106: Splatology—On Clearing Time Clutter

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When work slows down this is a perfect opportunity, which I've been doing literally in my home and metaphorically in the business, to say where is there stuff clutter lying around that's mucking things up and where is there time clutter again. Not rushing to bring on new people, not rushing to take on new projects, even though I've had several big ones drop into my mind and right as I feel myself taking the steps to launch full swing into creating them, I go pull back. Don't do that. Just pause. Let it be quiet. Let things be spacious. Let there be less to do than almost. I know what to do with myself and see what wants to emerge because I'm really trying to stay focused and streamlined and reduce the small and the many so I can harness all of my energy on the few and the big and the strategic.

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.

Have you ever been on a road trip in the summer and you can't help but get a bunch of bugs stuck to your windshield? At a certain point there are so many bugs stuck to your windshield that you can't even see anymore. I have fond memories of driving to and from home to college. I grew up in Northern California. I went to school at UCLA and so I would take Highway 5 if I was trying to be expedient or of course 101 the beautiful PCH. If I had more time on Highway 5 in particular it was just long stretch of trucker highway and when you're driving so quickly and it's summertime, unfortunately the number of splats on the windshield gets excessive. They're usually butterflies sadly, although it could be mosquitoes and other bugs. Turns out there's even such a thing. Or at least the self proclaimed title of splatologist. As I was studying this, I read about Mark Hoefler who he considers himself an expert in the art of splatology. He studies Greyhound buses and he tries to understand which bugs are stuck to the windshield and what it tells us about climate change. The parallel in this case is time clutter. Once you have too many tiny things tugging at your time, at a certain point you can't see out of the windshield of the car anymore, you can't see where you're going, you need to pull over, clear your windshield completely and start fresh again. That's what we're talking about today in this episode of the Free Time Podcast. Before we dive in, I want to give a very special thank you to Shelly Hitz, brand new BFF and bonafide book consultant and author in her own right. I encourage you to check out Shelley's website. I'll put the link in the show Notes Shelly said. Such practical, helpful advice. Love this podcast and often take notes because Jenny shares such practical and helpful advice. I'm in the process of rebuilding my team after some turnover and really want it to be a delightfully tiny team as Jenny calls it this time around. Thank you so much Shelley. I really appreciate it. At the time of this recording, we just passed the 100 episode milestone, so if you haven't left a rating in a review, I would love to hear from you. What has been a nugget of wisdom that has stood out to you so far from these first hundred plus episodes? Leave me a review. Let me know. You can go to lovethepodcast.com freetime that's lovethepodcast.com freetime okay, so let's get into this conversation on Time Clutter how do you know when your proverbial windshield is full of bugs minutiae that is blocking the view? I hear often from business owners who say I just don't feel like I have time to work strategically, to work on my business, to work on my most creative projects, the things that make me come alive. To name just a few of the ways that you might be experiencing time clutter. And I'm calling it clutter for a reason. Because it's not that you're full of big strategic priorities when you're experiencing time clutter. It's just like these bugs on the windshield. No one bug is a big deal, but they add up and if you don't take time to address it or wipe the windshield every now and then, they're going to add up so much that you can't even see straight. Time clutter includes things like getting interrupted or interrupting yourself by pings all day long. Rescue time. The time tracking software that I use shows that the average worker doesn't go more than six minutes without checking email. This is a case of interrupting yourself. If you're checking your email this often, it's probably just a bad habit of sorts that formed because you're genuinely trying to see if anyone needs anything from you. Maybe you and your team are working too much in email. So there are important aspects of your work that are kind of getting buried in email. Maybe you're procrastinating. Procrast checking so that instead of having to do some big scary project that has more involvement, you can just spin the jackpot wheel of your email and see if anything exciting might come through. Whatever the reason, this is definitely a way that we create time clutter by kind of filling our time with small things that aren't that nourishing in a given day. So if we continue with our bug metaphor of today's episode. Sorry if you hate bugs. Bugs, yes. You could actually eat bugs and they'll give you a little protein, but not much. You'd have to eat a lot of bugs to feel full and nourished by the end of the day. I never did get into eating crickets. This is just definitely not for me. But maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong. So time clutter has a sense that it's not that nutritious. It's the feeling of death by a thousand cuts. That's often how I know that I'm in a state of time clutter where that phrase, even death by a thousand cuts, is that the cuts are tiny, just like the bugs on the windshield. No one thing is a big deal. So I talk in free time about death by a thousand tiny question cuts. If you and your team are in a bad habit where they're peppering you with questions all day, and you are what I call the all seeing question answerer, not to mention the Chief Everything Officer, then you will constantly be reacting to other people. It also means that your team is not empowered to find the answers that they need in the resources that you've created, whether that's your manager manual, your email guide, your guided responses. On a related note, time clutter could be created when you're breaking up a process into too many small parts instead of batching it. So, for example, when I used to do this podcast, I would record with a guest and then later someone on my team would draft the show notes after the audio was edited and they would always come back to me saying hey, can you write the intro? And they would need me to write the intro to the episode for the show notes before it could go live. So guess what? I became the bottleneck and I would get pinged last minute about writing the intro and then I would need to stop what I was doing because this episode was due to go live tomorrow or the next day and and write that intro. But in the interim I had forgotten what we talked about, so it's even harder for me to pull from my own creative resources. It meant that the task took longer, probably wasn't done as well, and it interrupted the flow of what I was doing. Finally, I had an aha moment that some of you will have had long ago and said duh, why didn't you think of that sooner? Where I would just as soon as I hung up with a guest, I would write three sentences that would become the podcast episode's intro done. That was a form of batching those two things together so that my team was not waiting on me for some tiny component of this task or micro project that is each episode and they could do their thing without re interrupting me to do mine. You might also experience time clutter if you have let too many things pile up. Things that you don't really want to do, like your bookkeeping or checking in with your bookkeeping team and getting them paperwork that they need, paying certain bills, making appointments. These are all things that are annoying. Nobody really wants to do them. So you either have a VA or an assistant, somebody who is going to help you do these things when you don't feel like it or you need to rip the band aid off and dedicate one block of time each week. Whether it's one hour a week, half a day a week to do your adulting tedious tasks and just get them done so that they don't pile up and start taking up aspects of your mind that that would be better served to be free for creative thinking.

