133: Free-up Founder Time Preview — Time Blocking and Content Batching

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello friends. This in between episode of the Pivot Podcast is brought to you by my new completely free mini course, Free Up Founder Time. This is totally free. You can sign up@pivotmethod.com FFT and I'm so excited to share it with you. I've been having a blast building this course. I started creating it in anticipation of doors reopening for momentum soon and the goal is to give us all a head start on generating greater financial freedom, security, abundance, ease and flow in life and work. I have created this course such that every single lesson will free up two to five hours of your time each week. In true JB style, the lessons will each contain a combination of my favorite things, at least one big idea, a book RX that's book prescription podcast template or tool to energize you and free your mind and your time. This course in particular is devoted to founders business owners, so this could apply if you have a side hustle, but it's mostly if you're in charge of your time, but you want to optimize how you spend it and how you work on your business, not just in it. I define founder Time as that exactly that you're the owner of the whole operation and ideally your founder Time is your most creative windows when you feel energized to do your very best work. For example, for me, that's early mornings. Founder Time activities might include things like upgrading your operating system as the owner of the business through learning, revealing blind spots and continuous improvement. As a leader, it might be clarifying your mission, creating a compelling vision, setting strategy for revenue streams and next projects, sharing your best ideas with the world through platform building and thought leadership. Maybe you're working on hiring great people and determining who can help deliver desired results. For any next initiative, Founder time could also include delegating effectively and empowering your team to work efficiently together towards toward a compelling future while having fun along the way. I'm really big on that, and maybe your founder time is also spent answering questions for them or helping to guide the team. So that's what this course focuses on and it also leads in I'm doing a complimentary masterclass coming up in the fall on 10 scalable streams of solopreneur income. So once you have freed up your time to work on the business, what can you build? How can you create more steady recurring revenue? So if you want to get on the early, early wait list and register for that, head to pivot love 10 streams. The number 10 so 10 streams. That's pivot love 10 streams 10 streams for free up founder time the link is pivotmethod.comfft and I thought it would be fun to give you a little preview, so I'm including one of the longer lessons here in this episode of the podcast. This is an episode on time blocking and quarterly production batching. That is a mouthful, but you'll get a sneak peek into how I set up my day, how I think about my week, and how I think about content within a given quarter or three month block of time. Now, I'm not perfect, I don't keep to these time templates perfectly, but it might give you some ideas for how you could start to be more efficient and overall more creative and strategic. So I hope you enjoy this lesson. If you end up enrolling in the free mini course, the lessons are much shorter. They're about five to 10 minutes. And that's on purpose because it's a course called Free Up Founder Time. If I was going to just drag you in with long winding videos and tutorials, that would be probably more of a drag on your time. So the lessons are short, they're audio based in addition to written in case you want to learn on the go. And you could probably if you were going to binge the course Netflix style, you could probably get through it in an hour and a half. But that does not include doing any of the work. And you know that in order to free up time, you don't just have to think about it, you just have to do it. In fact, you don't even need to listen to the rest of this episode. You don't need me to teach you any new trick or give you a new tool the number one first step, and this is one of the earliest lessons in the course, is go to your calendar and just free up the time. So many founders settle for the scraps in their business, the scraps of time that everyone else has left behind. Don't do that. You got to break that habit right now because everything benefits if you free up your time as a founder, everything else in your life and your work will benefit from you getting to do your big brain strategic creative work. With that, let's dive into this sample lesson on Time Blocking and Quarterly Production batching. And again, if you want to Enroll, it's@pivotmethod.com FFT.

