up community so we can discuss free time. We can share tips and tricks with each other. In return, I'll just ask that you help spread the good word about the book. Whether it's the pre order campaign, leaving a review during the launch week that is so helpful you can't even imagine. Especially to let the big old Amazon algo know that they need to order enough copies of Free Time so that it doesn't get out of stock right when it's launching. But that's it. Pop up community 5 live Q&A calls with me a community forum. You'll also get early access to the audiobook which many of you already have. The brand new Free Time toolkit. This is for those of you who are excited about this. You want to help with the book launch and you really want that backstage Pass. I would love to have you join us. Just submit your proof of purchase. You don't need to buy again. If you've already pre ordered the book, just make sure you do submit it@itsfreetime.com launchteam. That way we know you want to be a part of the launch team. You'll be automatically added to the calendar invites and to our private Circle community. And again, that's a pop up community that will be live through April. After that I encourage you to join us in the little bit Deeper Dive BFF with Jenny Blake. That's where we're really going to be working through in great detail the themes from FreeTime through all of 2022. So submit for the launch team@itsfreetime.com launchteam or if you know you want to get more involved and really get to know our fellow BFF community members and be part of a second live Q& A call with me every month. Head on over to itsfreetime.com BFF so two great options to get more involved if you want to and the third and final announcement before we get into the topic of today's show, I am starting a new feature app for this podcast called My Favorite Time Saving system. And I need your help because sometimes when you're listening, you think, oh, I don't really have anything. I don't have anything good to share. I'm sure someone else will submit. I'm looking for two to five minute audio recordings. You can do this using the Voice Memos app on your phone. Super easy. Just pick one time saving system that you are really proud of that you're kind of geeking out over. You're really excited that you set this up, or it's just making your life easier in some way. I think we can all say that one of the best things about podcasts are when you get a new idea, you hear how somebody does something. There's a term even called time voyeurism. Like we're so obsessed with people's morning routines, how they spend their time, how they organize their team. And I figured that this new featurette, my favorite time saving system, I actually want to release them as little mini episodes. So if you have a cool little tip trick or sequence that helps you save time at home or work, please record a short voice memo on your phone and send it to hi time.com. you can also go to itsfreetime.com ask and record through Speakpipe, but you'll have more control over the recording if you just do it through the Voice Memos app on your phone. So two options. Email a memo to hiitsfreetime.com or submit@itsfreetime.com Ask and I encourage you to get nerdy with it. As in, what is something even teeny tiny that you're proud of? It could be as simple as putting toilet paper on subscription via Amazon, which yes, I have done. Or as complex as setting up a Zapier zap that connects a squarespace form submission to Kajabi, then to Google Calendar, then to Circle and Notion. That's like I think the longest string of zaps that I've ever created for one initial action, such as those of you who want to join the launch team, that is. This is my sequence of zaps that happen automatically when you submit@itsfreetime.com launchteam Zapier is set up that a squarespace form directly talks to Kajabi and adds you there so we can email you. Then it adds you to a Notion tracker so we know who's on the launch team. It adds you to the Google Calendar recurring entry and it adds you to Circle the private pop up community. How epic is that? I didn't even know. I've never done a string like this. So that's one of my favorite time saving systems or tools. What are yours? Let's help our fellow free timers free up even more time this year by submitting your own favorite time saving system for this podcast. I really, truly cannot wait to hear what you're up to and take notes and try things and implement in my own life and business. Just know that you're giving us all a gift and if you share something, no matter how small, okay, it's all welcome. Thank you in advance for having the courage to share. If you do. All right, let's get into today's show. Set yout Systems versus Goals Are any of you feeling a little weary as we turn the corner into another year of these crazy times we're in? There was a ball drop here in New York City, and given how much has gone down the last two years, some of which I've shared publicly, some of which, some of which I haven't, just because the nature of the events. Oh my goodness. I'm not worried about the ball dropping. I have this sense of slight dread about the other shoe dropping when things have been too calm or too, quote, normal. Do any of you have that? I remember in my 20s, I used to get that really badly, the feeling that if things were too good, the other shoe was going to drop at any minute. It was this intense anxiety. I'll never forget there was a day I was driving in my car, back when I had a car and life after college. My first book was about to come out, was going to come out in 2011, and this was a big, this is a big dream. I mean, becoming an author for the first time. I just thought it might happen in my 40s or my 50s. So this meant the world to me. And I remember driving and thinking to myself, what if I die? What if I die before this book comes out? And my mind went straight there. And of course, part of that is what let me know because that this goal was so important to me that I was worried that if I died, same thing happened with Pivot. I had this fear, what if I die before the book comes out? And I even told my brother and my editor, Natalie, at the time, I said, if I die, please make sure this book still gets published. At that point it was written. So I'm like, I don't care how, just please make sure that it gets out of my laptop into the world. And you heard it here first. If anything happens to me, please make sure the free time book goes out into the world. It will. I Mean, it's already at the printer. Okay, but let's not get too dark. I mean, this is the practice as well of Memento Mori, which is recognizing our mortality instead of having it be this unconscious or subconscious fear and then doing something with it, saying, okay, if I were to go, what would need to happen? Or what would I be most proud of? Could I die happy? Could I die with no regrets? And for me, part of that has to do with big goals like these three books, but. But also living every day in a way that honors my values. That brings me to today's topic of systems versus goals. I've had a strange relationship with goals over the years. When I was in college, the very first self help book I ever read was called how to Be, do or have Anything by Lawrence Bolt. The title sounds kind of cheesy, but he's actually a very wise author. And it was one of the first texts that I read that drew heavily upon Buddhist principles as well as. As a result of that book, I remember writing down Very detailed 5 year vision statements for every area of my life. Sure enough, within five years, they had just about all come true. I don't know when I did that. That must have been, let's say, 2003 or 2004. Five years later. I was entering coach training through CTI in 2008. And coach training as well is all about setting the vision and getting super clear on what each of us wants to create and then how do we help others facilitate that process. And this just completely lit my mind on fire. I mean, I fell so in love with coaching and the coaching process and in really helping all of us feel that we're reaching our true potential. Not in a linear ladder climbing success, growth at all costs kind of a way, but bringing out the exquisite greatness within each of us and the unique work that we, and only we can do. About a decade after that first vision, setting, exercise from how to be, do or have anything, I just became exhausted. So those of you who've been in my universe for a long time, some of you almost 15 years, 2013 I call my apocalypse year. Although now I think 2020 really gave it a run for its money. They might just be tied now to Apocalypse years. I was just exhausted. I was dealing with so much personally, professionally. The year literally started with a breakup that I could not move past. I was restructuring my entire business, rebranding my website. Who am I? All this existential searching and no amount of gratitude. Journaling, yoga, Pilates, green juice. None of it was turning this mood around this apocalypse year, I just had to sit in it. But I was becoming so exhausted from trying to push the river, as the Zen saying goes of goals, setting goals, and they just weren't helping. This was not a time in my life that I needed any goals I like. I actually needed to just drop everything and stop doing everything. And oh, it was just. I don't know if anyone else can relate, but my 20s were a lot about kind of striving and achievement and working in ways that I don't think I knew at the time how destructive they were to my body. I just, it took me time to realize, oh, working in a certain way is going to lead to burnout over and over and over again. So in 2013, I heard a book recommendation from a friend that I, one click ordered, sight unseen. Again, if you've been here for a while, you've heard me talk about it many, many times. The book was Outrageous Openness by Tosha Silver. Oh, and this was just the solve I needed.