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Another form of time clutter is what my friend Sarah Young, in her book Expansive Impact, calls tiny boxes on the calendar. This is a form of time clutter. When you look out at your calendar and it's just full of tiny boxes and they're stacked together, you don't have enough time in between to do anything really meaningful. And you're not even necessarily looking forward to everything on your calendar. In fact, you know you're experiencing calendar time clutter when you look ahead to the next day and the one after, and you ask yourself, why did I schedule that again? Or this could have been an email, Or I could have handled this differently. Or what was I thinking when my past self said yes to this? I was clearly not thinking of my future self, who would not want to be stuck on the phone or on Zoom or on video all day long. In keeping with the windshield metaphor, the impact of too much time clutter is that you can't see straight. You can't see the way forward. You're actually now burdened and slowed down by how many tiny things have piled up. What got me thinking about all of this is that Michael was out of town recently for 10 days, which gave me an opportunity to clean all the clutter in our house from corner to corner in every single room. When it was just me there, I was just kind of hanging out by myself. Me and Ryder had more free time, if you will, and I knew that there wasn't another person who would be moving things or need his things to be out in certain places while he was using the space. So it was this nice opportunity where I felt like I was making real progress every single day. And it was unbelievable how much frigging clutter accumulates. We've only lived in this place three years, and yet there were stacks and stacks of paper in my office. There were junk drawers, there were junk closets, there was junk on the terrace, including weeds. Different things that had grown and sprouted up in these potted plants that we don't even take good care of. So actually, the one thing that we are accomplished at growing are weeds on our little micro New York City terrace. And I just could experience how much this clutter had been adding up and Accumulating and the pain of doing it all at once compared to keeping up with it a little bit each day. Now, of course, we talk a lot about batching here on the show and there is also something to be said for doing it all at once like I did in this 10 day sprint. I would just go methodically from room to room to room and look for these piles of clutter that no one is that big a deal. Again, they never seem urgent when going about day to day life, they never seem urgent. However, clearing them creates a sense of spaciousness, joy, peace. My eyes can rest and the light can bounce off of the surfaces and I feel happier, so much happier when I look out these rooms and see just organized spaciousness. This goes hand in hand with not creating anything massive in my business right now. I spoke in an early episode about what to do when the financial tides recede and I'm in a phase right now. Summer is always slow in my business. The book is out, the dashboard's created, the BFF community is alive and well, everything is built, everything is moving, and I don't have a ton of clients right now in terms of speaking, travel, corporate work and so on. Not only have the financial tides receded a little bit, and that's okay. I'm also in a period of deep observation. There's been contraction on my team and I'm not rushing to fill those spots, even though I know that I'm living on the edge a little bit because I'm probably veering toward taxingly tiny. As I've spoken about before, I'm letting things be quiet. I'm inquiring what is my business trying to tell me what does it want next? What would help both me and the business and all my creative projects thrive. So when I'm going really hard in deep creation mode, deep work, like writing a book and trying to launch the book, there's no way I'm addressing the clutter in my house or in my business. So clutter will pile up when the financial ties recede, when work slows down. This is a perfect opportunity, which I've been doing literally in my home and metaphorically in the business, to say, where is there stuff, clutter lying around that's mucking things up and where is there time clutter? And so I've been in this deep, deep mode of clearing clutter in my business, and particularly in my time again, not rushing to bring on new people, not rushing to take on new projects, even though I've had several big ones drop into My mind. And right as I feel myself taking the steps to launch full swing into creating them, I go, pull back. Don't do that. Just pause. Let it be quiet. Let things be spacious. Let there be less to do than almost. I know what to do with myself and see what wants to emerge, because I'm really trying to stay focused and streamlined and reduce the small and the many so I can harness all of my energy on the few and the biggest and the strategic. Sometimes it's hard to see clutter. We get so used to it that we ignore it. We stop seeing it. Sometimes it's also hard to see how to make a dent in clutter time, clutter or stuff clutter. My friend Anne, you've heard me talk about the antervention. She does estate sales on the side, and she came over more than once to help Michael and I really get rid of a ton of stuff that was just taking up space. Clothes, dishes, stuff from the kitchen, stuff from the living room. And bless her, Ann had her truck. We threw a bunch of stuff in the