Time Blocking and Quarterly Production Batching in the do not pass Go lesson, you started to free up big blocks of time to do your most creative strategic work. Now how can you get more done in less time within those blocks that you've set aside? How to best manage the never ending Content Production grind without going crazy okay, okay. Hopefully you actually like creating some forms of thought leadership. Whether it's writing articles, which I happen to be personally allergic to, it drains me to no end. Although I really admire my friends like Dori Clark who can churn out two or three a week. You might really love recording podcasts. I certainly do. Writing a book might be something you're doing with your founder time or or even creating courses like this one, which I love as well. No matter what energizes or drains you most, you will be much more efficient if you start batching your time by doing similar activities together, even planning them on a quarterly basis, rather than constantly scrambling last minute to meet deadlines. For example, if you are committed to write articles for a site like inc.com or Forbes or Entrepreneur, you could either work at the last minute, right up to the deadline every week, or every month when your article is due. Or you could determine I would like to contribute four articles this quarter. You set aside one or two days for a content writing sprint and you go for it elsewhere in the course. I've shared the two day strategy Sprint template that could be easily modified for you to work on content in this way. For help with mapping your ideal week, there's also a time blocker template that's linked in the course lesson and in fact for this entire lesson there's a lot of little details involved, so you might find it easier to read this one rather than listen. Or at least listen and then go read it as well. Remember, you can log in and access everything, including the links and resources in each lesson at Pivot Love Login when it comes to time tracking that runs in the background of your computer while you work, I recommend Rescue Time or Toggle. Rescue Time is how I can determine that I work at my computer an average of 45 hours per month, which doesn't include time away from my laptop such as speaking engagements or on my phone while on the go. So 45 hours per month. That gives you an idea of kind of how I block my week and how I block my time. It's not that much. I'm even now surprised reading that out loud, but I'll have to log into Rescue Time and do some more digging because I find it super helpful to know exactly how other business owners set things up. I'm going to give you my time and content batching rules or strategies. I don't always stick to them perfectly, but this is an overall template that helps me hit an easeful work target 90% of the time. Definitely modify these to fit your needs however you need to, and note that they're subject to change. My life, My work is always evolving. Things are certainly different when I'm working on a big launch or a big client project, but this will just give you an idea about how I think about batching my time and my content production. Okay, so Week at a Glance Time Template these are some of the rules I've set. No meetings on Monday or Friday and no meetings before 10am ideally 11 or after 4pm max meetings per day. Four with a 30 minute buffer in between. I hate the feeling of rushing, rushing, rushing to get off the phone and then immediately having to call the next person or them calling me or having to rush a coaching client. I just always try to have buffer in between. And I also noticed that after four calls in a day I start to get fried and I start to really lose energy within the first two hours upon waking. I love and cherish my time reading nonfiction, often business books and the newspaper. Thursday through Sunday I subscribe to the New York Times. I also subscribe to the New Yorker magazine, which I love, and Vanity Fair. And then I spend the first work hour of every day at a minimum on creative projects and strategic business projects. So that's a given every day that before I even check my email or work on email or little things, I spend at least an hour on the most important frog or project that I could do that day. And on Mondays and Fridays I'm often spending several hours in a whole block. Mondays are also for catching up on business, sometimes errands, sometimes just the miscellaneous stuff that I think about over the weekend. On Tuesday through Thursday I start email batching 30 minutes to one hour prior to my first call. If I'm feeling very caught up on email, I might only spend 30 minutes. But I only work backwards from when my first call is scheduled because I know at that point I'm shifting into call and other people mindset anyway and my brain can start to ramp down from the creative work. So if I'm really behind on email, sometimes I'll dedicate a two hour batch ideally early in the week. Again I mentioned it another lesson, but my friend Nir Eyal does this really well. He does a batch every day for emails that have to be addressed that day and then he does a bigger batch once a week for anything that's not time sensitive. On Tuesdays that's my day for miscellaneous meetings. This could be potential client calls for a company or corporate work. It could be get to know you calls. Networking. There's always random miscellaneous meetings. I try to reduce these as much as I can and then these are only every other Tuesday. I realized that I was really struggling to work out after I moved and all my regular studios were different and I didn't know where to go. And so I looked up my favorite Pilates teacher, teaches in New York City about 20 minutes from where I live and I realized and it's in the middle of the day, 1:30pm so just as the advice that I gave earlier in this course, I actually had to look one month out from the day that I decided I really wanted to start to go to her class. The next available, even when I was back from traveling was one or even two months out. And I remember putting it on my calendar as a recurring do not schedule block every other Tuesday and then on the off weeks every other Thursday. So every week I can go to her class one time, but I block off three hours because there's travel time, there's I don't want to be rushing anybody off the phone and I certainly don't want to talk on the phone afterward and be rushing home. So I block off three hours and it might seem really indulgent, but it's helping a lot. So I end up leaving the house. I can only take a call at 11am and then I leave the house at 12 and I've what I've started to do that's working quite well is then I'll pair a coffee meeting or a walk and talk with a friend or a networking meeting for after the class. So that means I'm always showing up in workout gear with probably no makeup on, but I can set that up for 3 or 3:30pm and then I'm already out of the house and I'm already away from my computer and I'm not making this sharp right turn from doing calls and work all day at my computer. So that has actually helped me be a little more social as well. And I caught up with a friend I hadn't seen in a year the other day simply because I could let him know, hey, I'll be in this area at 3pm Would love to meet up. So now every other Tuesday and every other Thursday, I kind of know. All right, I can schedule a little social time in there before I head home for dinner. Wednesdays are podcast day. That is me interviewing guests for the Pivot Podcast or people interviewing me. And I also in the afternoons, every 3:30pm slot is either Momentum or Pivot Podcast Insider Calls. Pivot Insider is the show is listener supported, so you can contribute as little as $8 a month and you get a private monthly Q and A call with me. And that has been really, really fun. I look forward to it every time. Momentum, same thing. Those calls are twice a month and I just cherish these. But I realized that I needed to give myself more consistency and I needed to let Momentum members and insiders know when these are going to be. So now they're always at 3:30pm alternating weeks. And I'm even piloting a Q and A call for Defy Ventures. And this is for formerly incarcerated men and women to transform their hustle and get business and career mentoring. So in my fourth week where I don't have Momentum or Pivot Podcast Insider calls, I'm actually piloting, offering a complimentary session for Defy. Okay, that brings us. Oh, and by the way, on the podcast. So later in this lesson, we're going to get into batching podcasts by quarter, not just on Wednesdays, but nonetheless, there's always friends or book launches or some ideal guest that I'm reaching out to that happens outside of a batch. So that is always on Wednesdays. And that way my energy on Wednesdays is either pretty relaxed if I'm just getting interviewed for other shows, or I'm very focused, I'm reading books, I'm coming up with the questions, I'm preparing for interviews. And once I get in that groove for one interview, I'm kind of warmed up if there's a second or a third. And remember, maximum four calls per day. So that means at Most I'd probably interview one or two people for the podcast.

