062: Made By Monday 🐸 On Content "Frog" Batching

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

Mark Twain once said, eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. This sentiment was the underpinning of one of the very first productivity books I ever read, Brian Tracy's Eat that Frog. Now for those of you into animal kindness like I am, maybe we're not eating the frog. Maybe we're befriending the frog, having coffee with the frog. I don't know. Brian Tracy adapted this to say that if the first thing you do each morning is that eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that it's probably the worst thing that's going to happen to you all day long, he says. Your frog is your biggest, most important task, the one you're most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it. It is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at that moment. The first rule of frog eating is if you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first, brian Tracy continues. He says the second rule of frog eating is if you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long. The key to reaching high levels of performance and productivity is to develop the lifelong habit of tackling your major task first thing each morning. You must develop the routine of each eating your frog before you do anything else. And without taking too much time to think about it. When I read this book, it completely shifted how I went about my day to this day. I sometimes still put a little frog icon or emoji on my to do list. Digital usually. This is happening in notion and that indicates to me that this is the one thing that if I tackled it that day, I would feel like I had accomplished what I wanted to for that day and that it would in fact move my most meaningful projects forward. For similar inspiration on this front, check out the book the One thing it's really good at reinforcing this message that we can constantly be asking ourselves what is the one thing? If I tackled it today, or first thing, or this week, this month, this quarter, this year that would have the biggest impact? You can even segment that what is the one thing if I started doing this in my relationships that would most improve them? Or if I implemented one thing in my business that could turn the whole thing around, what would it be? The reason I'm sharing with you this principle of Eat that frog because it's been in my mind as I'm experimenting with a new frog eating system in my life as of 2022 that I'm calling Made By Monday. Over the holidays, I sat down and mapped out all the content that I would need to create between January and June. This is the first half of the year and I figure with the book coming out mid March, it can get so chaotic and frenzied during a launch that it's nice to have as much content in the can as possible. And I'm one as I share in the new book. But I'm big on serendipity and leaving time and space for surprise and to be able to say yes to things that come up in the moment or maybe even as a result of the book getting out there into the world. So what that means is that the more content that I can get done in advance, the more I can create space and open myself up for opportunities that might arise in the moment without missing any of my baseline commitments. I share more about this in episode 25 of the podcast, the Joys of Precrastination. Especially around a launch. Anything and everything that can be done in advance should be so when it comes to content, one of my commitments is to get back to my regular newsletter cadence. I have two podcasts, as you know, this one here Freetime and Pivot. I've had pivot since 2015 and now it's on a twice a month publishing schedule. It's a little bit ambitious, but for free time I'm enjoying the twice a week publishing of the podcast and Then both of those properties have a newsletter. Why not just combine it all, you ask? That is a good question. The main reason is that not everybody who is pivoting and navigating what's next is necessarily running their own business. So for now it makes sense to me to keep them a little bit separate, but still have a nice ecosystem that for anybody who reads the book Pivot and then wants more via the podcast and a newsletter. There's plenty of resources over there and it's still where I do a lot of the corporate work that I do. And then here at Freetime, I can geek out a little bit more on what my specific tips, tools, quotes, questions are for small heart based business owners. So that brings me to my challenge for myself. When I created this six month content calendar, I was shocked. I did this in notion and I listed every single podcast episode that would need to be created for both shows, every single newsletter, every single workshop. I'm doing the launch team behind the book ama ask me anything calls. There's gonna be five of those. I have my monthly BFF, live Q& A call with the private community. When I looked at all of this in a big list of my jaw hit the floor. I just thought to myself, who is doing all of this? How on earth is this all going to get done? And I know that so many media companies now, which in a way this is the amount of work for a media company, certainly a podcast that would have a whole team of producers and staff and people. And while I am always looking for what the right team setup is to support all of these activities, for now, I really needed to have a moment with myself where I said, Jenny, you know, one is this realistic? Does this spark joy to do all of these things? And if not, then I told myself I really needed to reconsider whether I should be doing any of it at all. Like go through and radically reimagine, as was my theme of 2020, go through and say, should I really be doing both newsletter? Should I really be doing both podcasts? And if that answer was yes, which I am still leaning toward a yes for all of the above, then I really needed to work my systems even more and refine them even more. Because while I'm super proud of writing the book free time in 2021, I hardly sent any newsletters at all. And it's not the end of the world, but it's not ideal because it's nice to keep in touch regularly with the community. Both the long standing Pivot newsletter community and then Also the new community that's forming at free time. So I don't, I don't like to be that person that's only sending a message really randomly when there's a book coming out. I like to keep that regular cadence of communication. But I had just gotten overwhelmed with all the events of 2020 and Michael and I moved around a lot in 2021 in Airbnbs. While working on the book, I just, I just dropped the ball. So this brings me to Made by Monday. I decided, what if I take a page from Brian Tracy and Mark Twain's book and I eat that frog? What would it look like? How would I feel if I had made everything I needed to make content wise by Monday each week? So this is the week long version of eat that frog. What if on Mondays, Because