207: Geeking Out on Client-Facing Pages + Favorite Notion Templates with Karen Allen

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We've probably said dynamic a hundred times in this, but that really is the best word to describe just how robust this system is and how robust you can actually create your individual systems.

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. I am so excited to be here today again with Karen Allen. Karen is a super mom, healthy eater, keynote speaker and the founder of the 100% Heal Human movement, helping others develop a mindset of joy and abundance through her community. We met through her hosting of the in the Details podcast. We hit it off so much we set up a follow up conversation for free time. You can listen to that in episode 191 on structuring free Time as a single parent and behind the scenes we've been geeking out about Notion this whole time because you know I love it and Karen also loves it so much that when she sent me the in the Details memo to say my my episode was live with me as a guest, it was in this beautifully laid out Notion page, so well organized and.

I just thought it would be great.

To chat with Karen and go behind the business a little bit. So Karen, welcome back to the show.

Oh thank you so much for having me Jenny. Every time we get together I love how we just nerd out about these things that actually make our life easier. And now by sharing them, hopefully we're making your listeners lives easier as well.

Yes, that's always the hope. I feel like whether it's a book or a podcast episode, if I or somebody listening gets one thing out of it like just one new idea or one game changing tip or system or strategy to try it's success.

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

One of the things that dashboarders, the freetime notion, operations, dashboard and even people who are considering becoming a dashboarder ask about is do I have client facing templates? And the answer is yes. But I have to say, I think you leverage client facing templates, as in collaborative pages with your clients, even more than I do. And so that's what I really want to dive into together is what your business looked like before you started using Notion in this way. And then of course, we'll get into how you create these shared really rich pages, whether it's a consulting client, speaking client, podcast guests, or coachee. How does that sound?

Yeah, that sounds great. Let's dive into all the things.

Okay, so paint a picture of life before Notion because this is less about the tool itself, of course, but it's like, you know, how were you interacting now, looking back in hindsight, what do you see was missing? Or just you probably didn't even think about it at the time that anything was missing. With speaking and consulting clients. I just wonder if you paint us a little before picture.

I mean, one word scattered things are all over the place because. Well, I'll put it to you this way. When you're a business owner, you are constantly creating. You're not just creating whatever the service or the product is for your customer, but you're also creating different systems or tools or resources that are going to help to support that customer experience. Experience. Starting off, you know, I didn't have a business mentor. I was reading all the books that I could. But depending on, we'll say what decade it was written, you know, how much of that could I actually extract and then apply to the business. So I was literally trying everything. And because I was trying everything, it all felt very scattered. I would create things in, you know, Google Docs or some things in Canva, other things in maybe like a Google sheet. I mean it was just all over. But the one thing that I started to really gravitate towards early on, it took me a while to kind of find out what that thing was going to be. Was trying to create templates for different parts of the business. But you know, that still felt a little disjointed because I may have a standard template, for example, for a coaching client, their welcome packet, maybe some of the things that I want them to reflect on. Even at the end of our experience together, it was like they're continuation plan, right, their game plan, but every single time it had to be customized. When I stumbled on Notion, I really didn't think that it was going to be something I used as a client facing or customer facing tool. I started to use it as my second brain. And that's how I heard it introduced because I would get all of these different wonderful ideas or I would be inspired by watching a video or all of my books. As you know, I told you, free time is one of these, has ton of notes in them, highlights, you know, tabs, all of that. But I wanted to really keep all of this wealth of information in one place, not just for myself, but also so it was easy to share. And so I went from using all of these different platforms to bringing everything under one umbrella. Now I still use Canva. I love Canva for some things that need to be designed. But I found that I can create pages in notion that are easy to share as a follow up to a speaking engagement or as a touch point for a coaching client. I started to use it in that way and now it is actually, you know, expanded. The way that I can serve individuals, but also streamlined for myself and my team. The way we're producing this information, usually we, you know, maybe produce it once, maybe a couple of small tweaks or iterations, but for the most part, once we create it that one time, it's ready to go over and over again.

