Top 10 Free Time Principles {BEST OF}

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello hello my friends. It is bright and early on Monday morning, just after launch week. We officially launched Free Time the book Lose the Busy Love youe business on March 22, and thanks to all of you, it was an instant Amazon chart topper. I am so, so grateful for all of you helping generate this momentum. And if you're new here as a result of me being on other people's podcasts, welcome. I'm not somebody that loses sleep over making the lists, although it's always fun to have targets and aim for them. But just a few quick stats from the launch week. The official seven day is not yet closed, so I'll report more in a longer behind the launch episode. But the early category stats we were Number one new release in Time management, number one new release in Small business, never one new release in organizational changes, number one bestseller and most wished for in Office Automation business. How's that for a nerdy category? And number three new release in Systems and Planning. We have 53 reviews at the time of this recording. Thank you so so much. The goal is to get to 100, so if you've already finished the book either by reading or listening, and could post a review on Amazon in Goodreads, I would be so, so grateful. It really goes a long way toward helping other readers decide whether this is worth their time, energy and money. And of course, reading them has provided such a big boost during this time. If you're a little stuck on what to say, I know I get this way when friends ask me to leave a review. I created a review writing Quick Start Chatbot. This is just one of those things I like to do when I'm procrastinating. I was thinking how can I save you all time and energy and just that staring at a blinking blank cursor feeling. So I created this review writing Quick Start Chat. It will just ask you five questions about your experience of the book. It will email you the responses and then you just need to zhuzh it a little bit and get it ready to post. So if you want to try that out, it's really fun. These are the kinds of things I love. Just go to itsfreetime.com review that's itsfreetime.com review.

Last thing before we dive into the top 10 free time principles. There's 27 chapters in the book, but I'm pulling out the juiciest ones for you. I would love to invite you to join us in bff. This is my private community for small heart based business owners and we're welcoming a ton of new people thanks to this launch. It's perfect timing because we are spending the second quarter of the year, April, May, June on the design stage. So in the first three months of the year we worked through Align and of course as soon as you join you'll get access to all of the archives. So the conversations, the thought exercises, the bonus podcast episodes. Now we move on to design. So together we're going to help you take a step back from your business, carve out that founder time, and truly design the ideal process of how you want to tackle things, the ideal outcomes you're trying to achieve with your business, and the impact that you want to have on your community, your clients and customers and everybody around you. I think design is where we really start to put these free time principles into practice and I find that doing this with other generous, smart, giving, heart based business owners has been incredibly rewarding. I know you'll feel the same. So if you want to learn more and join us, go to itsfreetime.com BFF and if you happen to be catching this on the day this episode goes live, this is the final day that BFF will be half off and then starting in Q2 we go to the new rate. So lock in your rate now while you can. You have that rate grandfathered in for life and I think you'll find that we really work hard to make sure that you kind of get the return on investment month after month after month to make this some of the best money and time you could spend. Once again, that's itsfreetime.com BFF. All right, now let's get into the 10 most important guiding principles that can transform your business and help you create order out of gas. The book is jam packed, so I've been hearing from a lot of you. There's so much in here I'm highlighting every other word or dog earing every other page, which is such a compliment. You'll have to show me pictures of some of this, these annotations. I love seeing the markup in a book. There's a lot to take in, there's a lot you could take action on, and the last thing I want is for you to feel overwhelmed, given that a lot of you are new to the free time world and you're just coming in from other places, maybe even from finding the book through a friend at this point, now that it's out into the world, I wanted to distill what I see as the 10 most important guiding principles that will absolutely transform your business. Each of these, if you really put them into practice, will free up hours of time and energy each week. Multiply that by every team member you have working with you in your ecosystem, even if none of them are full time.

Number 1 Automate what you repeat. This is that Agile development quote that has been with me for over a decade now. Automate what you repeat. Even if it's something as simple as sending friends directions to your kid, to your house. If you're hosting an event, put that into a canned response in textexpander and never type it out again. You can even have a link to Google Maps in this canned response. You can really craft the most perfect way to tell people how to get to your house. Link to Google Maps, have your address, your phone number in case they can't find it, and never have to type this out again. So textexpander is my go to app for automating what I repeat in terms of written communications. But this can also include automating things you repeat, as simple as on the household front, putting paper towels and toilet paper on subscription. Look at the cadence, the last interval of time that you ordered those few things and put them on subscription. That way nobody has to think about ordering them again and they don't take up valuable cart space if you go grocery shopping in person. So take this philosophy with you. Automate what you repeat, automate what you repeat, and you can become the watcher in your business, just like they recommend in meditation practices. You know, become the watcher, the observer. Same thing. You don't have to just be the business owner. You can be the watcher, the observer. What are you repeating sometimes if you don't know how to solve it right away? I also recommend just keeping a list throughout the week, even on paper, sitting right by your desk. What are the things that you're repeating most often including repeating yourself when onboarding or coaching team members. That's all content that can get documented too.