trunk, and she has this pickup truck that she uses for her sales, and we just got it out of there, and it feels so, so good. We can actually move around in our space. But I wouldn't have known where to start. I would have been overwhelmed. There were also many points where I needed a second opinion. I needed to say to Ann and Michael, what do you think about this vest that I got at a thrift shop in Brooklyn two years ago? Do you like it, keep it or no. And you know, they both shake their head, no, no, get rid of it. Boom, off it goes. But when I'm by myself, I get almost stuck in decision, fatigue and uncertainty. And me, being the libra that I am, have a hard time sometimes just being decisive about things. The same can be true in your business. Sometimes you need to ask your peers, am I charging enough? What do you think of this? Here's a gig I'm considering. I don't know if I want to do it. And let them reflect back to you the tone of your voice when you talk about it. Does it fit with what they've heard you say are your goals and your values? It can be so helpful when we're in the middle of things to think short term or see what's just in front of us. But your friends, your mentors, your peers are the ones that can see and hold a higher vision for you than sometimes you can even see and hold for yourself. This week on the home front, a big project has been clearing out Michael's studio. So he has a small room in the house that, technically speaking, he could make art in, but it's so full of stuff and clutter that it kind of holds him back. Now, my motivations aren't entirely altruistic because I basically said to him today that I'm procrast decluttering. Like, when I'm procrastinating, I'm stuff in my own business. Even cooking up what my next podcast episodes are going to be about. I find it deeply satisfying and gratifying to make tangible progress on a decluttering mission. So for this week, the project is his studio. And even he was experiencing some anxiety, like it was so full of stuff, he didn't know where to start. He didn't necessarily know in the moment what to sort through, what to keep, what to get rid of, what to move to storage. Until I would just hand him a pile and I'd say, here, take a look at this. What do you want to do with this? And of course, you know, we leaned on Marie Kondo doesn't spark joy. So maybe there was a piece of art that he had created that's taking up space. And is it a keep? Is it a move to storage? Keep it in the studio, keep it active. What do we do with it? And so over and over we would ask, does it spark joy? You can do the same thing with your time. You might feel conflicted in the moment. Sometimes it's hard to let go of things. Say no to people, remove things from your calendar, worry about disappointing people, not say yes to as many social invitations. But if you come back to that condo question, does it spark joy? And why not have that be the threshold for yourself? Why not pare things back so that you focus on what sparks joy and allow there to be spaciousness around that and around the rest? Most of us do not have the problem of saying no to too much and having too much free time that we don't know what to do with. If anything, I would say our habit is saying yes to too much at work, in our personal lives, in even taking on responsibilities at home. So the challenge, what I challenge you to do, what I'm challenging myself to do is be just on the uncomfortable side of free time. What I mean by that, I think we all can get comfortable with the idea of freeing up a little bit of time or even just right Goldilocks amount of free time. But what would it be like if you felt you had too much free time? What is that like? How often have you allowed yourself to be in that state and stay there without cramming it back up full of stuff? Sometimes we put a moratorium in our house. No new things. And I know minimalists are very good at this. This is the number one minimalist skill and value. Not so much stuff. Just like take your finger off the buy now button. Resist the urge. Use what you have. Ask do I really need this? Does this really spark joy? And do the same thing with your time. A couple takeaways on time clutter 1. They're by nature by definition tiny. But the tiny time clutter confettis add up. So look for the tiny, look for the small. Number two, you gotta see it to do something about it. So pause. Take one hour a week to declutter your calendar, your time, your tasks. 3. You might want to batch the things that you still have to do that maybe you haven't yet delegated or batched the time needed to delegate them to someone else. But try to rip the band aid off. Try to keep up with this a little bit so that things don't pile up and accumulate to the point where you have so much stuff in your house you can't move. Or so many bugs on the windshield you can't see when you're driving. And you know the metaphor extends to your business too. Number four. Try to allow for abundant spaciousness. What would it look like to do? Not just a little bit less, dramatically less so that you could do the things that you are going to do dramatically better, with more focus, more intention, more aliveness, and more of your unique gifts and creativity. I hope you found this episode helpful, if not a little bit gross thinking about bug splatter on the windshield, but we can all become expert time splatologists now. See what I did there. Thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. Have a beautiful and bug free rest of your day.

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