270: Free Time Framework for Moving from Friction to Flow in 2022

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. 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 financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

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, hello Pivoters. Happy happy holidays and Happy almost New Year. This is the final episode that I'm recording and airing for the year that is 2021. What wild times we are all living through together. Thank you so much for being here and for listening as always. Today I'm going to do a twist on one of the most popular episodes of every year is the set your strategy for the year ahead episode. I've done those based on the pivot method for several years in a row and this year the special twist is that I'm going to walk you through setting your 2022 strategy through the free time framework that is from my new book that is due out March 22nd of 2022. It will help you move from friction to flow so you can do more of your best work. Treat this as guided reflection, a self coaching session. You may want to hit pause as you need to grab a piece of paper and a pen. I'm going to walk you through and you can repeat this episode. You can play it back anytime. There's any area where you're experiencing friction and you want to move toward greater flow. Before we dive in, I also want to encourage you to check out our incredible team of Pivot coaches. If you are looking for more in depth one on one support, navigating next moves, planning your strategy for 2022, figuring out a pivot in progress, even setting a 90 day plan strategy for a pivot you've just recently made, I encourage you to reach out to our coaching team. These are some of my favorite people. They're all incredibly skilled, kind, warm and experienced in their own careers. And as coaches, just head to pivotmethod.com coaching where you can meet the team and and find a coach that resonates with you. You can set up an intro call and then the way we set things up, there's no minimum or maximum commitment. The minimum just starts with one month. We bill on a recurring basis. It's good until canceled. You can cancel at any time. These coaches are happy to walk you through from confusion to clarity, deepening your values, really figuring out what is most important to you, especially as we round this corner into a whole new year. And because you're here listening, I also wanted to give you a special coupon. If you use the coupon code podcast when you check out to sign up for your first month of coaching, you will get $75 off your first month. Consider this my Christmas gift to you. I really just want you all to experience Pivot coaching. If it's something that calls to you right now, again, you can go to pivotmethod.com coaching and whenever you are signing up for your first month, enter the promo code PODCAST and you'll get $75 off. That's pivotmethod.com coaching and Whenever you check out enter the promo Code Podcast One more thing before we dive into the FreeTime framework. This framework is pulled from my new book, as I mentioned Free Lose the Busy Love youe Business. It is now available for pre order. So if you pre order@itsfreetime.com book, you'll submit your proof of purchase. You can get instant access to the FreeTime toolkit, where there are a ton of worksheets and new templates that go with everything I'm sharing with you today. You'll also get early access to the FreeTime audiobook and you can gift audiobook access to a friend. So that's our Buy one, Get one, Give one pre Order campaign. You pre order the hardcover, submit your proof of purchase. You'll get instant access to the toolkit with all the templates that go along with today's FreeTime framework conversation. You'll also get early access to the audiobook and you can gift it to a friend. So head on over to itsfreetime.com book. You can learn more about the new book, pre order, get the audiobook and get a jump start on free time in 2022. The free time Framework starts with a primary diagnostic. Where are you experiencing friction? And where are you experiencing flow? The Pivot method is about doubling down on strengths. What's working? So with the FreeTime diagnostic, if you look at where you're experiencing the most flow, that is going to be informative of what you can double down on. Pivot is a method for figuring out what's next. Free time is a framework for really optimizing what's here now. How do you free up more time and energy right where you are?

Where are you experiencing the most friction right now?

Friction is a sense of disharmony. Things are not clicking easily into place. You're experiencing resistance, procrastination, overwhelm, or even dread. When you think about next steps, you're making mistakes. It's areas where your work is falling through the cracks. Things are starting to go haywire. You feel guilty or almost embarrassed by the state of your systems, and you might even be questioning if what you're trying to do matches your strategy. If this is the right area for you, should you be doing this at all? Is this the right type of project? Is it the right approach? Even prolonged confusion or boredom can be signs of friction where nothing is motivating you or you just cannot seem to reach a decision. On the other hand, you'll know you're experiencing flow when you're focused on really compelling, exciting projects and clients. If you're self employed, where you spend at least a majority of your time working on tasks that you feel are aligned to your unique strengths and you're delegating the rest. Again, even if you are working at a company, you might be delegating things on the home front that are draining for you. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the seminal book on flow, describes the flow state as effortless achievement, a deeply immersive, near ecstatic bliss where you barely notice time passing. According to one McKinsey study, we are five times more productive when we're working in a state of flow. Synchronicities abound and you're aware and engaged to create what good to Great author Jim Collins calls return on luck.