That brings me to the second principle. Create an externalized mind. This is so, so important and this is a big part of the impetus behind the Freetime Operations Dashboard. You can learn more about that@itsfreetime.com dashboard an externalized mind means that you are creating almost an intranet for yourself and your business to where the most important information in fact no information about the business lives in your mind or anyone else's. A strong externalized mind is searchable, interlinkable and customizable. I use Notion for this Notion eliminated completely the need for me to Frankenstring, Google Docs, sheets, airtables, Evernotes, Asana, all of that together. I eliminated all of that for the most part. I just use Google Docs now for what I think it's best for, which is collaborating on actual composition. But everything else about my business, the manager manual, client trackers, different dashboards, task tracking, every single piece of information lives in notion. And the reason I love Notion is that it's searchable, interlinkable and customizable. Highly customizable. In fact, it's overwhelming when you start with notion because it's just this blank screen. And yet now I can say over two years in I have this completely intelligent externalized mind. There are two books I can recommend for you here. Annie Murphy Paul wrote a really phenomenal book that was coming out right after I finished finalizing that chapter of the book called the Extended Mind, and she talks about how supplementing our intelligence and creativity in this way has been used throughout time as a really important feature of synthesis and strategic thinking. The other book is not out yet, but put it on your radar. Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain and I'm going to have him on the podcast. I can't wait for that. Thiago's book is fantastic. I'm reading an early copy as we speak to prepare for our interview. And he really shares the principles behind what he calls Building a Second Brain. Principle number three Systematize the spirit of your business. Here's a question. If you say you value generosity, what does that mean in terms of how you serve your customers and how you want team members, if you have any team members working with you to do the same. So it's one thing to say, oh yeah, I value generosity. But then when it comes to giving refunds, you don't have a clear policy on that. Or when it comes to helping somebody who's had an error with one of your products. What do you do? Do you over deliver? Do you give them a full refund and then some, and then some kind of bonus? What does it actually look like to live your values in your business? As I share in the book, I reference the Agile manifesto. They pioneered the idea of even overstatements. So an important part of not just identifying your business values, but systematizing them is saying what you prioritize even over something else. That's good. So one business might prioritize generosity even over frugality, but then another business like Amazon is notorious for their value of frugality. They would value frugality even over maybe luxury, you know, so you have to pick and choose. And when I say systematize the spirit of your business, this is about creating systems that help you express those values. So in the example I give in the book is gifting generosity, surprise and delight, Gifting gratitude. These are so important to me. But because I didn't have a clear system for the life of a gift, once I decided who I wanted to gift to, I became the bottleneck. The list of people I wanted to send things to would just stack up. I wasn't doing anything about it and I also wasn't engaging my team to help. So it wasn't until we created the gifting database that actually tracks the life of a gift from wanting to send one, getting the right information, choosing the level of gifts, and moving it through the process of tracking it at every stage, all the way until we confirm receipt with our final recipient. That took so much of the burden off of me carrying all of it and then feeling constantly guilty and bad that holiday gifts weren't sent till April. Now, John Rulin, who wrote a book called Giftology, it's fantastic. We'll put it in the show notes, he says, don't even gift at the holidays. That's too obvious and it's not as special. So John's whole philosophy is just incredible. It's about strategic gifting and really investing, even setting aside a percentage of your profits in your business solely for the purpose of meaningful gifts.

