Free Time with Jenny Blake

Are your business activities at the intersection of revenue, ease, and joy? If not, are you aware of what does fall into that sweet spot? Are you a bona fide Free Timer, Bordering on Bottlenecked, or Chief Everything Officer? Those are the three potential outcomes of the Free Time Quiz, and upon reviewing the data, it sounds like a lot of us are still holding onto tiny, tedious, and time-consuming...

“A big life can weigh a lot . . . That’s why I was overworked—I was chasing the long-tail of my tasks into infinity. This is when the music stops and there aren’t enough chairs for everyone.”  If the logistics of life and work are gobbling up your equanimity, listen to today’s conversation with Demir Bentley on how to turn things around and “win the week,” with joyful rewards baked directly into t...

If you’re the bottleneck in a service-based business, consider freeing your time by building your bench. That is what I’ve done with the Pivot and Free Time coaching teams, through partner contractors who I pass coaching clients to while taking care of the marketing and back-end operations. Today I’m sharing a walkthrough of the six Notion systems powering these programs. If you’d like more detail...

Are you pricing your products and services in an abundant sweet spot or a scarcity-inducing sink hole? How can you tell when your prices are too low or too high? How much of pricing is math, and how much is mindset?  Or, perhaps you’ve been ruminating on these two most common questions: What should I charge for this? Is now the time to raise my prices? We're digging into all of this and more durin...

Have you ever driven down a highway and gotten a whole bunch of bugs sadly splattered on your windshield? Eventually, there are so many that you can't see the road in front of you.  The same thing can happen with little bits of time clutter throughout your week. No one is a big deal, but in total they obstruct foresight and forward motion. Today I’m sharing how to identify the ways you may be crea...

Are you winding down the path of writing the wrong book? What does it take to create a marketing tipping point? What separates good books from platform books? Make sure you listen to part one of this conversation first, then dive into part two of this conversation with “bookitect” David Moldawer.  More About David: David Moldawer spent over a decade as a book editor at a slew of New York publishin...

So you’re getting good at saving yourself time; but what about saving other people’s time? How creative are you at reducing their next steps? The latter is a gift that keeps on giving. Visualize the final outcome, and work backward to envision how you can take the few next steps to save time and effort for fellow stakeholders. 🌟3 Key Takeaways: Take a few extra minutes to reflect before marking a...

What takes a book proposal past the slush pile onto a publisher’s deal sheet? How do you get the attention of literary agents who might also be looking for you?  In the first half of this two-part conversation, I’m chatting with longtime publishing, editing, and ghostwriting maven David Moldawer about what makes a great “big” book idea.  More About David: David Moldawer spent over a decade as a bo...

Free Time for Your Future Self: For any area of your business that causes friction, run through these systems-thinking questions to inspire small steps today that will save time far into the future.  This is from our BFF community’s private feed, with an excerpt from the Free Time book and toolkit. If you want to join a group of smart, heart-centered, generous and successful business owners who ar...

How has Alexandra Franzen built two thriving businesses without social media? By delivering work with a quality I like to call “exquisite greatness.” She treats every marketing initiative like a tiny art project, something to get excited about rather than a draining chore to dread—and no, it doesn’t require social media. As Alex shares, according to a Nielsen study, 92% of customers purchase produ...

Dearest Free Timers: I can’t believe it, but this marks the 100th episode of this show since launching on March 21, 2021! Today I've given myself the tricky task of trying to pair down the top ten lessons learned this last year and a half. I wish I could’ve pulled an excerpt from every single guest, but alas! These are the lessons that stuck most, sparking new insights and ahas.  🌟 If you enjoy t...

Finding the perfect problem is like falling in love. You can’t always choose the when or the what, but when it happens, you need to be ready to take action. In the second half of this two-part episode with Jim McKelvey, author of The Innovation Stack, we dive into the ways that finding your perfect problem parallels falling in love, and why having a lot of money doesn’t solve all business problems...