Take a moment you might want to hit pause and identify. You might even take a sheet of paper and write three columns Friction Meh or Undecided and Flow and map your work across these three columns for the sake of this walkthrough as we set your strategy for 2022, choose an area where you are experiencing friction and that will be a good prototype to apply the Free Time framework. Then you can apply it to some other areas in your life and work as well.

The Free Time framework follows three Align Design Assignments Align is about whether you should be doing this work at all and if so, how does it align with your energy, your strengths and your values the design stage is once you are aligned, you know that the work you're doing is aligned with who you are, where you're trying to go. Then you can design your ideal outcome of any project, your ideal impact on your intended audience, and the process itself. Only then do we move into the third stage, Assign Figuring out who will do what best by when Hint Ideally, it's not you. The reason there's an entire stage called Assign is so that we all can get more creative about asking for help and then assigning tasks in a way that is clear and reduces pressure and a feeling of burden, rather than increasing complexity and overwhelm, which can sometimes happen when we're not delegating effectively. Starting with the Align stage, I like to do this part as a mind map. So if you do have that blank sheet of paper, you can write your topic or project in the very center and then draw a bubble. Write the word align in a circle and we'll go through three of the align sections. Section one Values so draw a bubble from a line, write the word values. Put a circle around it. What are the core values that are most important to you?

Think about what you want to value in the year ahead. Are there things that have been latent or values that you have not been honoring either intentionally or by circumstance that you just have not been able to give your attention to certain areas.

So think about Try to identify five or so values that are important to you that you want to keep top of mind as we enter this New year, I've been playing with what I call a free time compass, some looking at four points of intention. Healthy, wealthy, wise, and grateful. These aren't necessarily my four orienting values for my entire life, but as I look at the year ahead, these are all areas that I do want to put some time, energy and attention into.

What makes you unique. Another way to think about values is, as the founders of the Agile Manifesto wrote, even overstatements. Sometimes values mean we are making choices between two compelling things where yes, we appreciate both, but we need to choose one. So maybe you want to honor a value of shipping creative work even over perfection. So you can see how writing even overstatements is declaring something and looking for ways that your values can help you move things out the door. Launch in the year ahead without getting blocked. So for the project that you're identifying as we do this whole walkthrough, what do you want to prioritize, even over other possibly important qualities? The second section of the Align stage is energy. Draw a bubble, put the word energy into it. I like starting with a rating scale so you could rate your energy. How energized are you by this project area currently? Or you could even rate your energy overall, like right now. On a scale of 1 to 10, where would you put your sense of energy and enthusiasm for the work or for the year ahead?

This is an important place to also examine what is energizing you the most and how can you clear more space for it? For the project you chose or even the friction area that you chose, which parts of the work do energize you most and which parts do you want to let go of? For example, one of the audiobook bonuses was a sample coaching session with Wade Brill, who's the founder of Applied, called Centered in the City and a great podcast of the same name. She was saying that she loves communicating with her community. They're on her mind and heart all the time. But she is not energized by email or email newsletters. She feels that they add clutter. So we did our coaching around the parts that match her energy and values and then worked through the framework to identify and understand. How could she honor that value of connection and community and communicating with them in a way that did align with her energy while delegating some of the rest? The third and final section of the Align stage is Strengths. This is parallel to Pivot and the Pivot method. In this last year, capture what were some of your biggest strengths, especially with all the change we were experiencing? What strengths did you lean on? What strengths got you through? What did people thank you for this year? When did you feel most confident and like you were at your best?

And then as we look to the year ahead, what strengths do you want to double down on?

What strengths would help you navigate this area of friction that you've identified? This project or this area of your life? What strengths could help pull you through or help you problem solve in a really creative way?

