102: 12 Systems-Thinking Steps for Moving from Friction to Flow

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on so stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go Places.

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 hello my friends and fellow free timers. This is a special episode of the podcast where I'm republishing one of our private bonus episodes for the BFF Community's private Podcast feed. This one happens to be on Process. Each month we have a different theme based on principles and sections in the Free Time book and I thought you would particularly enjoy this one but also want to extend the invite to you to join us in the BFF community. As I've shared many times on this show, this is one of my favorite places to hang out online. You will be with other heart centered, generous, smart, successful business owners to brilliant sparter. That's our take a penny, leave a penny philosophy of giving and receiving feedback. So it's not just a place to feel good, although I always do when I'm interacting with this group. It's also a place for you to get real time feedback and ideas and solutions for your business. If you want to learn more and join us, go to itsfreetime.com BFF that's itsfreetime.com Bff and now let's get into this special episode pulled from the private BFF Podcast feed.

Hello hello beloved BFFs. I am so excited to be kicking off another month with you and another section of the Free Time Framework. We are in the second stage design and this is the final section Process. Let me read you the quick overview and then we'll get into it. Beyond the ideal outcomes and impact of new projects, ensure that you and your team are intentional about designing the processes required to make that work happen before you assign it out. Be strategic with your time. Bake in batches by saving similar tasks to be done at a regular cadence in sprints during designated time blocks, particularly actions that are small and non time sensitive. Batching helps eliminate task load that comes from reacting unconsciously to low priority items. Email and messaging apps can also be processed in batches so you and your team aren't splintering your attention all day. Checking and reacting as a default state Design your default state to be intentional. Active Focus Ensure that your calendar has plenty of spacious time for strategic creative thinking. No task needs to be repeated the same way twice. If you're paying attention and willing to do a bit of extra work up front for any recurring task or message, take small actions today that will save time in the future. This has the added benefit of preventing knowledge from being stored only in one person's mind. In the Process section, we design deep work containers hat tip to Cal Newport time block and bake in batches and automate what you repeat. If there is any section of the book that is near and dear to my heart, it is this one. Freeing up Founder Time is so powerful and I find that the strategies that I research, that I share, that I've tried in this section. Process of the Free Time Framework really goes such a long way toward actually freeing your time and giving you your time back. Process is where you take a strategic, high level view of your business and look for what processes you can streamline and also what process needs improvement. And you do this before you delegate to your team or you ask your current team members to engage with you in this process. What I have found over the years is that once processes become established, they almost become calcified. Even the team members working on them don't necessarily automatically step back and go, oh, I've been doing it this way for three months, six months, three years. Why don't I step back and redesign this and make it more efficient? My friend Nick has his team members actually rotate across different job roles in the business so that they have fresh eyes constantly. And he learned this when he was doing high frequency trading where somebody had to come in and manage his books for a week or two and then they would see what ideas they had. You could certainly do that. I don't necessarily do that because I don't think everyone in my business wants to do the other roles, the other work. But I have noticed that when there's transition on my team and I get back in and I start to look at the work again, I see where there's room for improvement. I've talked a lot within the BFF community and on the Free Time podcast about a lot of the topics in this process section. We've had conversations about batching work, about automating work tools like Zapier that you know, I'm obsessed with. So today I want to dive into the systems thinking steps that I share in the resources section at the back of the book. Because when you're designing process, I find that going through this checklist first, you can have it in front of you. It's also in the free time toolkit online, that's@itsfreetime.com toolkit. If you don't already have yours, this will start to become automatic in your own mind. But even better is if you get these systems thinking steps as a way of life, a way of being, a way of operating with every single person who interacts with you on your team.

Look at any area of the business and I encourage you even as you're listening to this bonus episode right now, pick one area where you're currently experiencing friction or task bloat in your business. Something that you feel is taking maybe longer than it should, or you're not really enjoying it, you procrastinate on it. So conjure up that area in your mind. I'll give you just another couple seconds. And now with that friction area identified, let's go through some of these systems thinking steps.

First, is there a chance that you, or better still your team will repeat this? Even if somebody will repeat it, should it be done at all?