Principle number four, Continuously bust bottlenecks. This relates to the story I just shared about me getting totally in the way of getting gifts out the door. Look for ways and places where you are the bottleneck. At home, at work, what is stacking up on your desk, even virtually? What are people waiting on you for? Where do you feel the slowest? Where are you moving like molasses and you're in the way we all tracked when the Suez Canal got blocked by the Ever Given. This happened also right as I was working on the book. It created shipping and supply chain delays for years into the future. We are still seeing the adverse effects of this one bottleneck at the Suez Canal. So think about this. Where are you the Ever Given? Where are you getting in the way and preventing the steady stream, the flow of work and energy and resources? Wherever you can find those bottlenecks, I like to ask this question, or I at least say the mantra. Let it be easy, let it be fun. Like this bottleneck is something that's creating strain or stress and pressure. How could I lighten it up a little bit? How could I lighten the load? How can I get out of the way? This could also relate to services that you offer. So for example, with my first book, I knew I was the bottleneck because I was the only coach in my business. And it meant that when I was full, either my time capacity was filled or my energy, that was it. There was no plan B. There was no second path that people could take. So with pivot and now with free time, I offer coaching, but I'm not the one doing it. So I was able to bust the bottleneck of me being the only coach to the point where now I no longer do one on one coaching. But I have incredible team members who love doing that and that's their passion. And they don't work in my business full time either. They run their own businesses with their own delightfully tiny teams. But I'm able to partner with them to provide coaching. So if you go to itsfreetime.com coaching you can submit an inquiry if you're looking for one on one support and you'll be matched with. At this time, our pioneer free time coach is Chris Wilson. You would be in such good hands. He has his own incredible platform, simplifyyoury.com he's generous. He loves systems and automation. He and I were geeking out over the Alan Dib strategy of evergreening a year of emails into a welcome sequence. And Chris said, oh yeah, I've already done that. It was the most transformative thing in his business. So that's an example of busting a bottleneck. Where there's a need, there's interest, let's say from clients and customers of getting one on one support. How can I get out of the way? So just ask that question. How can I get out of the way? How can I step aside and let that information, that interest flow more freely, whether it's on the internal systems or external demand. And I always quote my friend Leanne. I love her question. How can I fall in love with this area again? That brings me to principle number time block and bake in batches. I did not invent time blocking or batching. There are so many people super skilled at this in business. Cal Newport talks about time blocking. I share in the book the Story of JLD and His Epic Batching, where as a podcaster he runs a daily show for entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs on Fire. And yet he only records two to three days out of the month. So he stacks, in true marathon fashion, eight interviews a day for two days in a row, maybe three days in a row. And that's it. All his interviews for the month are done. I shared in a previous episode. We'll link to it in the show notes my Made by Monday strategy so this year, because I was the bottleneck because my newsletters were not getting sent out while I was working on the book in super deep work mode, I just decided what if I could have everything made by Monday and I eat the proverbial frog first thing in the week and I know that all my content is made by Monday and it's not always that I feel like doing it on Monday mornings. We all know about the case of the Mondays, but it does help me go into the week when I can do that. It helps me go into the week feeling free and clear that some of my important communications work is done. As Jeffrey Shaw pointed out in our interview for his podcast the Self Employed Life, you don't prepare cookies, a whole batch of cookie dough, and then bake one cookie. But yet we do this in our businesses where we muster up the willpower and we sit down and we go, okay, I'm gonna finally write that this week's newsletter. And then we write one. It's the equivalent of the energetic preparation when we could write four newsletters at a time, or even two. But instead we bake one cookie and then we have to do it all over again. Time blocking refers to creating themed days. So for example, on Wednesdays those are the days that I conduct podcast interviews and for the most part, with rare exception, they happen on Wednesdays. So I know every Wednesday morning I wake up, I get in the zone, I start refreshing myself for the guests that I have that day and my energy is clearer for what I'm doing. Thursdays are days I often meet with my team members and so it's a more low key day. I don't feel as much pressure that I have to be so prepared. I mean, I do prepare and I ask everybody to create a little agenda in advance in notion, of course, and I'll add to that as well. But by time blocking and blocking out chunks of time for dedicated types of work, you can also rest assured that you'll get more done, you'll be more focused, and that you know generally what you're doing when. Because especially when you run your own business, possibilities are endless. And it's easy to feel scattered. What researchers call time confetti, where you feel like your calendar is just a mess of splintered little things where no one thing adds up to that feeling of accomplishment and output that you want.