On Thursdays are when I have coaching clients I have now. And doing this work for myself helped me get clear. Okay, I have room for two clients maximum right now. And if there's really a favorite or a client who's, I would call them an alumni, someone who's graduated in the tasks but returning, I'll open up a third slot. But this way coaching happens only on Thursdays and I speak with clients twice a month. So that means that one week is on with all my clients on that day, and then one Thursday is off. Guess what? That's the day I'm heading to Pilates. So with two to three clients at any given time, these are happening every Thursday or sorry, every other Thursday. And then that just keeps us all on a good track. And it means that two weeks out of the month I'm not having any client calls. So again, there is more founder time that I've now created for myself.

In the afternoons, I try to do some yoga. At least 30, 45 minutes. I have the mirror, which is super cool. It's if you're familiar with Peloton for Spin where you get a bike at home and you kind of call into classes. Mirror is just like that. But for everything else, yoga, Pilates, strength training, cardio dance. I mostly use it for yoga, but it again, this just solved a problem that I had of not exercising after I moved. And so mirror, it's a little pricey, but for me it's worth it. It's in actually my same room as my office and ideally three times per week around 4pm, I'll do a 30 to 45 or 60 minute class on the mirror. Part of the reason I like doing a class on mirror. Even though I I did yoga teacher training back in 2010, I'm certified to teach. I could definitely do a home practice. I get more distracted, I let myself. I'll be in a downward dog and I'll notice the books are not color coded. Color coded properly, that's how crazy I am. And I'll like break a pose just to go fix something. It's really a bad habit. At least with mirror, the classes are guided. And so sometimes I want to just turn off my brain all together and let somebody else lead me through. And the other benefit of that is that when I'm on my own, I tend to avoid the poses I don't like. Like, I don't know why. I just. Pigeon pose is not a favorite. I don't have Very open hips or.