I mentioned the Free time toolkit when I was experiencing friction in the form of health issues. Honestly, these last couple months I had a really, really terrible ear infection and then two weeks later, which was very recently caught a case of bronchitis. So clearly my health was telling me there's friction, they're doing too much. I recorded a free time episode on perceived capacity versus actual capacity. Even though I thought I could do what was on my plate, clearly my actual capacity was much less. When I did my own diagnostic of why I was experiencing so much friction around everything that was on my plate, I also looked at what are my strengths? And I reminded myself that actually a lot of the work that I was doing as it related to preparing for the new book to come out did fall into my strengths. So building the Free Time toolkit. I love tinkering, I love building, I love creating worksheets. I did a lot of work in Canva and this toolkit is created in notion. So by reminding myself and connecting to the work that was on my plate that I felt aligned with my biggest strengths, I was able to have a sense of momentum and accomplishment and start making headway toward getting over the hill or the big hump of feeling totally overwhelmed and inundated to. By working on things and starting with areas that were aligned with my strengths, then I had more capacity and more brain space to start to delegate some of the rest. We're going to keep moving to the design stage of the Free Time Framework. I encourage you to spend a whole lot more time on the Align stage because the more time you spend there, the more it will fuel and propel you through the stages that follow. I'm giving you the high level overview here in this episode, but but I do encourage you to hit pause, spend more time, mull over things, check out the worksheets in the toolkit, take the time at each stage, write more than you think you even have in your head. Encourage yourself to not stop writing at what's most obvious, the things that you first think of, but really push it. So when you think you're done, say, can I come up with three more things for each of these sections?

The second stage of the Free Time framework is design. This is about again designing ideal outcome, impact and process. So for the project area or the friction area that you identified, let's start with outcome. If this were in a flow state, if you were really flowing here, what is your ideal outcome for this project?

As we look to the year ahead, we could also set what is your ideal outcome for the entire next year? What would you be most proud to accomplish?

Try to really sit with this one, really build it out, get specific dream, go big, go small, flesh out every aspect of your ideal outcomes and then you can move on to ideal impact.

So ideal impact, designing the ideal impact helps you set the vision. What is the ideal impact of the work that you're creating? Or for this area that you've chosen? What is the impact that you want this particular project to have on your intended audience? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to do differently in their lives as a result of experiencing whatever it is that you're creating.