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Principle number 6 solve for Sisyphean Systems Wherever you find yourself in a never ending loop and no way out, no way to win, you're in a Sisyphean system I often talk about. You hear me? I can't even gripe on this too much more, but things like email and inboxes. Inboxes in general, whether it's email, text messages, social media inboxes, in a way are Sisyphean because they're never going to end. There's no there there. Even the elusive inbox 0 lasts for.02 seconds until the next messages come in. They're also Sisyphean because you really have no control over who decides to message you, when and what about. So you're always gonna be a little bit on the receiving end. Now that can be really fun. When it's about serendipity and new opportunities, sure, those are great. That's what gives us the dopamine hit. When we hit refresh on our inbox, we're actually wondering, am I gonna get a cool email? What's gonna come in? But those emails can just as much provide a sense of dread and stress and pressure. They're also Sisyphean, because this is a weird paradox. I talked about it on the interview with Cal Newport on his show back in December, that in a way, the more successful you become in life and your career, only the more volume you're going to have to receive and process. I remember a coach asking me way back in 2008, I was already overwhelmed with email while working at Google. And she said, what would Oprah do? How would Oprah answer her email? What's her approach? And that was her guiding me into a more systems way of thinking about email. And can Oprah read and respond to every single message? No. So maybe I could take some of the pressure off of myself being a long way from Oprah, but just thinking about email in a more systematic and removed way. So instead of working in the tasks, you work on the process. Instead of working in the inbox, you step back and you observe and you work on the category that is inbox management. Because you know what, even just saying the word inbox, there's no one type of task. It's 15 different types of things that might come in. Whether it's scheduling, delegating, facilitating a training, you know, inbox. It's almost like saying, go shopping or get food. It's this huge category. It could be anything. Oh, what are you shopping for? Is it clothes or is it food? If you're shopping for food, is it for dinner that night or is it groceries for the week? What's your budget? How much time do you have? What store do you want to go to? I mean, there's a lot to figure out. So the same thing with inboxes, that there are so many different categories and types of work that emerge that's really helpful to solve for Sisyphean systems. If you can step back, back even while you're working on it. I've created this delegation task tracker where when I'm working in email, I start noticing what types of tasks I could delegate even if I'm not ready to delegate them just yet. Both of these templates, both email categories and the delegation task tracker you can get for free in the Free Time toolkit, just visit itsfreetime.com toolkit.

Principle number seven, scale. Be ready for a big break. Break. This is a thought exercise. Are you and your business and your systems ready for the proverbial big break? Or would your systems break and crush under the pressure of all that surge of incoming interest? So I'm always asking myself and my team, are we Oprah or Tim Ready? As in Oprah goes without saying. Or Tim Ferriss? He's just someone I've long since admired. He, in a way, set the tone and the foundation for so many of the principles that I talk about in free time 15 years ago with 4 hour work week, as did David Allen with his fantastic book Getting Things Done. Being ready for a big break, it's not always easy. You have no idea what's going to hit when just how much interest and attention is going to come your way. But this can help you at least envision Am I ready? If I had 10x the number of readers, listeners, clients, customers, would I be ready? Would I be ready if I had a hundred times the number of interested listeners, readers, clients, customers? How about 1,000? How about 10,000? How about 100,000? So if you go through at each of those tiers, you might discover where you have bottlenecks, where you have vulnerabilities, where you don't have enough redundancy, maybe you would be understaffed in certain things. Are you ready to roll out the red carpet? Is your bio and about page updated? Maybe you have some special content that if a big break hits, you want to say, hey everybody, welcome. I'm so thrilled you're here. Let me introduce you. It was very common in the blog world about 10 years ago that everybody would have a new here page of their website or new question mark start here and it would walk people through. These are the most popular posts. This is what you should know about me. This is about our community. And so I think that's a really nice orienting type of page. New start here.

Principle number eight One of my favorites in the entire book is the Fiji Test. Continually make yourself and your team members replaceable. The Fiji Test is in lieu of wondering what happens if you get hit by a bus. This is saying if you or any of your team members were whisked away to Fiji for three weeks with no devices and no ability to give notice, could anyone else seamlessly step in and do the work? Or would you be taking valuable content with you to Fiji and no way of letting anyone else help Companies talk about brain drain. The same thing is happening with the Fiji Test. We want to know. It's almost like a pop quiz. If somebody is out sick or they have to suddenly take a step back and they don't even have time to document or delegate. Once that hits pop quiz, are you ready? Is their role fully documented? Has each person in the business been continually making themselves replaceable by automating things and documenting things? And we all know that actually that more you make yourself replaceable, the more valuable you become. So I tell my team, you know, don't be afraid of this. The goal is that we continually make ourselves replaceable, especially for the lower value tasks and work. And that way each of us can continue working on more and more interesting projects. The Fiji Test also makes onboarding and offboarding much, much easier. So instead of the stress that if one of your team members leaves, they're going to take so much of your business insight and knowledge about how to support clients and customers with them. This is saying, okay, if they leave, one of the last things that they do, if you have the grace of two weeks or a month before they go, once they've given notice, have them invest that time in the manager manual. That way when the new person joins, everything is written down. Yes, they're going to have questions and things will be confusing, but at least there's a record of how to get up to speed. And I can't tell you how much this has accelerated the process of getting new team members onboarded in my business.