You showed me a great example before we hit record. That was for a consulting client where you're giving them a roadmap, what you're going to do together, learning objectives. Down at the bottom, there's a database embedded in the page. That's one of the things I love is you can have all these different formats. I saw you had an inspirational video and a YouTube video that was embedded. You could play right there in the page and then all these resources. One question I have, do you ever worry that the client, whether it's a speaking client, podcast, guest, et cetera, coachee, is notion resistant? They're like, what is this new software? I don't know what this is, or I don't know how to log in. Have you ever had problems with that where people can't see it or they get frustrated in the beginning trying to collaborate with you on it?

This was going to be a true test of that, actually the one that I showed you. So that's a really, really great question to give your listeners a little bit of background. So I started to work with a local AAU organization. They asked me if I could do some mindset coaching for a few of their teams. And so initially I was just brainstorming with the director of basketball. And as we were talking about it again, I have so many ideas and they all end up in notion. So it was actually very easy for me to pull the different ideas, learning objectives and philosophies. And all of that, and then just bring them into one page. And the first thing was I was able to show him what the program would look like. And I put it together in maybe, I don't know, an hour or two. So the next morning after our meeting, it was in his inbox and he was like, holy moly, you did that in one night? And I was like, well, it's kind of already ready. But he was so impressed by the way that it was presented. And for me, it was easy just to pull together because it was already living in Notion. I just pulled it into one organized page. Now, from that initial overview, what I did was I realized that I wanted the parents to understand the journey, the vision, but also the journey. And I also wanted to give them access to different resources because I would only have, you know, a few minutes with the kids a couple times a week. But we know anything that we're learning or any new change that we're trying to adopt into our life, you know, that reinforced behavior happens throughout the day. And so I wanted the parents to have some resources to help them keep this conversation going when the kids weren't in the gym. So I took the same page that I showed to the director of basketball, which gave him the outline, and I just went a little bit deeper. I was able to again, talk about the philosophy up front, give an overview, program outcomes. But then, like, honestly, adding a picture up in a corner brought some kind of personality. And as you saw, putting a video in the middle just made it even more engaging. And so what I thought to myself, though, was they may not know how to use this. So one of my other favorite tools, so you don't have to hop on a call every time you need to go over something or explain something, is Loom. So what I did was I was on the page, I had it open in my browser, I recorded a loom and I said, hey, I just want to explain what this is, because a couple of the features in Notion, you know, they're not like shouting, click me, because I'm going to be a dropdown. You know, I'm a toggle and I expand. So I wanted to make sure that just by even providing a one minute video that they felt comfortable navigating that page. And one of the things I mentioned in the loom video, because this was a huge selling point for me, was you can access this on a desktop and also on your mobile device, because Notion is that user friendly. I mean, I love the user experience across all of my devices. So what really helped them was first of all, you can just have a webpage. You don't have to log into Notion to access it, but I could lock the page. So I knew none of the parents or any other, you know, user or viewer was going to mess up or disrupt the content that was there. And providing a less than 1 minute video explanation helped them to navigate it with ease. And I mean, they were all so happy to see that. And it's actually a living, breathing document because as you mentioned at the bottom, I have resources there available for the athletes, for coaches, for parents. You know, I even use different labels so they can see what it is and for whom it applies. And so just that alone is a dynamic piece of the page that I can add to. And so now that they're familiar, they're comfortable, and it really doesn't take a lot for you to access it. This has been one of the favorite parts of the program is them just really having a clear vision of what we're doing, how we're doing it, and resources that will help to support their athletes learning.

Well, that's something that we were also saying before we hit record, is that it makes our lives so much easier too. I remember the very first two Notion pages that blew my mind because when I first saw it, it was just a blinking cursor on a blank page. And I just go, it's just another tool. You know, I was underwhelmed and I really didn't know where to start and I didn't know what was possible. And by the way, this whole conversation, this is not like sales pitch for Notion. It's. I don't have an affiliate link or anything.

It's just, it's a personal obsession. Right, Jenny?