Once you have your ideal outcome and impact, then it makes sense to start to design your ideal process for tackling or working toward those two things. Sometimes people assign work or jump in on work before designing the process, and then the process itself creates friction. I'll walk you through a personal example on this front. I think one of the reasons that I kept getting sick was that there was too much dust in our house. Ryder is two years old now. There's a lot of dander and there's a lot of dust. My husband and I, neither of us are like clean freaks, you know, so it's not like we're vacuuming every day or getting the dust out of every nook and cranny. And I just was experiencing so much friction. I was getting asthma. I was waking up in the middle of the night when I couldn't breathe. I was getting sick. I had a mold inspector come to the house. I just could not solve this. And I was getting really overwhelmed by the sense of clutter in the house, yet did not have the energy myself to suddenly double down on cleaning. I also was experiencing friction with trying to find the right person to come help, you know, cleaning professionals, just scheduling friction. The friction of never knowing when I should bring them in, how often, how much to pay, texting, coordinating, rescheduling. The whole thing was driving me nuts. And yet, as my health concerns escalated, I realized I need to dedicate time and energy to this. I need to solve it, and I need to create a system here. So I'm walking you through a really personal, sort of quirky example, but maybe it's one that you can relate to. For me, running my business, planning a book launch, cleaning the house is not necessarily something that I and only I can do. Not only that, I'm not good at it, I don't enjoy it. I'm not detail oriented when it comes to cleaning. There are other things that I can be doing with my time that if I freed up time that would otherwise be dedicated to cleaning, I could do things like record this podcast. My ideal outcome in this sense would be a clean house. Feeling a sense of peace, calm, feeling confident that it was being taken care of. The impact would be that I'm healthier, maybe even Ryder's healthier. He's been itching a lot. So we're problem solving there. So the outcome is a clean house, but the impact is that I feel calmer, I'm healthier, I get to relieve myself of a certain burden. And when it gets to the process, I realized I need to probably contact an actual cleaning service, not one off people. And to schedule something weekly, which was something I never really gave myself the budget for. But after all these health flare ups, I realized, okay, find a way. Make it work. Earn whatever I need to earn to make that work. So then the process was that I wanted to find a service where I could get a discounted rate. Thankfully, in New York City there are lots of different options. Have something weekly, have it recurring same day and time, be able to prepare for it. And in my case, I chose Fridays at 1pm so that I can tidy. I always used to get mad at my mom for making us clean for the cleaner, but now I understand. Of course they need to be able to get to things in order to clean them. So on Fridays I don't have any meetings. That's already part of my schedule. And time blocking. I'll tidy in the mornings maybe while listening to podcasts, and then have confidence knowing the house heading into the weekend will be sparkling, little cleaner, little calmer. And even that accountability that knowing someone is coming getting me to tidy up that morning is already putting me on a more regular cadence for an area that I was feeling some friction around. That example takes us into the third stage of the free time framework. Assign once you design a process. So in my case, the process I designed was that I want to shift this from one off ad hoc onto a regular person at a regular day and time and go through a professional service where there was a little more reliability and communication. Okay, so then the assigned stage is who, what, when. Now, once you know that the project area is aligned and you make the shifts to make that happen, then you design the ideal outcome, impact and process. Then it makes sense to start brainstorming. Okay, who could I tap to help with this? There's a book called who Not How. It's fantastic. I highly recommend it by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. And they say that who is so much more exponentially insightful and it's really an accelerant than how. So by getting the right who, you know, I don't need to know how to clean the nooks and crannies of the house or what to buy. I just need to identify the right who and then what you're defining what you would like them to do and by when. So for the project area that you have identified, or even as you look ahead to the entire year ahead, who would be most beneficial for you to work with.

Who is currently missing from your team. Who could help you address the friction area that you identified?

What is about drafting almost a job description? Before I even know the who of who I'm going to hire, I like to capture the what. What do I need them to do? What do I need the most help with? Where do I want them to start.

And then when. If you have a fixed deadline for a project, this is by when you need to hire again, hiring even part time and also when in terms of a cadence. So maybe this is a recurring role in your work or your home and just figuring out the timing. When do you need to take the first steps toward hiring? When do you want to delegate the first set of tasks around this project? When will you check in with this person? And even giving them a clear picture, when is the work due? What are the key milestones that together you will agree to to check in on? Once you've worked through these three stages? Align, design, assign. You will start to experience some more levity and flow around this project area. I know I'm finding that for myself, it's been really helpful to have a way to identify is this work aligned? If not, how can I make it more aligned or drop it all together? Designing the impact outcomes and ideal process and then doing that extra work to assign it. Sometimes I think it's tempting to take it all on ourselves at work, at home, and we take on too much, myself included. And I know for me, overwhelm does lead to burnout and it does lead to a sense that I'm not doing anything well. So when I push myself to have that third stage be a sign and really think about who could help, that completes the process. And that is how we free up more time. So this is why it's called the Free Time Framework. By freeing your mind first and foremost by working through this, you then start to free your time and then you put a small, delightfully tiny team in place. You can even do this work to free up your team's time. I hope you find this helpful. I would love to know what experiments you do, how you apply this, what projects you apply it to. Please leave me a voice note. I would love to hear how it's going for you@pivotmethod.com ask. And again, if you want to get the book and early access to the audio edition and the toolkit, just head on over to itsfreetime.combook. that's itsfreetime.com book. Thank you so much for being here listening everybody. And I hope you have a wonderful start to the new year.

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.

And connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

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

The Uniswap Wallet makes it easier and safer to own and use crypto Created by pioneers of the crypto economy, the Uniswap Protocol has powered over $3 trillion in trading volume, and it's trusted by tens of millions worldwide. With the Uniswap Wallet, you can discover, swap and manage your crypto all from your phone. Buy your first crypto assets in just a few taps and start exploring the freedom of decentralized finance. With Uniswap. Tap the banner to get started.