This is a side note to the Fiji Test. There's a phrase that I share in the book that says, new here, help us onboard the next you. What I mean by that is the newest person will spot the biggest holes in your documentation. So part of the Fiji Test is, could anyone get ramped up for this role or project area without any additional support? Is every single detail documented? And inevitably, no, it is not. Or things get out of date or things are confusing. So I always ask new team members, I say, you are in the best position out of any of us to help improve our documentation. So every single question you have while onboarding, it's nothing to be embarrassed about, document it. It means we have not done a good enough job capturing aspects of this role or this project. So if you're new, help us onboard the next you. Principle number nine, double how much you delegate. This is an ongoing call to action for all of us. It is a challenge. I think that if you run your own business, you know that delegation can be stretchy and it can be frustrating. Sometimes. You don't want to take the extra time it takes to ramp somebody up or document something or even figure out how to get it out of your head and into someone Else you worry it won't be done as well. Or maybe in the past, you've gotten burned, things have fallen through the cracks, things haven't gone well. It's been more trouble than it was worth. Still, there's a reason that the entire third stage of the free time framework is a sign. And that is because I don't want you to just stop at thinking you can create free time by calendaring a little bit better. Free time truly comes, yes, from raising your prices and making sure that you're charging enough for the services that you offer, including the three T's, time taxes, and team. Free time also comes from doubling how much you delegate, getting better and better at this. And I will say, the smarter your systems and the better your documentation. You don't need to hire for every role. A super expert, you can reach a point where you can delegate even to people who are newer in their career or newer to your business. Double how much you delegate is about asking, okay, what is your comfort zone for delegation? The things that you don't feel bad delegating at all. I can certifiably say that hiring a house cleaner to come at this point, they come about once a week, sometimes once every two weeks. You know, it's a little bit of a stretch zone, actually, because someone has to see our mess. So it does actually make me a little uncomfortable. I feel a little bit guilty when they're here sometimes, but I generally feel comfortable delegating that because I know that they're going to do a better job than me. I know that I'm helping. Giving someone else work. I know that it's not something I want to do. It's not something that delights me. I'm not great at it. I don't have the attention to detail. And I know that I could direct that time that I would spend cleaning into my business. Okay, but then let's say something like podcast editing. Well, in the beginning, I was nervous to delegate that, especially once I would raise the bar of the podcast standards. I really wanted free time, this podcast, to go pro. I want to be really professional, A to Z. So delegating audio editing, replacing myself and my listening ear, and try to convey what I'm looking for to someone else, including drafting show notes, was tricky. That was a stretch zone for me. But it's been so worth it. I've been working with One Stone Creative. They're an absolutely fantastic team. And as much as that was a stretch for me in terms of financial monthly investment into the podcast, because you know, the podcast still doesn't generate its own revenue. It's more of my ongoing public original thinking at this point. But that is one of my dreams, that it becomes its own self sustaining part of the business. It is some of the best money that I have spent in my business. So I encourage you to think about what's your comfort zone of delegating? Are you currently delegating in that arena? And then what is your stretch zone? What feels really edgy but could have outsized rewards if you were to take it off of your plate. I described this in a recent episode that the reason I knew I needed to hire one Stone Creative was that we are a month and a half out from the book launching and I was sitting there editing audio all day on a Saturday. Now I enjoy audio editing. It's kind of soothing to me, but I really shouldn't have been doing that. My friend Neil Passericha, he calls it the Saturday morning test. Whatever you do on a Saturday morning is something that probably brings you tremendous joy. So although it was joyful, there was so much else I had to build or wanted to build so that everything was ready behind the scenes when the book launched, that I really, really had better uses of that time, that day. And that's when I decided, okay, I've got to get out of the weeds. Even though I enjoy it, even though it's stretchy for me and it's an important business area, I've got to get out of the weeds. I got to delegate and I need to redirect that time and attention toward building things in my business, like the Free Time Operations Dashboard, like the BFF community, really invest in the things that were going to generate the revenue that funds the podcast and that funds me doubling how much I delegate by hiring a production team. The final, vital guiding principle of my top 10 favorites from the book, number 10 the owner is not the owner. Relinquish your role as Chief Questions Answerer, or as I call it in the book, All Seeing Questions Answerer. The owner is not the owner. This is so important. And I tell this to my team over and over. This principle came to me because of a mortifying business moment. There was a client that ordered the biggest bulk order to date of pivot workbooks, something like 10,000. It was a huge number. I had never had an order of this size. And