It was so soothing. It's all about surrender. It's about offering our lives over to the divine, not pushing so hard. It's about receiving, it's about not having all the answers. It's about dropping what she calls the grocery list for God form of manifesting and goal setting and instead taking on a stance of divine surrender. And that doesn't mean that we lay down and do nothing, but it means that we become completely open and receptive to what is, grateful for what is, and then surprised by the serendipity of what follows. So in doing this, I finally found some relief of this pressure I had been feeling all year. And I started to go with the flow of whatever my life and business brought my way. Of course, still meeting it halfway with meaningful projects and following little threads of serendipity. But overall, this way of being brought me such a sense of ease and gratitude. Whatever arrived was perfect in a business sense. I had never been that inspired by numerical goals. I always set them and yet they seemed arbitrary. Like I would set oh, how many people I want to bring in from a launch or how much revenue I want to bring in from that launch or in the year. But nothing happened. You know, I've read in a business book recently, when you set goals like this, they're basically dreams. If we don't operationalize them, then that's all they are. They're just these little post it notes we stick in the sky. And maybe they're going to happen and maybe not. And after reading Outrageous openness. I had this also this sense that well what do I know? Isn't the number of people who join or the number of revenue in my business and my life like isn't it perfect? Isn't it exactly what it's meant to be? It's not that I would drop altogether Project B schools. I love working on big meaty meaningful deep work and I love thinking about how to scale myself and my business so I can work with more ease and joy in less time. So yes, I do have a lot of intentionality about what I'm creating and creating some space and ease and scale and of course growing my revenue while decreasing the amount of time to deliver for that. But just the straight up hardcore metrics we never that motivating for me there's this Peter Drucker quote and I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times because I know I have. Can't manage what you don't measure. This makes its way into about every leadership and systems book despite the fact that I've heard it so many times over the years. I would set these revenue or even book sales goals and then the end of the year would come and I was nowhere near them. So I just started to feel like what was the point? And it wasn't until very recently that I had an aha moment about why these metrics and numerical goals have not been motivating. They were missing something.