Yes, it is a personal passion and obsession also because it's saving so much time. And I think that yes, there are competing tools. You're welcome to use any one of those. We're going to see a lot more tools adding all this type of functionality. But the game changer for me was two things. One, I collaborated on a page with a friend on saying no. And the whole page was about us getting better at saying no. But as we built it out, we had quotes, we had like quote blocks, we had a database of good responses we'd seen other people send to say no. We had videos, we've had podcast clips. Like, the page itself became so dynamic as this resource that was helping us build a skill. And then the other one I created, and that's like sort of embarrassing. It's part of A paid course, but maybe I'll link to it in the show notes called Heart of Podcasting. Just like the use case you're describing for a consulting client. I ended up kind of whipping this together for my students. And the page was so full. What I liked was that, as you said, without having to build a whole website notion, you can create it really quickly. But then it makes a big impact because there's so much there and it's all in the right format. So instead of a link to a Spotify episode, it's embedded right there. You can just hit play. That's what I love, is that you don't have to leave. The client doesn't have to leave, even if, like you said, they're just looking at it in a web browser.

Exactly, exactly. And I love how you mentioned that because I did the same thing. I'm building out a masterclass right now, and I decided that instead of creating a whole sales page because my website is also currently under development, but I had done this before, and it was so much fun creating and it was so well received by people who I just like, was showing it to. I'm like, how do you feel about this? Instead of a very long, lengthy sale sales page, which again, there is space for that, but for me, I was like, I want to be able to send this in an email to my list and just say, hey, check this out if you're interested. I don't want it to be overwhelming, if you will. And so I created this sales page for my masterclass and it is so succinct. It is so to the point. It has links to other resources or even downloads if they have questions about it. You can make it pretty by adding a graphic in there, but it's just feels like a very clean and condensed way to convey your thoughts or helpful information for whoever's on the receiving end. For me, that's why it's been also so helpful.

We'll be right back just after this.

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As you were talking in the beginning, I had an aha moment because still to this day, with potential speaking clients, I have like three page details of the event and also an agreement. It's not a heavy legal document because that ends up kicking you the can over to procurement and then you're in hell for four months or to their legal team. So it's like a very streamlined Google Doc that I ask them to fill out the details and then they agree to the payment date and terms and we sign it. But I'm thinking to myself, you know, this would go really well in notion because I have things like my bio or sample talk descriptions and it would be formatted even better if it was in notion. And a lot of corporate clients don't even know what to do with Google talks. Like I hate to say it, but even that can be tricky. So I don't know, I'm kind of curious. What I like about experimenting in this direction is that instead of having so many files, even if they're in the cloud, in Google Drive, they're still all separate. Whereas if I had a database, which I do, called active speaking clients or active coaching clients, you and I get to see all our clients in one place easily copy, paste, move blocks around, reference other cards or data or information across the business brain. And then within the card that's proprietary, that's kind of just for us of details, planning the event. I even save all our communications. I have little checklists to prepare for the day of. Then within that you can make a page that you and the client both see and then that's the shared page. So I used to have that in a Google Doc when I was doing one on one coaching. Once I started using Notion around the same time I also stopped taking one on one clients. So I would love to hear how you found it helpful to have you and your client share a page. So let's say now we're moving on past corporate and now it's a one on one individual.

I love how you mentioned that about corporate because we have in my speaking page as well the whole outline of the client experience. So the pre event questionnaire is in there, the pre event call and my standard questions, even are in there. Now, whenever I click new client, everything populates with that template. So we have all the different steps in the process. And you're right, we can create pages that are just available for the client to see. And so with coaching, I have my clients in there and I have notes, maybe from the session, maybe from previous sessions. I also have standardized templates like welcoming someone or if somebody is up for renewal, you know, if they would like to pursue all of these things. It's like they are personalized before you hit send, but for the most part, everything that you need is just right there at your fingertips in the template. And so one of the things that I really enjoyed about this was having that separate piece for the client, because that's where you can share resources. For example, I have a coaching client and you know, we were talking about something and it spurred a book that they should read. Well, I would go and find the book on Amazon, I would bring it over to their page and I would drop it right there for them. And the thing is, is they can save this notion page and anytime we've talked about something, whether it is a resource or even if it's just something I said, and they're like, oh, I need to remember that, boom, I'll put it right there in the page for them. So anything that they need is available at their fingertips. And I don't know about you, but like most of my clients or you said you don't do one on one anymore. But I know the folks you work with, same class, they got a lot going on. And having to search through email can take up too much time or what was that thing? And trying to remember what was said, that wastes a lot of time and energy for us as well. So to create this catch all page, if you will, again, it could be for resources, it could be a podcast episode that you embed in there. And then the other thing I love about this is it may not just happen in a coaching call, but I could be doing anything. I could be, you know, randomly sitting in the car line getting ready to pick up my son and I'll get an idea for a client. And now again, because the user experience is so well done on every single device, I could be on my phone, grab the link, drop it into the client and it is right there, embedded, bookmarked and available for them. And I just randomly had that thought and I don't have to wait to get back to my computer to put it in there. Let me tell you, that time save alone is worth the mental space.