Well, try to think of some other ones. But when I take a class that someone else teaches, I'll like begrudgingly do the poses that I don't want. So that kind of helps me stay even because otherwise I would probably be, who knows, lopsided somehow because I wouldn't do any of this stuff I don't like. Reverse triangle is probably another one I wouldn't do on my own. And then after I do yoga. So imagine I'm sort of ending in my little office yoga room around 5 or 5:30. I do not check email after that. That might be shocking to some of you, some founders that I speak with and even coaching clients, that would mortifies them. Like what if you miss something? What Something urgent that almost never happens. And the converse is that I would be completely neurotic. Like after dinner my brain would be going, I already have issues where I'm solving business problems in my sleep sometimes when it's a particularly busy or creation mode time. So I just, I let myself wind down. We have dinner, Michael and I will watch a show. And I do not check email after dinner or before bed. And I try not to check it in the morning as well before starting my day until like 11am so in an ideal world, I'm not really looking before 11am Every now and then I do and I'll like sometimes I'll go through team emails and asana and see what notifications and what needs my attention. But I don't respond to client emails, usually before 10 or 11am.

Okay, so that's how I have my week template set up in my mind and kind of how I run my calendar. Remember, there's a time blocker template in the course lesson and I also use Calendly a lot, which I mentioned in another lesson. But Calendly is a lifesaver for reducing back and forth. And you can set up different calendly links. So pivot, podcast, interview, Jenny gets interviewed, coaching call. And then those links can have the specific time blocking criteria that you set, including the 30 minute buffer before or after an event.

Okay, now let's move on to quarterly content production. So in a quarter, that's three months, there's four quarters in a year. And that's like business speak. Of course we could call it seasons as well. But three months is 12 weeks, which is about four batches to plan per year. What I'm going to share with you is what I worked out, that if I were going to batch my content, what would I need to produce in a given quarter. Note that this does not include launch planning, course creation, webinars, corporate client work, et cetera, things like that. This is just my regular, what I call maintenance mode activities that have me producing content and thought leadership in the business. Okay, so 1/4's worth of JBE content production includes 10 to 12 podcasts. If I'm really sticking to it, it's going to be 12, and I aim to record in the first two to three weeks at the start of the quarter, then the rest can cascade. So as I mentioned, it's helpful if I can batch 10 episodes even across the first two or three weeks of the quarter, maybe even two weeks, and then a few more may trickle in throughout the rest of the quarter. That allows me to get the rest of the podcast production steps firing while I move on to other things. So if I can batch that many at the start of the quarter, then Brenna, my project manager, she can send it to James, my fantastic audio editor in the uk, and they, they just get going. So James will start working on the audio, finalizing that Brenna will get started on the show notes, and then the only thing I'll have to do is review the final in Squarespace. Brenna marks them needs review, which is when I know to go in and look. And ideally they're all set up and almost done and I just need to write the introduction and then fire it off in the Pivot List newsletter. Within that 12 podcasts, I would do two to four solo episodes and I'm going to experiment with mapping those out in advance and recording them over one max two days. And they're about 45 minutes each, so we'll see how that works. Sometimes solo episode ideas come to me randomly and I do like to have some wiggle room to record things in the moment. So like an idea hits me or something happens where I just think we gotta get this on the podcast. And you you'll note that's what exactly what we did for the episode I did with Michael, my husband, at Life of a Lebanese Artist. So that one's@pivotmethod.com 127.

So I will say that when I create a course like this one, Free up founder Time, I will batch all the lessons at once. So I'll write them all at once. Then I'll let it percolate for a few days and then I'll review and edit them all at once. I used Evernote for that and then a couple days later I might program them in Kajabi. That's what I'm using as the course platform and the membership platform for Momentum and even my email list is now in Kajabi and then I'll record the audio all at once. That means 14 lessons all at once. I am the type of person I would rather just get it all done, get it out, fire it off to James and keep moving. I don't want to worry about every day breaking up what I'm doing to go work on something like that.