If it should be done at all, what larger system, function, process or business outcome is this part of? Is it nice to have or must have? Knowing the answer to that will help you decide how much time and energy you want to allocate to it. If it's must have, it gets your best attention. If it's simply nice to have, maybe you need to pare back a little bit and treat it like cookie dough instead of fully baked cookies. That means letting good enough be good enough and then you keep moving. How can you save time when taking these same steps in the future? Where is there possibility to automate which aspects of this area currently live only in your mind that you can capture in a process Doc. When you consider this area, should it be recurring even if it surfaced as a one off? For example, adding links where you're featured to your website? Yes. Is that a recurring task? Actually you want somebody to do that once a month or once a quarter. And if it is recurring, can you batch it for content creation? There's so much room to batch and to experiment with different ways of batching. I've talked about my made by Monday strategy that gets me front loading all my content creation for the week. Some people batch all the content they're going to produce for the entire quarter. Some people. Some people do it twice a year. Think about how you could leverage batching in your business and in the friction area that you chose, what is the desired outcome of this process? So for this friction area, if you didn't have a process at all, what is the desired outcome? What does success look like? Then you can ask how can you design a process to achieve that outcome with ease? That means minimizing effort and complexity. What would shift this area from friction to greater flow? Whether that's you doing the work or how you even move toward a greater state of flow? In terms of delegating and reviewing the work, are there any remaining unknowns? Is there something that you need to ask another team member hire a specialist for or to experiment with? Within this friction area, are there any subtasks that could be captured or relevant and related links to include? What do you want to group together in your business? So maybe this frictionary relates to one or two other areas. How can you group them together? And how can you pull out and extrapolate any of the subtasks that actually help it get done, but that aren't being explicitly designed and optimized at the moment? When you've thought through all of this and you have really streamlined and documented how the work ideally flows, could a person who's brand new to the business easily implement the steps that's part of finding those subtasks and being really clear and specific about what success looks like? That is the test that says yes, I could hand this off to a complete stranger to the business and they would know what to do and the work quality that comes back to me would be beautiful. If not, if you still couldn't delegate this section or this friction area to somebody brand new to the business, what other FAQs and potential pitfalls could you anticipate? Is all of that documented in your manager manual?

We'll be right back just after this.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold Cranberry and Winter Spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sippin season and only for a limited time. Sprite Obey your thirst with Venmo. Stash a taco on one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back with Venmo Stash. Get up to 5% cash back when you pick a bundle of your favorite brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash Terms exclusions apply. Match $100 cash back per month. See terms of Venmo Me Stashterms.