Yes. And getting off email, because like Slack, at least in Notion, and again, insert whatever other tool can do the same things, but within that page. Let's say you drop in a link for them and let's say it is a YouTube video or a Spotify link.

You.

You can from your phone hit embed, so then it's right there so they don't have to open something separate. And then you can reply them. So you can say, Aaron just dropped this, just saw this and thought of you. And then you would even get notified on your device, like if you have the Notion app downloaded or the next time you log in, in the upper left there's a little update section. And I find that so helpful. I now collaborate with our podcast production team entirely through Notion, with my team, but then with clients, I have done it. I have done Voxer coaching in the past, which I might be opening up again soon. So I'll put the link in the show notes just in case. That's where people get to submit a question Monday through Thursday, and I answer everybody on the Friday by end of day Friday. And so we're trading a lot back and forth within Voxer, but I also create a shared page Voxer. There's a button you can click to transcribe an audio message, which I love. That's partly why I love Voxer. You can copy and paste that into Notion. I do it when I'm the coachee. And then what I like about Notion, even over Google Docs, is you can still have a table of contents. Let's say there's a page or a sub database of meeting notes. You can still organize if it gets long and unwieldy. But then within a session's meeting notes, you can have checkboxes, so you can have subtasks where here's your homework and create those as actionable box checkable things. You know, it's just like a little more dynamic because as you said, clients are really busy as well, and they want to be able to reference back everything we've talked about, everything we've shared. As I recently learned at being the coachee, getting coached is one thing, but implementing it is quite another.

That takes time.

Takes time, absolutely.

And if we can just organize that for our clients, coaching clients, or corporate clients again, that makes a more enjoyable experience. That was the whole reason I started the podcast guest page, because being a guest on other people's podcasts when they asked me to share, and I am happy to share, it does take me quite a bit of Time to think back. Okay, what did we talk about? Or okay, let me write this in a post and. All right, what else should. What hashtag should? I mean, it was just taking way too much mental energy. And so as I was thinking about being on the receiving end, I decided, you know what, let me just streamline this whole process for my guests so they can go right to this one page. They can get their pictures, the social media pictures that have been created. They can pull whatever link is most, you know, preferable, whether it's on Google, on Apple podcasts, you know, whatever they use, or their audience. And then some copy using table of contents. As soon as the guest opens up the page, they see a little note from me and then there's a table of contents and they can skip over to the section that is best for them, that they need to utilize something that's going to make their life easier. But I just knew that being on the receiving end of being a guest, that it does take several steps and brain power. And we're all out here working very, very hard on our craft and in our careers. And so if there was just one thing I could do to make that lift lighter, that was the whole goal.

And.

And I love how you mentioned that as well. The whole process here, it's really just about streamlining it for ourselves, for our clients, so that way we can have more time and more energy to serve in our greatest capacity, which is always in our flow zone.

Something else I appreciate too is it's searchable. So let's say you're working with a client and you remember, oh, we had similar homework or resources I shared two years ago with another client. I like that within notion. It all talks to each other. It's all searchable. Technically, I guess that would be possible in Google Drive, but I don't find it nearly as easy to just kind of click around and find what I need.

And now wait, do you use Notion for personal things as well?