Within the 12 podcasts, I will also try to come up with three to six podcast resources. I love doing that. As you know, I love tools. I love templates. So when I can create a template or a worksheet or a shortcut of some kind for the podcast, I like to do that. So my goal is 3 to 6 of those per quarter and sometimes they'll come from the guests that I have, so maybe the guest has something handy that they're willing to share and that counts. So that's always a good thing too.

Then in a given quarter I'll have 12 weekly pivot list. That's my free newsletter newsletter where I do a curated roundup of all the links, articles, videos, tools, templates I'm finding around the web. It's not every single one of those every time, but it's usually at least a handful of the best stuff I found around the web. And that's totally free. Pivot List. I send it every single week. If you want to subscribe and aren't Already, it's@pivotmethod.com pivotlist those 12 do often tie into the podcast, so it would be a little tricky to set up 12 all in one fell swoop at the beginning of the quarter. And I try to write a more timely introduction and even timely things that I'm finding. But I do keep a task in Asana called Weekly Pivotless Newsletter and then I have sections in the Asana Task description for reading, watching featured tools and so on. And during the week if I find cool things, I drop them in there. So I usually do have a repository that I can pull from. Every time I'm getting ready to write and finalize a newsletter.

Within Momentum, my private community for solopreneurs that you've heard me talk about many times. We produce three to six momentum templates per quarter, at least three content based workshops either live or recorded, and then three to six 15 minute hot seat coaching calls so those will be batched across one to two days and then in terms of my live time throughout the quarter. I do six momentum calls, three pivot podcast insider calls, one a month and then three defy Q& A calls. We'll see. That's a pilot. And then coaching clients. I think we talked about all of the. So the other things that just take my live time are podcast recording and coaching and then in person meetings. I've also blocked off Thursdays in the afternoon. I'm a member of Soho House, so if somebody does want to meet for coffee, if it's not going to be a walk and talk, then I'll suggest. Usually there's three Soho House locations in New York and I've just earmarked Thursday afternoons. I don't go every Thursday. I'm not even that social. But it's there. It's a resource when I need it and I've tried because what I used to do is procrastinate. If somebody wanted to meet up, I would just delay and delay, never knowing what would be a good time. And I needed to just set for myself. Okay, Jenny, if you're gonna go, just make it Thursdays in the afternoon. And I just needed to decide that to reduce the friction and decision fatigue in my own mind around that. It doesn't have to be something fancy like Soho House. Maybe you have your go to coffee shop or a co working space that you're a part of. What I find helpful is that in the calendly. Of course I have a calendly link for setting up an in person meeting and I like having the same location. It just again, it reduces all that back and forth about where are we going to meet and when. It's just in there. It's noted. Similarly, when I do conference calls, I use Uber Conference. I love that service. I've been using it for years. You get your own conference line. It's super easy to record. There's a really convenient and easy to use app that goes with it and they'll text you if someone is on your line and you're not there. So that has saved me many, many times. That's uberconference.com and calendly. Whoa. So that's a lot of details behind the business, possibly even tmi. But hopefully one or two of these parameters sparked some ideas for you about what you could batch and how and how you could make the most of the founder time that you are freeing up through this mini course. For extra podcasts on this topic, I highly recommend these awesome episodes from Amy Porterfield. You can google them or if you're part of the course and remember the course is totally free, so I encourage you to sign up for if you're already a member, you can log in at Pivot Love login and get these links. But she has episodes on how to create a three month content calendar, how to mega batch your content, six pillars of her content creation process and one that I really loved. Steal my Podcast Project Plan so if you're not already enrolled in the course, you can head on over to pivotmethod.comfft that's free up founder time, but you'll just type in pivotmethod.com.

And you can register for this free little mini course. Thanks so much everybody. See you in the next lesson.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter. Enny Blake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.