172: Free Time Isn’t Just for the Fun Days

With Venmo Stash a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more, pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Stash Terms.

Free time is not just for the fun days. It's also for the days that you really need it. The days where you cannot imagine talking to anyone, where you don't even have the energy to cancel your calls.

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.

Free time isn't Just for the fun Days Building on last week's episode, Imagine a World of Abundance, this week, I want to talk about another important aspect of free time. The phrase itself connotes leisure, fun, time off vacation, like we're skipping through meadows with butterflies and unicorns. But as you know, if you've been listening for a while, if you've read the book, I think of free time as a verb. It is a skill, it's a muscle that we can build, and it's something we can get better at in terms of creating smarter systems where we take small steps today that free our time far into the future. In my world, free time is not just leisure time. It's not just time where we're twiddling our thumbs or even doing something fun. It's a way of thinking, how do we continually improve our skills at freeing our time? And what are you freeing your time for? That's up to you. I often say freeing up your time so you can do more of your best work. But sometimes you don't want to do any work at all. Free time is definitely a luxury and a privilege. There's no doubt about it. Any of you who have small kids, you would know that grabbing those little windows that you have to be alone to be in quiet. I've had friends say just Taking a hot shower is a luxury at that stage of raising kids. It can also be about building in buffer margin, spaciousness. And that's so important because we all know life is unpredictable. We have no clue what's going to get thrown our way. We don't know when we're going to catch a cold or the flu or some other health related concern for ourselves or a family member, where you do need to drop everything and be there for yourself or for someone else. Creating a spacious calendar in advance allows us to be more flexible when change happens or when unexpected events occur. In episode 151 with Laura Vanderkam on calming time Chaos angel, and in her book Tranquility By Tuesday, she talks about creating backup slots. Laura says anyone can make a perfect schedule. Time management masters make resilient schedules. For her, having space in her schedule is the psychological equivalent of sitting on a large emergency fund. And that's just it. A truly agile calendar. And when I say calendar, it's really how we're spending our time. Unless you're somebody who happens to live completely calendar free, like my husband Michael, which is its own freedom to admire. An agile calendar is one that can flex and bend and that has enough abundant free time built in, not just for the fun days, but for the days when you need it. For the days where you're craving rest, for the days where you do not want to talk to anybody. Because if you've stuffed your calendar to the gills, wall to wall with meetings all week, all month, then when something unexpected happens, you have no time emergency fund, to use Laura's phrase. I'm sure you're familiar with thinking about the emergency fund when it comes to financial management and best practices, that you want to have savings and pockets of money invested and diversified in different ways and different places, so that if you have an unexpected car repair or house repair or medical bill or you want to help a family member out, you have extra so that it doesn't create stress. What happens with time is that we forget to build our time emergency fund or our time savings account from month to month. And when that happens, there can be this cascade of cancellations because in order to accommodate needing a rest day or a rest week or a rest month, we're then punished by having to deal with this domino effect of moving and shifting so many different meetings ahead into the future. And then what happens? Our future self arrives at those meetings that all got punted into the future already exhausted. So even if we end up clearing the space at the last minute in a scramble. We've just created a new problem or actually recreated the exact same problem for our future self, who is not going to be very appreciative when those days arrive. If you listen to episode 150 where I share three strategies to set your time free in 2023, I talk about all the specific ways that I create spaciousness in my calendar in advance for the year ahead and even on a recurring basis. So Mondays and Fridays are blocked off indefinitely, especially in my calendly tool where people would book meeting times. But I also block the whole month of August mid December to mid January. I block the day after national holidays. There's all kinds of things that once I realized in the moment how little I wanted to work on some of those days. Not only do I create the block in that year, but I learn I get smarter for my future self. That's that systems thinking where those calendar entries now recur annually. So that means that I'm creating more and more free time for myself in the future by default, knowing that I can make exceptions in the moment when the time comes. If there's something important that arises in episode 126 on creating time buffer, I also share seven strategies for spacious scheduling, so be sure to check that one out if you haven't already. I'll put it in the show notes Another strategy that I use is blocking off one week every month for deep work. For me, it's the fourth week of every month. Shout out to Cal Newport and I'm always so grateful when that week arrives. Every now and then I do make an exception as I mentioned and I'll add a meeting, but for the most part I need that week when it comes. And half the time I need that week for deep rest. If I'm not in a mode of deep work. If I'm not in a work sprint working on a particular project, sometimes I need it to catch up on email and communications, but a lot of times I need it so that I can do nothing at all.

We'll be right back just after this.

Hi, this is Deechen Lackman and I am here to tell you 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 fun financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more Toyota let's go places.

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 is a.

Refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season, and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.