Oh, I do, yes, yes, yes. I actually want to hear how you use it for personal, because I know some people. I learned Notion from Marie Poulain. She is just a wizard at how she uses it for personal Everything from gardening to grocery shopping to meal planning to health and metrics tracking. I mean, it's just incredible. And my friend Emelia as well, I don't go that far, but I do have some key databases, like financial. I have a Profit first database that calculates when a check comes in, how I'm going to distribute it. I also have my gusto Payments of when I'm going to pay my team because I don't want anyone else on my team to see that. So that's impersonal. And even fitness tracking. I track like peloton classes that I love or at one time I had a database of cycling PRs for different class durations. That's like really nerdy. I just got so detailed, but I haven't done that one recently.

How about you? What's.

What are some of your favorite?

Well, that's the thing, right is I thought it was just going to be a business tool and I was like, oh no, this is a blessing for all areas of my life. Gosh. Some of my personal favorites, definitely my simple budget as you were talking about like the finance. It's such a good way to make sure things that aren't auto pay, you know, are taken care of. But also to look back month over month. That has been really, really good. My journal, because I do like writing but I type a lot faster than I write. So keeping a journal and it's a template because it starts with things I'm grateful for and then intentions and then just a flow of thoughts. And so with those three sections it always helps me to really ground myself. But I will say that the two that I find I use the most often is there's one, a cookbook database. Because I mean Jenny, we've talked about this like even eating, if we can streamline how we're eating or how we're deciding what we're going to eat, that again it just helps to free up some mental space. I always forget the different things that I like to cook. And then I just, you know, get in a cycle of like three things. I'm like, I know I have more than that. And so since I don't have the good old fashioned cookbook, you know where you would write down on your recipe cards and I don't know, maybe our parents still have theirs but I decided to digitize that. So my cookbook is there and then the other one is a medical directory which was so helpful because I have my dentist, my son, our primary care, his orthodontist, like all of these. And I have their names there, their phone number, just everything that I would need because again, if I'm looking for something, last minute notion just seems to be that one stop shop for me where I can go there. And I know that everything I need is right here and organized in a way as you mentioned, that's easy to find.

I do the same thing. I have cards for the vet, doctor, dentist, et cetera. And then within that I have a sub database that says last appointment and then next appointment. So I'm actually tracking, I know when anyone in the family saw whomever last and any prescriptions. So I have like the doctor's name, a date field and then notes, and that's where I keep notes. And then when I make the next appointment, I put that in there and I set a reminder. Because in notion, if you select a date and assign it to a person, it can remind you so that. Yeah, I do the same thing. On that front, I want to hear more about your nature. Daily journaling, is it a database called Journal and then are you creating a card for every single entry that then has a template? I love that there's a template involved even in this. Yes, yes.

So what I did was I started off with one template and it's called Daily Reflection in that it has the intentions, what I'm grateful for, flow of thought. And I also forgot there's also action items. Because if I'm journaling then something comes up. I'm like, oh, I should do that. So from the daily template, which is just a card on its own, I just duplicate it. Which again is another reason why I love notion. It makes it so easy to duplicate something. I will duplicate it every single day. I will date it. And yep, I go through those four prompts and. And the other thing is again, in notion, when you create these different tables, there are different labels for each. So you can tag it, you can put a topic, you know, and so what I do is I always put the date because if I wanted to go back, not only will it search for, if I want to search for a word, but right now it's organizing it by date as well. Now people are like, well, if you write in a journal, of course it's going to be organized. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. I know that, I get that. But there's something about just being able to pop back to a date or a time and reflect on where I was during that time that I really enjoy. And it's easy because it's right at my fingertips. So yeah, my daily reflection is a part of my notion experience.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I'm not doing it anymore, but at one point I had a database. It was like a meta database called Daily Agenda and all it was was relations to every other database and for anyone who's not a notion, customer, user. I hate the word user, but I'll tell you what I mean by that. Basically I would like at reply different cards so I would have a field for free time, podcast, pivot podcast, fitness tracker tasks, even medical professionals. And like I would plan my day even story worthy. So I have a collection bucket that I call synthesis, whatever you call it, ideas collection bucket. And I would have a line for that as well. And then what I could do is pull in the card that was relevant. So like today if I had an interview with you, I'd pull in the Karen Ellen card in the free time row. And then if I have a Pivot podcast conversation and then I had open fields for highlight of the day I did the like rows thorn, whatever. You know something I learned I don't do it anymore. But that was fun because it was kind of my way to pull in the relevant data that I wanted to look at that day and keep a record of how did that day go? Just something small to fill in. Almost like a. What do they call those journals? The five year journal where you just write one sentence a day but it shows you the last five years for that day.

