150: 💸 3 Strategies to Set Your Time Free in 2023!

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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.

Welcome back Free Timers. As we start to close out for the holidays, this is the last solo episode before taking a break behind the scenes here at jbe. I figured there is nothing I love more than helping you set your mind, time and team for free to do more of your best work. So today I'm sharing my top three strategies to set your time free in 2023. You know I did that because it rhymes. Last near decade that I've been podcasting, you know that I live by one of the Agile development mantras. Each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it. Today I'm going to share a few excerpts from the Free Time book. Be sure to grab your copy if you don't already have it. But before diving in, there are a couple other resources that you might find helpful as you set your time free to do whatever else is on your mind for the year ahead. For starters, there's a free leader toolkit if you go to itsfreetime.com leaders if you want more accountability implementing these free time principles, I highly recommend working through that leader kit with a small pop up group, a mastermind that you might have, or even your own delightfully tiny team. I'll put the link to that in the show notes. Again, it's@itsfreetime.com leaders. There's also a free toolkit choc a block full of free tools and templates to help you implement, practice, observe, teach others how to do these principles, how to make your life easier. That's@itsfreetime.com toolkit if you want the Done for you Business Operations Dashboard to set your mind free and make you feel much more at ease. Because Everything in your business has a home that's at itsfreetime.com dashboard and last but not least, help give the gift of free time. You can start by sharing this episode with a friend. Visit Pod link FreeTime to get an easy to send link where they can open the episode wherever they listen to podcasts. But also, we're reopening our Bogogo promo for the holidays. That is buy one, get one, give one. So if you order a hard copy edition of FreeTime, if you've already gotten it for yourself, buy it for a friend or for someone on your team or a colleague even. I've been getting great feedback from people within companies who are really taking to a lot of the principles in the book. Once you buy that hardcover copy, submit proof of purchase@itsfreetime.com Bogogo that's B O G O G O and you'll get instant audiobook access via private podcast feed. And you can gift audiobook access via private podcast feed to a friend. So that's Buy one hardcover, you'll get instant access to the audiobook and you can gift audiobook access to a friend. It really is the gift that keeps on giving because you can not only set your time free in the year ahead, but help others do the same. Again, I'll put all those links in the show notes. I just wanted to make sure you knew right at the top of the episode how to get more and dig in even when we go on holiday hiatus with this podcast.

Strategy Number one Set your time goal first, then work backward. Always. As we approach the end of the year, everybody's talking about New Year's resolutions and goals, strategies, even building smarter systems, which you'll hear a best of episode where I talk about systems versus Goals. What I want to encourage you to do is set a time goal for the year ahead, then work backward and fill in your strategic goals. From page 221 of Free Time, how much is your time worth? Calculate it. I really mean that. Get out a pen and paper right now. You could crunch these numbers on your phone or a device, but I really encourage you, put pen to paper and really try to understand. Not just what is your time worth? What is your billable rate? If you break down your income? But how much would you be thrilled to earn this year? That's step number one. How much would you be thrilled to earn in the year ahead? Notice I'm not asking you how much could you get by on? How much would just stop keeping you up at night? How much would be okay? I guess that's enough. No, no. I'm asking how much would you be thrilled to earn this year? That's step number one. Step number two, how many work hours per week is ideal for you to achieve that? So often we assume that we need to work 50 plus weeks a year and 40 plus hours a week. Well, if you run your own business, that's no longer true. So I want you to consider how many work hours per week is ideal for you to achieve your ideal annual income. I start by asking you what's ideal because I really want to stretch your thinking. I really want you to dream. If time and money and previous linear thinking limitations were not getting in your way. What are your abundant earnings that really provide for you and your family and maybe even your broader community or extended family members? And how many work hours enable you to thrive? It might not be 40. Maybe you only want to work 20 hours per week to achieve your ideal income. In step number three, I encourage you to multiply your ideal hours per week by 42 weeks to account for really abundant time off. That includes a week here or there for vacation time. It includes my strategy of blocking off all of August, half of December, and half of January. It even includes times where you might get sick or need to take care of personal issues. So another thing that I find interesting about people setting time goals or strategic goals for the year ahead is that we overestimate how much time we're really going to have. We think that just because there are a certain number of weeks in the year, all of a sudden we're expected to be working all of that. So when you calculate your ideal time value, I suggest multiplying by only 40 weeks in the year to account for abundant time off. And then the last part of this equation is to divide how much you'd be thrilled to earn this year by the total hours that we're going to account for working in this year to get your ideal billable hourly rate. Now, if this is confusing, I'll copy and paste this formula into the show notes. But the broader themes that I'm encouraging you to think about are what if you don't have to work as much as you thought you did? What if at the start of the year, you can intentionally set a time goal for how much time you want to invest each week toward your broader strategic goals? And what if it were easy? What if it were fun? Just by setting these numbers, as ambitious as they may seem, at least you have a chance. Whereas if you turn the corner into the new year, under the assumptions that you have to work the way you always have, with the same hours and the same stress for little or equal or maybe more salary. You're just setting yourself up for more of the same.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Strategy number two Once you have your ideal hours worked, your ideal annual income, what your time is worth hourly rate. Now step two we can fill in strategic goals within your time framework. I always like to ask how can I achieve them in half the time? So you know the central guiding inquiry of Free time is how can we earn twice as much in half the time with ease and joy or while serving the highest good? That last piece is important because we're not trying to run anyone into the ground just for the sake of the owner's benefit that this is a business that is life giving to all involved. If you've read the book, you know that it's based on the Free Time framework. Align, Design, Assign. So the primary diagnostic is where are you experiencing friction versus flow? Even now, as you're listening to this episode, really think about an area that's important to you that you know for sure you want to be a big strategic focus for you in the year ahead. And you might want to pause as I walk you through the Free Time framework because each of the three stages has three subparts to it or sections. Conjure in your mind an area right now that's experiencing friction that you know for sure you don't want to drop altogether. Of course that's a huge way to free your time is just to say no, stop sailing the sea of shiny shoulds. But for the sake of this exercise, bring an area to mind that's important. But you're currently experiencing friction and in the year ahead you would be delighted. And so Much happier. Maybe it would benefit everybody around you if you could transition this area to a greater state of flow.