I joked in last week's episode that my friend Stephanie said this year she feels like she's going at a turtle pace. And then I asked if I could be the snail on her turtle's back. And I'm so thankful to have given myself really spacious time and have these time boundaries set. Because it took me over a decade, if not my whole life, to get to this point where my days are not crammed totally full and to stay committed to just working a couple hours a day so that I can focus on health and family and rest and recovery and reading and taking in information. And I don't feel that I'm drowning in work or drowning in meetings. It took me a long time to get to this point. For example, as I shared last week, I've been on full time dog duty with Ryder while Michael's out of the country. And it's a lot of work in New York City because we don't have a backyard. So every time he needs to go out, which can be three to four times a day on a normal day, sometimes it becomes this big process, especially in the winter, of getting dressed, putting on my jacket, my gloves, my beanie, my boots. Not just getting ready to go out, but being in the city, talking to neighbors, being a little bit on guard. If it's at night, it's dark out and it's hard to see who and what's going on or there'll be rats scurrying across the street. So it's just a little edgier than if we would just open up a backyard door and go play Frisbee or something. One of the days last week, poor little guy was having digestion issues. I won't even say more, but I was exhausted. I was still adjusting to trying to juggle work with Ryder care, and every single time I was getting ready to record a solo episode, he would scratch the front door. Which means that he really needs to go out because you would think he would do it willy nilly just when he's bored. Somehow he learned he really doesn't. He just scratches when he really needs to go. This was a couple days in a row where right as I was about to record, right as I was about to get into the swing of work. He swipes the door and if he does it again before I'm able to get myself dressed and ready, then I really know that it's urgent. I had done all this psychological ramp up of having coffee, brainstorming, getting myself in the mood to record, but alas, dropped what I was doing and took him outside. Next thing you know, I'm on my hands and knees on the sidewalk picking up, very difficult to pick up dog droppings, let's just put it that way. This was not solid as would be expected. And people were basically just stepping over me and I just had this moment of complete frustration, exhaustion, breakdown. I just could not help but start to cry. That's another thing about New York City is you just learn to cry in public. So there I am with red eyes and I'm wiping my eyes and you know, there's neighbors around, there's people out, it's the middle of the day and I just started crying. And that's when it really hit me, this message in particular, that free time is not just for the fun days, it's also for the days that you really need it. The days where you cannot imagine talking to anyone, where you don't even have the energy to cancel your calls. You hereby have permission to build abundant free time into your calendar, if not even setting half of it free. What would it look like if you reduced your meetings by half? What would it look like if your week could only get scheduled up to 40% full in advance? And then maybe you wait until closer to the day to add things only if and as they resonate in real time? There's a scheduling consideration or framework that I've been hearing going around lately. I don't know the original source, but when thinking of whether to say yes or no to something, it's asking, would I say yes if this was tomorrow? What if we didn't schedule so much out into the future? What if we said to other people, you know, I keep my schedule pretty loose? Or right now I'm working on keeping a very spacious schedule, but I'm outside walking with my dog every day around 2pm so feel free to try me anytime. Now obviously that's a little loosey goosey for some people. Some of you wouldn't enjoy or appreciate that. But on the other hand, it's a fun experiment and it does leave your calendar more open. And then in the moment when a person is calling you, I know nobody does that these days anymore, you can decide whether to pick up or not, whether to call them back or not. And also, it's not a zoom meeting by default, they're calling you on the phone. It's at a time where you're not in the middle of deep work because you give them a time window where it's time for calls. It's not your peak energy and creativity. And then you can be a little more spontaneous, a little more loose, a little more agile with your calendar and with your time. Of course, if you have a lot of phone tag, that can be frustrating and a time drain in and of itself, but I've been experiencing this a lot less lately. As I've said in previous episodes, sometimes I'll even automatically suggest that we move to something asynchronous like Voxer or Marco Polo just so I don't hold up a conversation. I get asked a lot from friends and mutual friends about book advice, how to get an agent, write a proposal, get a book deal, which type of publishing to go through. Now some of those I turn into podcast episodes as another nod to asynchronous helping and helpfulness. But for a lot of those inquiries where they're looking for some input, especially if I'm in a moment where I am kind of full calendar wise, but I genuinely want to be helpful to this person, I will either create a public facing resource, there's a ton in the author toolkit, or on this podcast and when I suggest Vox or Marco Polo, it's great because they can submit their question, I'm able to leave a really warm response. You can also use vocaroo.com if you want to do this just through your browser. That way they don't need to sign up for a new app or service if they don't already use these. There you can be helpful, but it just doesn't have to happen in real time. I'm able to do that and respond based on my own availability, and it also means I don't compromise in terms of adding what my friend Sarah calls tiny boxes on the calendar. As always, I would love to know what works best for you in terms of keeping a very abundant, spacious calendar so that you have free time, free energy. You can leave me a voice memo anytime at hi time.com or visit itsfreetime.com ask thank you so much for listening. 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.