I already don't have meetings on Mondays. That's already a personal rule. No meetings Mondays or Fridays. With rare exception. What if I committed that every Monday I would write and schedule two newsletters and record three to four podcast episodes. As I sat with this, I realized that would feel pretty good. I would go into the week knowing that I had done my creative work, I had created things, I had scheduled communications to go out to the community, and that I wouldn't be scrambling at the last minute to record podcast episodes, edit them. They would already be made by Monday. To help with this, I started booking studio space or making myself go out of the house. I shared in a previous episode, going to WeWork. It's $29 a day drop in or I'm a member of Soho House here in New York. But that part of my made by Monday ritual would be leaving the house today. It's a Monday and I'm recording this in a podcasting studio in Midtown where I'm paying to be here. I think I pay for four hours, a four hour block. I pay $160. That's not nothing. So that's the kind of commitment to myself that gets me to show up. Even though today did I wake up springing out of bed at 7am, eager to go record? Not yet. I was a little groggy going to be honest with you, I was kind of groggy. I just like, you know, it's gray and rainy, but gotta do it. Paid for the space. So made by Monday, rain or shine, means that I leave the house and that not only do I show up to record, but that over the weekend or the previous week, I've already been brainstorming content and topics. So part of Made by Monday is that Monday is the day to show up and do it today. My goal is, like I said, record three or four solo episodes, but I'm even doing an interview where I'm on someone else's show today and then ideally, if I can swing it, getting those two newsletters drafted and scheduled what I'm loving about Made by Monday, this is my fourth one in a row now is that it is challenging. I don't always feel like it, but it puts a container for me for my content that front loads the week. I feel accomplished. I know it's behind me. I don't have to context switch throughout the week of what I'm working on. With everything created Made By Monday, I go into the rest of the week of meetings and email catch up and scheduling calls and all of that feeling like at least I got the thing that is truly unique to me and me alone and that requires that deep work and space. At least it's done. It's made by Monday.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Another thing this is allowing me to do is not be so precious about any of this content. There's not really time to sit and procrastinate or worry or wonder if it's good enough. The whole goal is really to tie a bow by the end of the day on all of it and not let things linger, not be incomplete and also not be overly critical. Because if I'm too picky with myself about what topics I'm going to record, how I record them, how I write the newsletter. It just won't get done. It will just be left there like an open loop. So part of what this exercises helping me to do is stack and batch content production. But Also make a point to finish it so that by the time I am heading home in the afternoon or you know, sometimes I'm able to do Made by Monday super early in the morning without even leaving the house. But no matter what, once I close the session, ideally all the content is done and ready to be handed off to others. So hopefully I get my podcast editing workflow lined up. We're in transition right now where I just record the raw files, pass them to someone else for editing to take this to the next level. I've also created a template for myself called Made by Monday. So that the template already now that I've done this a couple times, the template already indicates about what types of things that I could be getting done during these sessions and then each subsequent week I just need to fill in the blanks a little bit. What I like about this, the last thing I'll say is that it also helps my gears turn with a purpose when I'm reading and listening to things in the days prior. So in the days leading up to this, I kind of know that I'm going to need to sit down and eat my frogs, eat my content frogs of creating the most important things this week. So it gets me thinking productively because I know there's a container and an outlet for it. So as I know that Monday is approaching, I already start thinking to myself, okay, well this is coming up. What can I slot into this? And when I start that process a couple days early, what's nice is that little follow up ideas and thoughts and examples flow into my mind over the next few days. So as my friend Stephanie says, it gives ideas time to crock pot or marinate amongst themselves. How about you? What would it look like to front load your week if you were to do a Made by Monday challenge? What would be the most meaningful aspects of your business? Your creative projects that you could slot into a Made by Monday session? Do you want to go to an outside space? You want to change it up a little bit? Is there somewhere you could go to get in the zone of Made by Monday?

And by the end of your Made by Monday session, what would you be really proud to have accomplished? What would have you heading into the rest of the week feeling already accomplished that you had gotten your most important projects done? And also a weight lifted off your shoulders, Precrastinating on some of the deadlines that might pop up later in the week, knowing that you've gotten them all made by Monday. I would love to hear how these go. If you run any experiments like this, or if you have any other content batching techniques that help you keep a commitment and a regular cadence without necessarily doing things at the last minute. As always, I will throw all the links to the resources mentioned in the show Notes. Be sure to check out episode 25 on the Joys of Precrastination. That has worked wonders by the way, that mindset, because with all the supply chain delays, the books have taken longer than four months to print. I got a huge jump on submitting them way before anyone else would have told me to do, and because of that, the books will be out on time for the launch, even though I thought I was getting them out six months ahead of time. So the joys of procrastination are real. They come in very handy, and that's in episode 25. One last quick thing. If you are listening to this on Spotify, would you do me a huge favor and rate the show? You don't need to write a review, they just have a star rating. So leave your honest rating for the show. Or if you really want to go the extra mile and you're not even listening to this on Spotify but you want to pull up the Spotify app, I would be super grateful. Who knows, maybe we can get in with the Spotify algorithm and get the show in front of more people. Thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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