We'll be right back just after this.

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So I heard Scott Adams put it this way on Tim Ferriss podcast. This was an interview from several years ago. He says goal oriented people exist in a state of continuous progress pre success failure at best and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

So good right? I'VE never heard it put this clearly that goal oriented drivers, they can be motivating. And if you're someone who is super motivated by numerical goals, oh my gosh, continue. Don't let me stop you. But for a lot of us it just has this sense of like foreboding, near failure. Like there's this one moment in time where we may or may not hit it, but but the rest of the time we're falling short. Essentially, we're focused on how far we have to go. Again, if that's motivating for you, go for it. Systems oriented people and this is what I resonate with so much. It's less about the end goal and it's more about creating smarter systems and then feeling a sense of satisfaction every time they work. And I do find that if you focus on experimenting and building just the right systems and tweaking them and improving them, you can get to some really big meaningful goals and you can make a lot happen. But your sights are set on a different part of the process. I'll link to the episode the interview I did with author Josh Kaufman. He wrote a book called the Personal mba. He was one of my early interviews for this podcast and he said the same thing. He said that book has sold over a million copies, but he purposely did not try to go for the New York Times list, nor has it ever made any of those bestseller lists. Instead, Josh was so much more focused on creating a system that would sell a million copies of his books over time, rather than some burst that he may or may not hit during launch week due to arbitrary list managers. Let's say there's another great quote that I've been hearing a lot recently. Maybe you have too. It's a zinger from James Clear's book Atomic Habits. You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So good. I just finally read his book. I've had it for years. I don't know why I didn't read it. It's really great. If any of you are looking to set new habits and start momentum on that front in 2022. I think he really explains things clearly. I also think it's a masterful example of how to organize a book. Well, I just write it clearly with lots of diagrams, nice chapter summaries. I'll say it again, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. He had a great conversation. Brene Brown had him on her Dare to Lead podcast and he said, focus on building a system, developing a process, rather than trying to achieve a goal or an outcome. The goal is not the hard part. It's building a system that executes on that, that carries you inevitably toward the goal. He said, almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed for your current results. Your life bends in the direction of your habits. I just love that he's saying, because he's confirming something I've felt for a long time. The goal is not the hard part. Every year I could set a book sales number of how many books I want to sell that year. That's not hard. It just takes me saying to you, I want to sell a million copies of Free Time. Okay, that's great, but if I just leave it at that, nothing is going to change, nothing is going to happen. Now in the converse, as I did, even with pivot, I would just say, yeah, this number would be nice. A certain number would be nice. But let this book reach anyone. It's meant to reach Tosha Silver. She had that intention for outrageous openness because she self published it, but it became this viral word of mouth sensation and she just turns it over. She says, this is not my book. This is the divine. This is the, you know, know God's book. It's not my book. It's. I am a vehicle, I'm a messenger to get this book out in the world and may it reach everybody who can benefit. So for me, that's more of an intention and a direction and a feeling to cultivate, which is may free time make it into everybody's hands who can benefit from it. What do I care what number that is? I mean, the more important thing, right? It's like, what if a million people bought it, but then 990,000 just sat on a shelf or nobody used them or nobody benefited from them. That's way less important than just the right 10,000 people, let's say, in year one, checking out the book. And by the way, that's the size of my first print run, 10,000. So I am prepared to give away tons of books to get that momentum snowball started. But it's so much more interesting to me to imagine those 10,000 books living, breathing, making their way with perfect serendipity and synchronicity into exactly whose hands who needs them most? I don't know. There's just something inspiring to me about that, to find the happy medium here, I have this idea. It would be amazing to sell a million copies of Free Time. For comparison, my two previous books, Life After College and Pivot have Both sold about 5:35 to 40,000 copies. It's rare. I think only 5% of books sell more than even a thousand copies. Certainly 10,000 is another threshold. So they've already done very well. But of course, I mean as an author, it's like, of course you want to see the work reach as many people. Like, I have this vision of freeing 50 million hours. If the book or this podcast could reach a million people, well then I feel really confident that we could free 50 million hours that year of just all the time people would save by putting some of the principles into practice. So if we find a happy medium here, we could say there's a goal. There's also an intention. May it reach whoever can benefit. And then we can create the system. This is where it gets more interesting and this is why I love systems and, and why the focus of free time is operating principles to create these kinds of systems that free our time far into the future.

