220: The One Thing You Should Do Now for Next Summer

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I broke my own rule this summer and for the last few weeks I've been kicking myself saying, how could I do this? I know better. I wrote a book called Free Time. Well, as I say in the book, business stress is a systems problem.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? And 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.

So before I tell you about the rule I broke and the systems and reminders that I put in place now to make sure I don't make the same mistakes again next year, I want to cordially invite you to an upcoming bonus workshop for the BFF community. As some of you know, I've planted little seeds. I started a secret substack this summer. It's a paid substack which I'm finding to be incredibly refreshing and energizing, called Rolling in Divine Disaster Diaries from a breadwinning business owner living in New York City. If you want to check it out, visit itsfreetime.com secret and you can peruse the two months of archives that are up there. So far and part of this process, I've been having a few calls with Linda LeBrun from their writer partnerships team. Linda is specifically working on getting more business writers onto the platform and she graciously agreed to do a Q and A with the BFF community on September 7th at noon. She's going to walk us through Substack's goals as a company. The types of writers and creators they're most interested in working with monetization strategies that are working best ideas for how to leverage their network and community to grow your platform. I have to say it's the most fun I've had online since 15 years ago. Early blogging days for the first time in 15 years, I feel that there is a place now that has grown enough that has comments and likes and replies where with a really engaged intellectual community of people who appreciate good writing and it's so rewarding. I have not been this happy with new software since I started doing a real deep dive into notion in 2019 and early 2020. So if you want to join us for this Q and A on substack on September 7th, I would love for you to join us in BFF. You can visit itsfreetime.com BFF to learn more and enter Promo Code Podcast for a discount on your first month of enrollment. That's its freetime.com BFF and by the way, if you're listening to this far into the future, as soon as you join you'll have access to all the archives. That includes a bonus workshop on certification and licensing with Pamela Slim. It includes this substack Q and A and a bonus podcast episode that I release every single month solely for the BFF community. We also have a forum where you can exchange ideas and feedback with fellow heart based business owners, a live monthly Q and A call with me, and so much more. So once again, that's itsfreetime.com BFF promo code podcast. And if you want to check out my new secret substack, although I'm starting to say it more and more, that's itsfreetime.com secret and it's called Rolling In Divine Disaster Diaries from a breadwinning business owner living in New York City.

Now back to my big business mistake. I mean, there's much bigger mistakes that could have been made, but this is one where I should have could have known better. It's mid August and I have a podcast interview scheduled for 1pm that is prime time for summer sun. I live in New York City. My office is already a sauna. I'm sweating. The sun is beating directly down through the windows because my office happens to face south. So as the sun moves towards setting in the west, my office just becomes increasingly unbearable. And fellow podcasters will know that you can't turn on AC during an interview. Or of course the mic is going to pick that up. The jangling and clicking and clanking and noises of the ac or even a fan. Some of my friends have even taken to recording with an ice pack sitting in their laps. And on this day I had forgotten about that technique. So I take a big deep inhale as I turn off the fans in my room. I bring in my ice water where the cup is already sweating onto my desk desk and I close the windows and I just Brace myself for the Bikram Yoga of podcasting, saying, never again. Never again will I do this. Where here I am in the middle of a swelteringly hot afternoon, no fans, no ac, and I need to sit here. Thank goodness I don't keep video on when I record podcast interviews, although increasingly everyone else seems to be doing that for, quote, content on the socials. I just told myself I have to remember my own rule next year. That rule, no meetings in August. So as soon as I hung up from that interview, thankfully it went okay. I set a reminder for next year to update my calendly availability for podcast interviews three months in advance, because my calendar shows 90 days ahead. And I realized that I would have to adjust my availability that interviews, maybe they're only at 10 or 11am in the summer. So in May or June at the very latest, I need to change my calendly availability and I need to block off August, which I had already done this year, but I kind of encroached upon my do not schedule my DNS blocks. I just thought, what's one more week in August? Okay, what's a second week in August? Why don't I just keep going? I'm doing fine. Well, that's me earlier in the year. That's spring Jenny. Which has nothing to do with summer. Jenny, summer is not my season. Hand me a puffy coat and I'm blissed out. I don't care if it's 7 degrees out, 15 degrees out. I am happy. Me and my puffer. The streets are clear. Nobody's out. Well, in New York City in the summer, it's hot. The concrete is sweltering. I'm sweating. I don't like wearing shorts and summery kinds of clothes. I am just a total grump. So I invented a new term for myself for certain summer moods, and that's thangry. Tired, hot, and angry. That is summer Jenny. She's not me at my best. And so I had set a DNS block for all of August, as I talk about in free time, as I've even talked about on the podcast before, but with it being a slow year in business, I just steamrolled right over it. Steam, sauna, summer, pun intended. In fact, new research shows in the New York Times, they say if you find that the blistering, unrelenting heat is making you anxious and irritable, even depressed, it's not all in your head. Soaring temperatures can damage not just the body, but also the mind. And they cite a landmark study from last year that analyzed data on more than 2 million people with private insurance, finding that emergency department visits for mental illnesses were significantly higher during the five or six hottest days of summer compared with the coolest days of the same season.

We'll be right back just after this.