There is a Goldilocks quality to designing a Delightfully Tiny Team, a horseshoe of team happiness. Too small, and you are taxingly tiny: in many cases when you have fewer than three people, and certainly if you are entirely solo, the burden of moving the business forward falls entirely on you. It is hard to get the rest and recharging you need to do strategic work. On the other end of the horsesh...

How can you find — and attempt the great feat of solving — your perfect problem? That’s what I’m talking about today with my guest, Square co-founder Jim McKelvey. His book, The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time, is one of the funniest and most engaging business books I’ve read. We met at TED through our mutual friend Jon Levy, and had the great joy of reco...

Today I’m sharing the recording from our second-to-last book launch team Q&A one month after Free Time launched. I share post-launch stats, lessons learned, how I think about investments I’ve made, and share more about how helpful my “Author Support Group” (ASG) calls were with friends along the way.  Save the Date: I'm excited to partner with Caveday (featured on p. 266 of Free Time!) for a deep-...

Do you feel like you are wasting precious moments just finding things? Today, I’m speaking with Nick Sonnenberg, CEO of Leverage, about the importance of optimizing your business for retrievability. Nick’s sweet spot is teaching companies how to reinvent the way their work gets done by focusing on building a culture of team productivity, instead of merely focusing on individual efficiency. More ab...

It’s time to stop Franken-stringing software together. If you've read Free Time or been listening to this podcast, you know I am obsessed with software. Tools are my default go-to team member, given how much they do for my business. Today I’m sharing the top five tools that power my business . . . plus a few bonus “utility” tools that are always running in the background (I couldn’t resist). 🌟 3...

Could you sell your business? Would you even want to once it’s optmized enough to make selling an option? Today I’m discussing the practical and emotional considerations of selling an online business with my longtime friendtor, Alexis Grant.  More about Lexi:  Alexis is the founder and CEO of They Got Acquired, a media company telling the stories of “small” acquisitions. She has sold two companies...

Stress, frustration, overwhelm: These are systems flags from your business asking for renewed attention on a bottleneck or inefficiency. In my case, it was repeating myself for the fourth time in as many months to different team members in answering the same small email-related process question. This is no one person’s fault (other than mine!).  My aha moment: a strategy for training the system to...

“I’m always stumping quarterly planning for business owners. It’s the Goldilocks horizon for strategy execution, project scoping, and team alignment.” Today I’m talking with Charlie Gilkey about why the quarter is an ideal time unit for strategic planning, how to apply his stepwise Momentum process to mapping projects and goals, and striking the balance between visioning and planning. Charlie also...

There is a chicken-and-egg problem in the early days (and transitional moments) of any business: you need to earn more money in order to hire help, but hiring help is one of the only ways you can free your time to do the highest revenue-generating activities. Today I’m sharing the best investment I made in Q1 of 2022, even though it wasn’t a direct line to profitability (but pretty dang close). 🌟...

Don’t bother starting a {business, blog, podcast}, the market is already too saturated! That limiting sentiment gets thrown around a lot—not least of which by our own mind. But just as there is always room to make new friends, so too can you find your best fit audience.  This week Megan Dougherty, co-founder of One Stone Creative and host of The Business Podcast Blueprint, takes over the pod again...

If you’ve been in business for more than a few years, you’re probably well-versed in the perils of switching costs and shiny object syndrome when it comes to trying new software, especially if there’s a high learning curve.  Today I’m sharing more context on a conversation I’ve been having repeatedly behind-the-scenes with people who are curious about switching to Notion for their business operati...

What are your business goals for your current or potential podcast? If you are like many business owners, you may not have set them set in stone before getting started. Today’s episode is the first of two crossover episodes from Megan Dougherty, co-founder of One Stone Creative, a podcast production agency, and host of The Business Podcast Blueprint. I asked her to take over the pod because I love...

How valuable is your time? Are you conveying that value to your potential clients? In the first five years of running my business, I spent way too long thinking I was the only one who could handle important communications with current and potential VIP corporate clients. Taking inspiration from Cyrano De Bergerac, today I’m sharing a mindset and process that enables a team member to take on the he...