Yes, I love that. And you know you mentioned earlier about like checking things off. That was in my own weekly planner, if you will. So my Monday through Friday I would have my tasks and then I would have personal tasks and so I would check. And it feels so good to just check those things off, to have it in front of you, but then also to check it off. And underneath that week I have this rolling task list. So anything that's just on my mind goes into that. There's a status, there's a priority, there's even a target date. And so when I'm filling in my weekly planner, if I pull something up from that rolling task, I always Feel like I'm making some kind of progress going forward. But in that space, it also helps me to link back to. If I have a coaching call, then I will just connect who it's with. If I have a speaking engagement or I'm even preparing for a speaking engagement, I would just at whatever it is and it points back to that page. So, again, I mean, we've probably said dynamic a hundred times in this episode, but that really is the best word to describe just how robust this system is and how robust you can actually create your individual systems.

Is there any area that you have your eye on next to optimize where you're like, oh, just wait till I get my hands on this, or just something in the business that's causing friction and sorry, everyone, for the drilling that's going on in the backyard as I record this. It's a metaphor for drilling down into our business systems as we're doing today.

Anything? I'm thinking, I don't know, I feel like we have to do a notion swap. Jenny, I'm like, what you said, there's so many good things. Like, I would love to see that, you know, there was a creator and gosh, her name slips my mind. Anyway, I looked at on YouTube and going onto YouTube and just looking up notion templates is a really fun thing for me. I know it sounds very nerdy, but I think right now that the biggest thing that is on the forefront of my mind is just making sure that my notion is tight. I think that's the best way to put it. It can be extremely robust and overwhelming. So what I've actually done in the last month is I've gone back through to look at the different pages and ask myself, which one of these are you really using? Which one of these are you still using? For example, there are coaching clients that I'm no longer working with. I had to pull them out of the current database. And this is for several pages. I've done this for several pages in. My notion is to create an archive bucket because I really only want to see what's currently happening and I do like to hold on to things. I think it's important, you know, to have historical reference of things. And I always have good ideas, but maybe it's not for the right time. So just cleaning up notion and making sure that really is streamlined and not cluttered. And the biggest thing that's helped me in the past month is definitely creating those little archive pages.

Yes, I'm a fan of that too, because it's too Scary to delete something completely. So just drag it down into the archive, it goes away. And Notion's really forgiving. I remember Marie saying something about that, that it's very forgiving. You can make mistakes, you can recover older versions of a page, you can pull things out of the trash. It's not the end of the world. So it is the kind of thing that you kind of have to play around with. And just like you, I'm so glad you said that because I wouldn't have thought of that. But it's true that when I was first using Notion, I would create like six databases for what actually only needs to be one. And doing the work of consolidating actually and just getting things tighter is such a good way to put it.

Oh my gosh. I just actually thought about this though. This might be another show. Have you started using the AI tool in Notion?

A little bit. I've been more impressed by GPT4. Sorry, Notion, where I do use GPT4 a lot to help me brainstorm content or answer questions. I have an episode, I don't know the exact timing. I think it comes out before this one. On the 10 most creative ways that I've been leveraging GPT for in notion, I do it a little bit. I'll say summarize this page or, you know, create the action items, because I know that it can do that. But I haven't been as blown away like, oh my God, that just saved me an hour by whatever it created. It is impressive though. It is going from zero to one. Like, it's definitely adding something that I think is going to get more and more powerful over time. How about you? Have you used it?