so one of my team members said, great, just check your bank account and once the deposit hits, we'll ship the workbooks. Well, you know how billing goes with companies. Sometimes it takes Longer than others. And I checked maybe weekly for a month, and it wasn't there. But then I forgot. I was in deep work mode. I was really in a hermit mode, writing free time and editing, and I just forgot. So by the time we thought to remember and we looked in the bank, the money had arrived and it was one month later. I was mortified. We didn't thank the client when the money came in. We didn't send the workbooks. So we ended up kind of scrambling and offering them a free virtual keynote with me, which goes up to $15,000 of value. So we delivered the value and then some of those workbooks that shipped out late. And it didn't turn out to be a big deal for the client. But I was so mortified. And we had this case where both of us thought the other one was owning it. So she thought, well, the ball was in my court because I needed to check my bank account. But I forgot. And so I'm saying this as a public service announcement to team members everywhere and business owners everywhere. The owner is not the owner. The owner of the business is, I will tell you right now, juggling way too much to remember. Small things like that at the client level, it's just too much. Not only are our brains, human brains, not equipped to remember that much information, especially important information, the owner has too much on their mind, too much on their plate to remember those things. So what that means is that each team member needs to hang onto the task. They still own the task. And I tell my team, if you don't hear from me in a week, check in with me, bug me, remind me, keep this on your radar. Have your own reminder set. Even if you think the ball's in my court to check on something or approve, I forget. Things fall through the cracks. So I need you to stay the owner. You can co assign me if there's an action for me to take as well, but you're never just passing a task to me and assigning me Jenny, the owner, without them staying on the case. There's a fantastic book about this, the One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. It's by William Onkin. He wrote one of the most famous HBR articles of all time that what happens is that team members come into their manager's office, virtual or otherwise, with monkeys on their back. They're stuck. They have a question about something and they just leave the monkey on the manager's desk and leave. And by the end of the day, the manager is overwhelmed, practically managing a zoo. Give the monkeys back to their owners. The manager, the owner should not take on everyone else's monkeys. So when people just ping pong you a question, what should I do about this? I always write back and say what do you recommend? And I'm always asking my team, don't just ping pong me a question, make a recommendation and tell me what you plan to do by when and do I need to approve or not? Or is it can you keep moving and tell me if I don't respond by X date, here's what you're going to do and then any consequences of that are on me. So that's what I mean when I say relinquish your role as all seeing. Question, answer. Don't just be a question answering machine. Get people to think critically and make recommendations and then document. And if you do answer questions, they gotta throw those in the manager manual. So you're not gonna answer them again, okay, that's my soapbox, that's my soapbox. On the owner is not the owner. And I could tell you number 11, the bonus could be notice mortifying moments in your own business because those are the system's flags. Those are the moments that you go, oh my goodness, this is so mortifying and so embarrassing and so against the values that I want to convey. How can we fix this moving forward and not just fix it in the moment, but fix it at a systematic level, at a principles level. So if that mortifying moment of the workbooks hadn't occurred, I wouldn't have had this catchphrase, the owner is not the owner. But it came to me because I needed a way to communicate what happened. It wasn't just the one time slip up. It was a flag of a systems problem in our business, which is not any one person's fault. I don't think it's about playing the blame game. You did this. You didn't do this. Well, it was your fault. You should have checked your bank. Well, you are managing this client. Doesn't matter. It's not about that. It's just saying where did our systems break and how can we fix it in the future? Not just for this issue. Moving into the future. And Charlie Gilgie calls that the second fix, which I love. So I hope this was helpful for you. These are my top 10 out of the 27 in the book. Operating principles to help you run a more agile business. Of course, the linchpin of all of these I do believe is that centralized operations dashboard or hub, including the manager manual, because that is how you get yourself out of the weeds and delegate and onboard and communicate with your team. So if you want to learn more, you can go to itsfreetime.com dashboard and I can help you implement this in Notion. And again, last call. If you want to join us in BFF as we work through these together, I would love to have you and you will be so delighted by this incredible group of smart, generous people that we've assembled. Learn more@itsfreetime.com BFF thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. Thank you for making the Free Time launch as successful as it has been, and enormous thanks to all of you who've taken the time to leave a rating or a review on the book. It is so helpful in these early days of the launch. If you ever have a question for future episodes on this content or what you've read in the book, feel free to submit those@itsfreetime.com ask thanks again and have a beautiful rest of your day everybody.

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