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So there is another reason that we're crankier. At least I am. I'll speak for myself. Crankier in the summer. And that's that it disrupts our sleep. In our quirky New York City apartment, we actually have a small staircase that goes up to a bedroom and a bathroom and a tiny terrace. So we have this upstairs nook. It's almost like kind of reminds me of a tree house in our apartment. Oh my gosh, if you think my office is a sauna. The bedroom is horrendous. Every night I climb the stairs in the summer and I go up and it's like I already can't breathe when I'm halfway up the stairs. By the time I'm in there, Michael and I turn two fans on and open a window and we can barely stay asleep through the night because the AC units are broken. No matter how many thousands of dollars we've thrown at them, nothing seems to help. And the quote I got to replace them all entirely was over $25,000. So for now, we're just sticking with it, with these summer make do strategies. But the research shows that people fall asleep later and wake up earlier on warmer nights that the quality of their sleep is poorer. So imagine that this could exacerbate other conditions that you might have. And the research showed that it negatively affects psychiatric disorders, suicide risk, memory, mood, and cognitive function. So my fangry moods are a thing. And I'm only realizing now as I was preparing for this episode that it's not just me, that the data actually supports this as well. This episode comes out on September 1st, but no matter when you're listening, even if it's far into the future, consider it a PSA of sorts. Block off next August, right now, the entire month set a daily recurring do not schedule block and do not let yourself schedule over it. I am telling you what I need to hear again, because even though I've done this in the past, this summer I got a little sloppy with my boundaries. It's been a slow year overall, business wise, and I just let myself encroach into the first week of August and the second week of August. And by the time that third week hit and I had that last podcast interview of the summer, I. I was so ready to be done. I was thangry, I wasn't sleeping well, I was sweating, the house is hot. And I just thought, Jenny, I gotta get this right. Next summer, I have got to do this better. Look back on the last few weeks. Wouldn't you have rather been outside and playing? Nobody wants to be sitting indoors all day in the dog days of summer, at the very tail end when everyone else you know is out on vacation. Here on the east coast, summering is a verb. Whether you go in on a summer share or you're lucky enough to have a second home upstate or somewhere in the country, people pick their places. Whether it's the Hamptons, the Catskills, the Berkshires, Fire island, the Jersey Shore. Everyone else is off and away. You don't want to be the only one cooped up inside, sitting in front of your laptop. And again, if you sit and reflect on the last few weeks, I guarantee you wish you probably had fewer meetings and commitments than you did. The other good news is that most of your clients are going to be as well. I mean, that's kind of the good news. And the bad news of peak summer is that everyone else is traveling. So your business, your potential clients, aren't even really back until the fall. You're also going to want to conserve energy so that when the fall frenzy ramps up and everyone does start getting back in touch to do business with you, or you get your kids back to school, you actually have the energy reserves to do it. Because if you steamroll right over your own summer, which is especially easy to do when you're self employed and running your own business, you won't feel rested. Going into that fourth and final quarter of the year, I really took a page from my European clients when every August, every single person that I would work with, my point of contact was so disciplined. We would start wrapping up our work together at the end of July and they would just say, we'll be back in September. They didn't email me during August, they didn't schedule meetings. They were completely committed. And it was a cultural expectation that the entire company, let alone most of the country, takes the entire month of August off. Now in Europe, sometimes they stagger where some people take the month of July off, some people take August. But I was doing some research on this and there's a 1989 paper from historian Gary Cross who explains the title is Vacations for the Leisure Question in the Era of the Popular Front. He writes, one of the ironies of the 1930s was the democratization of the summer vacation in Europe. While neither the 40 hour week nor other proposals for economic security were successful, holiday with pay won nearly universal acceptance. The vacation was not merely mass escapism as Europe prepared for war. Rather, the paid holiday was a deeply felt social need which after the war became one of the most valued entitlements in Europe. The mass vacation appealed to both the cultural right and the left. The holiday with pay reflected a consensus that modern work required compensatory leisure in the form of extended periods of time to recover lost values of family and community. Americans are the worst at taking vacation. When you work for an employer, we are the ones that leave the most vacation days on the table. And when you work for yourself, well, I don't have to tell you, sometimes we're our own worst boss. So the good news is that especially if you have international clients, they won't be expecting much from you and your future self will be so grateful if you do what I failed to do this year. And truly, truly not only block August off and make sure that all your scheduling systems reflect that, but that you also stick to to it and that you don't let yourself steamroll over those precious end of summer days. You hereby have full permission to claim your big free time blocks for next summer. Now I'm telling you right now, when you finish listening to this episode, set that daily DNS block for next August and don't let yourself schedule anything over it. If you have a VA or an assistant or anyone else on your team, tell them, don't let me schedule over the time that I set aside for vacation. I need your help. Because without your help I am likely to steamroll right over it. Bonus. If you haven't already, you can even block off mid December through mid January, just so that you have no meetings by default during those four weeks of the holidays. So between mid December through mid January and all of August, those are already two full months of the year that are free time. And it's not to say you won't work, but you won't have to work. And I often find that when I have these big blocks of consecutive time, I'm able to do bigger things in my business. I'm able to clean things up, including the clutter on my desk. I'm able to clean up some of the clutter in my business. I'm able to do deep writing and thinking. Even this podcast. I ran crossover episodes from one show to the other, from pivot to free time and vice versa. Ah, and it was just such a relief to have a pause to take a step back, to do a different kind of creative thinking, to not be caught up on where I need to be and who I'm talking with and when and what I need to do to prepare. There was a real important sense of creative freedom that set in for me, and that's the reminder that even if all you do is rest, that's incredibly valuable in and of itself. And you might also surprise yourself because at the end of that rest period, new ideas are going to come in that would have never entered otherwise. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day and a wonderful start to the new season. Or if you're listening far into the future, whatever season we happen to be entering, thank you so much for being here and I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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