So even if you've long since dropped your New Year's resolutions, I encourage you to think about what systems you would be proud to create this year. I normally choose a word or a theme for the year. In the past I've also done mind maps where I put the year in the center of a piece of paper and I just free write as many spokes as I want to different areas of my life and work. And then I do tertiary spokes to what would be fun and engaging to focus on in every area. I'll put a link in the show notes. One of the only viral videos I've had was CNBC did a feature on this practice. So I'll try to find that and put it in the show notes. This year I'm adopting a 2022 compass. So there are four themes that I want to improve my habits and systems for and I want to just drop something into each bucket every day. So that compass is healthy, wealthy, wise and grateful. The title takes its name from the proverb early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. That was first used in print by John Clark in a 1639 book of English and Latin proverbs. If you've been here for a while, you know that I call myself a grandma. I go to bed earlier than my grandma.

Let's just be real. In my ideal world, I am heading upstairs into bed around 8:30 and definitely would love to be asleep by 9 given that I have a husband and a dog. Just doesn't always happen like that. But I love this proverb. Early to bed and early to rise makes a person. Gosh, I should have just done that the first time. Make it more gender neutral. Makes a person healthy, wealthy and wise. For me, this compass is less about goals, it's about Did I exercise for at least 45 minutes today and I'm giving myself permission. It can be yoga, bike combo doesn't always have to be vigorous exercise, but did I move my body? Did I do something to improve my long term wealth creation or savings? Whether it's canceling certain subscriptions, hiring a new bookkeeping service, reading, learning, educating myself in the area of finance, just more and more deeply, did I this is for the Wise bucket. Did I meditate, journal, read or act in service of my highest self Self? And then the Gratitude Bucket. We just, we all know so much of the research points to gratitude being hugely transformative and beneficial for our happiness. I find. Oh, with all the chaos of the media and politics in the last two years, it's just so easy to get swept away by fear and lack. So for me this gratitude bucket is about expressing gratitude every day to friends and family, Michael Rider, all of you who are here listening and also just feeling gratitude in my body instead of focusing on what's wrong or what I'm missing. So if I notice myself focusing on what I don't have, what I don't want, feeling down to really try to come back and see what's in front of me, the abundance that is already here. With all of that said, my brother, he runs a real estate business. He is going to all in on traction. This is a very popular book by Gino Wickman with what's called the Entrepreneurial Operating System eos. So I am going to experiment with a weekly metrics scorecard this year with my team members and it's less about obsessing over hitting high level sales and revenue goals, but more about if we were to track our metrics weekly, which we used to do monthly, but if we would track weekly, could we improve our systems week by week in order to make things more easeful, automatic and abundant? So with with all my curmudgeonliness around goals and metrics and numbers of session, I am going to take a little turn in this direction, run a little pilot and see how do we do when we track weekly, does it help us get smarter about our systems? Again, less about some end state but more especially through AB testing And I'm going to talk about that on a future episode. Will that awareness help us create smarter systems? So how about you? What word or theme have you chosen for 2022? If you were to create a compass that guided daily systems and habits, what four values are most important for you to honor each day? And these don't have to be your all time forever values. But maybe there's four values that you want to focus on this year. Or as my friend Leanne is doing a quarterly word or theme. So for the first three months of the year, is there a word or theme you want to focus on and cultivate? Are you someone who is motivated by setting specific targets? And if so, what helps you design the systems to reach for them? I'll end with a longtime favorite, Henry David Thoreau quote as he wrote in walden, published in 1854, if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. That wraps up this episode. Welcome back everybody. Welcome to our new listeners. Happy start to 2022. May you set a resonant vision and surrender to whatever magic life brings your way. This year. I hope to see some of you for the FreeTime launch team. Don't forget, submit your proof of purchase@itsfreetime.com launchteam and if you have a favorite time saving system that you think other listeners could benefit from, I want to hear it. Send me a voice memo. Hi Com. Thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. Happy Happy New Year and have a beautiful rest of your day.

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