I'm using them in tandem, so I've been using them together. And when you were saying, oh, you know, what is next? It is figuring out a little more of how that can help streamline the process. And one of the ways is, as you just mentioned, it's like, oh, summarize this page. Or, you know, what are some bullet points from. But the other thing is, with my podcast guests, we usually receive professional bio, but taking that long, professional bio, putting it in the page because each guest has their own page, asking Notion to summarize the bio and then changing the tone of it. I find that a lot easier and much more user friendly than going over to GPT4.

I do the same thing. We have a really in depth podcast guest template, like podcast prep template. And the other thing, when you said bio, I have a page that I call short Bios, even though now some of them are long. Every time I have to modify my bio to send to someone that they go, give me three sentences or we need 150 words or whatever it is, or I modify it for a certain company that's different for a different company. I just now keep them all in one notion page. And so when I need a bio, I search for short bios. I go and I grab what I need because even I'm part of groups where they want like a fun bio and I don't need to sound so fancy. And so I just have a record of all these bios that live everywhere that I can leverage, I can use.

I love it.

Thinking about corporate got me to say leverage.

Oh my gosh. There was one other thing I wanted to say about this. Speaking of what we want to tackle next. If you are listening to this and you have something that you are so proud of yourself about that sparks joy every day, some system that you've created or page database in notion, will you please let us know? I'm always trying to get people to leave me a voice memo for your favorite time saving system, but that would give all of us new things that we could experiment with.

So you could always leave a voice.

Memo, go to itsfreetime.com ask or record it on your phone and send it to hitime.com with that. Karen, let's give people one tiny experiment they could try and then the permission slip. What do you want to give people permission to just stop doing altogether?

Mm.

You know, something to try is if you think about an area of your business that takes a lot of time and it's usually because it has multiple steps. Think about how you could bring that into. We'll just say a system like notion, but you know, this is definitely off of. What I learned from Jenny, from you, my friend, is you can systematize a lot more than you think. So just pick one little thing. For me, it was definitely, how can I get all of these things out of my head and into another place for safekeeping? That right there was a good system to put in place and then it grew from there. So that is the one thing I would say for the homework and then permission. Oh. There was a time where I think I might have mentioned this in our last conversation, but I could not afford to even give myself vitamins because it seemed like a luxury. And I know that being in that space where we have to be very frugal and we want to be, you know, good stewards of the money that we have. It's important. It is important. But I want you to give yourself permission to invest in the systems that are going to support your overall well being. And now a lot of times we will invest in other things, but I think that, at least in my experience investing, I don't know, $8 a month or $12 a month in a system that helps me to then be more present in other areas of life. Those are definitely some of the best investments that I've ever made. It gives me more time to be with myself or to work out or to be with my son or friends. And having that kind of support in a system is something that all business owners or even leaders or I would even say, if you're the boss of your household, if you're running a household, give yourself permission to invest in systems that will support you.

Absolutely. And the household one is adulting is what has the most annoying stuff, you know, like who wants to remember to make a dentist appointment? Nobody. Nobody wants to have to think about that. And I love what you said. I love this permission slip to invest in software because counterintuitively, I've had people tell me that they've been able to consolidate how many team members they need. Sorry, team members. I hope you find new things, you know, but it's like you don't necessarily have to have as much help that you're paying a whole lot more money for. If things are streamlined and focused and you're clear on what you're doing and be like, then it creates less chaos in the business and then it's more manageable even on the personnel side of who you're working with and how, and how much time that's gonna take. Cause that can get very expensive.

Absolutely.

Well, this was such a joy. Karen, if you're still here, as my friend Neil calls it, the end of the podcast club, and you have fully nerded out with us this whole time, we would love to hear from you. Send us a voice memo. Hi'sfreetime.com or visit itsfreetime.com Ask and Karen, where can people find you if they wanna listen to more of your great, great stuff?

Oh yes, you can hop over to the website karenallen.co. you'll find everything there. You'll find good resources for life, for work, and most importantly, you will just find something for you. So that is my hope for anybody who visits the website. Head on over to KarenAllen. CO. Yay.

And you can hear that professional second read. She also has a podcast, so don't forget to search for in the details wherever you're listening to this one. Thank you Karen Big thanks everybody for being here listening.

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 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.

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