Stage 1 alignment 3 parts values how can you operationalize and express what makes you and your company unique in this area? Energy. What energizes you most and how can you clear more space for it? And strengths. What are your biggest strengths as an individual and as a company? What bottlenecks are getting in the way of expressing these? And even if we hearken back to pivot, what superpowers could you double down on to help you move this area from friction to flow?

Then we move to Stage two, Design three Parts Outcomes what are your ideal outcomes for this area? What does success look like? How will you define intrinsic success? No matter the results.

You also want to look at Impact. What will this area help your ideal audience achieve? What will they thank you for? Maybe there's an impact on your personal life. And the third part of the design stage is process. What is your ideal process for this project or friction area? How can you shift from friction toward flow? How can you tackle the work or project related to this in a more intentional, streamlined or even automated way? Stage 3 the final stage the final piece of the Free Time Framework assignment. Who will do what by when? Who will own this project process and the results? Is there a way to hire a who who isn't you? What are the final deliverables? What aspects will the project owner or anyone on your team need your input or sign off on before continuing? And then when? When will you start delegating in this area? When will the designated work be complete or is it recurring and working backward? When are the major milestones due along the way?

To give you a personal example, I was experiencing a ton of friction having a cluttered home, and I realized that I could try to ignore it, but I could only ignore it for so long. And then the physical piles and clutter started to bother me so much that I worked through this framework on my own for a personal area because I knew that it would really free my mind and my energy for the more important work that I would rather be focusing on. So I tried to understand what's important to me about a clean house. How does it affect my energy? I could clearly see that cleaning the house was not one of my bigger strengths. It wasn't something I was uniquely suited for or good at. When I thought about then moving into design. Ideal outcome the house is cleaned regularly and it's not by me. The impact this would have would be fewer fights with my husband, fewer tension Less tension for me in the mornings, coming downstairs, seeing really cluttered messy house and then thinking about process that it hadn't been working for me to just hire ad hoc cleaning people to come into the home and coordinate over text, never know who's coming when and not have a system around it. So finally I moved into the assigned stage where I hired a cleaning service. Not just one person, a service set a recurring day and time. In my case It's Fridays at 1pm When I know I don't usually have meetings or important podcast conversations and now it's set and forget it, I don't have to think about it. Of course every week I clean for the cleaner, which I used to get frustrated when I was in high school with my mom saying mom, why do I need to clean for the cleaner? And now of course I get it because there's stuff that I could really use a deep clean on, but there's so many piles and dog toys in the way that it's hard for her to even get to it. But the who will do what by when is that the cleaner will come every Friday at 1pm and if they can't make it, the cleaning service brings and schedules someone else in their place. It's not perfect, but this is a system that works. And the best part is that I know rain or shine, whether I feel like it or not, somebody is going to show up on Fridays. Now sometimes I cancel. We don't always need it four weeks a month. But I will tell you that I wake up on Saturday mornings with my coffee and my newspaper so much happier because I'm in a clean home. So even if it devolves into chaos from Monday through Thursday evening and I spend a lot of Friday running around cleaning for the cleaner, this has created so much more flow in how I help manage the household while running the business.