Now that's obviously a long list. Nobody needs to remember that verbatim, not even you. But if you can start to think this way to say where am I experiencing friction and how can I design my way toward flow and ask your team members to do the same, then you are consistently making a habit of working toward flow in your business and of creating more free time. I say in the book, but not even as explicitly as I've stated, started to say it on other podcasts that freeing time is a verb. It's a muscle that we build. We build the skill of freeing time. Just like when I wrote Pivot, we build the skill of pivoting. If you run your own business, you're a pivot pro because especially after these last few years, you need to learn how to adapt, how to stay agile, how to shift the services and products that you offer, how to talk about what you do in our current era. It's interesting reading books now, seeing oh, this book was written in the before time, they didn't even know what's coming down the pike. We have a new vantage point now. The world has changed. We've all had to change with it. So just as pivoting is a skill set and a mindset, free time is the same. It's a mindset of working with joy, ease and abundant time and energy. And it's also a skill that we build. We build the skill of freeing time by thinking in a systematic way. In the recent free time episode that I did on training the system, then the person my big aha around process was that I was repeating myself. That was the red flag. And then my aha was that I need to train our systems to be smarter. I need certain emails that come in more than once that come in on a recurring basis. The example I used in that episode was Speak Pipe submissions. When people want to leave a voice memo for either podcast, I wanted them to be auto labeled in Gmail and in Help Scout with the page in our Notion email guide. The email guide is new. It runs parallel to the manager manual with what to do with that kind of email that had all the steps outlined because it's too cumbersome to create a label that would outline all six steps of what to do. But the label just points to a short link that points to a notion page in the email guide. Now this may have already put some of you to sleep. It may be too complicated, you don't want to deal with it. But it helped me really crack a nut on this, where I was continually repeating myself in not just that area, but many areas as it related to email. Until I realized I need to create a whole email guide that's as clear as possible that I build out over time. And then I need to auto label emails that come in with what to do. This example is so powerful because it was my biggest stress area in my business. You all know I always was constantly for years talking about the friction that I experienced in email. And I'm really excited because I just had a call with somebody who helps executives manage email in a conceptual way at Google, and I want to have her on the free time podcast. But she's kind of the productivity czar at Google and she loves thinking about how to solve these questions, these really kind of ongoing, never ending systems. This email guide was a major breakthrough, but it didn't happen until I stepped back and I first recognized the red flags of frustration and for me, repeating myself. And that meant that every time a new team member would enter that business area of email, I was repeating myself. Things were falling through the cracks. Nobody knew what to do. It was overwhelming. No one could even look at my inbox because they didn't know where to start. And the answers didn't come right away. I needed to take a step back. I needed to call this out as a friction area. I needed to decide that I wanted to tackle it, that I wanted to transcend the tug of war of this Sisyphean system. You know, tug of war is this linear duality good, bad, I'm bad at email. Email is hard. Email is stressful. And there's almost this feeling of no way out to transcend tug of war. What my friend Christine, as I share in the book, calls a sacred third solution. It means what is a way that transcends that tug of war that transcends the sisypean nature of this task. So I needed to look at the area straight on. I finally had the time and space in my own business to do that. I decided I wanted to do something about it and I needed to get out of my head, get out of the house. It didn't happen. Staring at my laptop, I even think this aha moment came to me while I was either showering or commuting or walking rider. But it definitely didn't come when I was sitting in front of my computer working, pounding away at the keyboard, answering emails. I got away. And I talk about this in Pivot. You read about it in every book on creativity and the creative process that sometimes you need to do what my dad says and drop a bucket. You see a friction area in your business and you need to drop the bucket into the wishing well of your brain and then trust that at some moment, once you set that intention and you have that open question, that open inquiry, the bucket will come back up the that wishing well of your brain with some ideas. And that is the power of Looking for Ease and Joy this is why I'm so passionate about the free time principles that I share on the podcast, in the book and in our BFF community is that if we don't even hold the hope or the possibility that aspects of our work could be easeful and joyful, we will just accept the slog of it. We won't even try to fix it. We won't even try to address processes. We won't even try to innovate with new ideas, new ways of doing things, and new ways of solving problems that we can then share out with other people and make their lives easier too. This is why I'm so passionate about process. Because process and intentional process design. Even if you feel rusty or you feel unskilled at it, you can learn, there is a learning curve, but you can get better at it. It starts with the intention to try. So I don't want to hear you say, oh, I'm not a systems thinker, my mind doesn't work that way. What would happen if you tried? And in fact, because your mind doesn't work that way, you might design even more elegant systems because you go, oh, I don't want to design some complex thing, even like Jenny described for her email guide. That might work for her, AKA for me and my brain, but it might not work for you. So the advantage that you have if you're not a natural systems thinker is that you're going to design something even more easeful, even more joyful, because it's going to fit you and your process and your definition of ease and joy and spaciousness. Speaking of email, I've started to see more and more people shift to a four day work week and their process design around that is that they put up an autoresponder that goes up on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays that says our team is now operating a four day work week. We'll get back to you on Monday. Alexander Franzen, who's a longtime friend and guest on both podcasts. Her message her autoresponder thanks to my friend Sarah who forwarded to me for their Get It Done company is totally delightful. She links to research that shows the benefits of a four day week. Pretty sure she links to a playlist, there's some little joyful offering in the PS or in the footer and she just says this is what we're doing. We'll be back to you on Monday. She knows that nothing she's doing in Get It Done to help people write books and create courses is mission critical. Life or death must be answered within 24 hours or else. And therefore she's designing a process and setting expectations in a way that leads to a far more spacious business and way of operating for her and for her team. As I share in the chapter on Automate, what you repeat, think of the name of the software tool. Even if you don't use this tool, if this, then that they even borrowed that phrase from the computing world. Software coding. If this, then that ifttt. This little catchphrase can become your best friend. Because you start to look in your business, you start to look at friction areas or where things fall through the cracks and you then design a solution that involves saying the statement if this then that. If an email comes in about xyz, then here's what to do with it and you can actually start to understand. It's a little bit like whack a mole at first, but you can look for where things are falling through the cracks, where there's friction areas, what you dread, what you procrastinate on, what's draining you, dragging you down, and you go how can I design a joyful, easeful IFTTT around this? So take that little catchphrase, that little acronym with you into the next few weeks and put the IFTTT lens over what you're seeing in your business. I always suggest having a piece of paper handy at your desk and and just writing a list. Keep a list of what has potential to have an improved process, even if you don't know how to solve it right away or who to assign it to. Just make a note of these friction areas and then later you can add a column called IFTTT and start brainstorming solutions. What would your IFTTT look like for those friction areas? As always, you know I love to hear from you, but please share and I would love to share this out with the broader podcast audience. What processes have you designed in your business? What time saving strategies would you like to share with us? You can leave me a voice memo@itsfreetime.com ask. That's itsfreetime.com ask and you know what will happen? I will get an email from Speakpipe and it will be labeled with exactly what somebody needs to do with it, whether it's me or another team member. Hope you have a fantastic month thinking about process honing in on where there's room for improvement. And then maybe it's at the very end of the month that you start to get all these new ideas rushing in about how to improve those open areas of inquiry about where there's more room for ease, joy, flow and abundance in your business. Thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time Even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join Remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs.

Let it be easy, let it be.

Fun, and build with love.