The third and final strategy for this episode on setting your time free is is intentional calendar design. It is now a cliche of the time management productivity space, to cite Parkinson's Law. But I just cannot help myself here. This is the adage that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. I remember first reading this in Tim Ferriss book the Four Hour Workweek. Such a game changer when that first came out. Turns out this term was coined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in a humorous essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955. Isn't that interesting? I didn't know how old this term was, but you never know. Tim cites a lot of stoics and Greek Philosophers. All right, well, this one's 1955. Is it a coincidence that it's just as we were doing more and more office work and more and more knowledge work, and then computers were kind of starting to make their way, and the Internet hadn't yet gone mainstream, of course, but now this is really, really true. And not just that work expands to fill the time allotted. Meetings expand to fill the time allotted. Time on our phone expands to fill the time allotted. Design your calendar now and be aggressive for the year ahead. Here's what I mean by that. And I've talked about this before, so I apologize if it's a repeat. But if it is a repeat and you've heard it, I would ask you, have you done it? Block your time now. Now, if you don't want to have meetings on Mondays and Fridays, even if you work in an office, you could try to coordinate with your team to have no meeting Mondays or no meeting Fridays. It doesn't mean you're not working, but it means that those days are perfectly set up for you to have deep, focused time. Paul Graham wrote the famous essay on the maker's schedule versus the manager schedule, and he talks about how as soon as there's one meeting on your calendar, the entire day starts to revolve around it. Not only that, it is nearly impossible to go from a mode of being in meetings and calls into the deep work of making and creating. So from now, I want you to block your calendar. If you don't want meetings on Mondays and Fridays, put a recurring DNS block. Do not schedule for yourself. Half of what we're protecting here is protecting your calendar from you. Okay, so recurring DNS, maybe you only want to do it on Fridays. That's fine. Anything I tell you in this third strategy, modify it to fit what you need. But I want to give you permission to be aggressive here, to overly block your calendar so that month by month, you are making exceptions in the moment for what's joyful. It's not by nature a free for all, for anyone and everyone to schedule you where you're simply reacting to all these requests. And then the week comes and your future self goes, what were you thinking? I don't want to do half this stuff. So if you were being maximally aggressive, if you were designing your calendar to fit your time goal that we determined in strategy number one on setting your time goal, how would you need to block your calendar and do that now? Because if you wait too long, it already starts filling up. It's like a snowball and it just accelerates away from you and runs all the way down the hill and then it's gone. And it's really hard to walk it back because you have to then start moving things, canceling things. Then you're writing a check that your future self doesn't want to cash. Start now. Be aggressive and it was nerve wracking the first time I did this. It was nerve wracking because I go, oh no, there aren't very many windows for people to schedule calls Tuesday through Thursday, 11 to 2pm it's just fewer inventory now. And you know what? Nothing fell apart. I was just so much happier. In my case, as I mentioned, Mondays and Fridays have a DNS. There are schedule blocks that I tell my team member, anyone who's on my team helping me, that I program in Calendly, where typically I don't schedule meetings before 11 or after 2. Again, I make exceptions just like anybody, but I do it in the moment when it's really intentional. So those are my meeting windows. I also block the day after every major holiday because I found that it's much more fun not to have to go back to work when everybody else does. As I said, I block the month of August and I block mid December through mid January. Block your calendar now. You will thank me later. There you have it. 3 strategies to set your time free in 2023 Set a time goal. Fill in a strategic goal based on moving from friction to flow through the free time framework and be aggressive with your calendar design a year in advance.

What did I miss? How are you going to set your time free in the year ahead? I would love to know. As always, you can leave me a voice memo@itsfreetime.com ask. That's itsfreetime.com ask. And if you want even more accountability and support working through these principles, these practices, I would love for you to join us in my private BFF community. You can learn more@itsfreetime.com.

Happiest holidays everybody. Happy New Year and see you on the flip side.

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