You don't have enough time.

Your mind is cluttered, you are struggling to keep up with the endless pings and inboxes, and important information is falling through the cracks. You may feel like you are drowning in the riptide of reactive work, barely treading water on your best days.

As a result, you and your team may be tiring under the weight of the Burdensome B's: getting bored, bottlenecked, burned out, and/or buried by bureaucracy.

If this describes you, I have good news! Business stress is a systems problem, and it can be solved more easily and quickly than you think. In fact, systems expert Alex Sherwood and I have already done 90% of the work for you—you’re in the right place :D

It’s time to relinquish your role as Chief Everything Officer. Even if the phrase operational efficiency makes you cringe, once you're set up with the right business backend, everything will click into place, and everyone you interact with will thank you. This isn't about creating more work—the mark of a good system is that it's harder not to use it.

Are you currently doing the work that you and only you can do?

💭 Rate your answer to this question on a scale of 1 to 10

• A score towards 1 means you are burdened, bottlenecked, and teetering toward burnout.

• A score towards 10 reflects working in your zone of genius at least 80 percent of the time, putting in less than 30 hours per week (with rare exceptions).

• If you rated lower than 8, it is likely you have room to streamline your systems through automation, delegation, and eliminating bloat from unnecessary tasks, projects, and processes.

Your creativity and entrepreneurial spirit got you here.

Smarter systems will take you there.

There is less friction in your operations, and greater focus on joyful work.

There is a spacious calendar, where you are free to dedicate time to your most compelling, strategic projects — the ones that best express your unique talents.

It’s time to stop working full time, and to start working free time: by applying agile operating principles toward building smarter systems.

Imagine running a business where:

• You know where to find everything you need, within seconds

• No information about clients or operations lives in any one person’s mind . . . including yours

• Onboarding new team members is seamless — the information they need is already at their fingertips

• Instead of Franken-stringing dozens of apps together, your entire operation is searchable, inter-linkable, and customizable — your own cohesive easily navigable intranet

• Roles are clearly defined, with streamlined processes for every area of the business

• Team members can access the information they need without wasting time fumbling through confusion or overwhelming you with questions

• You are no longer the bottleneck preventing business growth

Business Stress Is a Systems Problem

As I say in my book, Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business, stress is a systems problem.

Not all stress, as there are terrible evils in the world and crooked societal systems wreaking havoc on people and planet. However, many of the stresses of running a small business stem from broken—or nonexistent—business systems.

When running your own business, there is no reward for doing all of the jobs, other than burnout.

When you run your own company, “hard” work no longer has a direct correlation to the profit you generate. In the entrepreneurial realm, time is decoupled from money. There is no guarantee that pouring more time into your business will yield positive results.

In a small business, there is no place to hide. Hard work itself is meaningless.

The work must work—it must be strategic and revenue-generating, or you will quickly go out of business.

It’s Time to Transform Your Operations: Create Order Out Of Chaos

The linchpin of this freedom is having a centralized operations dashboard, or hub, where nothing about the business (or your clients) lives only in someone’s mind—yours or your team’s. None. Nothing.

If you’ve read Free Time, you know about the Fiji Test (Chapter 22): If anyone were whisked away to an island vacation with no notice and devices left behind, the business could continue operating just as smoothly without that person. That means every piece of data—process, passwords, rules-of-thumb—must live outside of any one person’s mind.

Notion can help you achieve this. Not tools like email or Slack relying heavily on search; you need something centralized that is searchable, customizable, and interlinkable. In my business, we have used Notion as our operations hub since 2020. Every bit of data has a home in our shared dashboard: from task, project, and client tracking to the Manager Manual, with many subpages for each.

Centralizing our externalized mind with an organized dashboard has the added benefit of bolstering the business’s memory through easily searchable archives. No one needs to remember anything, except how to navigate our documentation. Now you can also just ask Notion’s AI assistant! This includes our:

• Operating Principles

• Manager Manual with detailed processes on each area of the business, often referred to as standard operating procedures (SOPs)

• Monthly Metrics Dashboard

• Client and Member Trackers

• Content Production Boards and Calendar

• Meeting Notes

• CRM

• Gift Tracker

• and much more . . .

When we need to find information, it is all there. It means we are repeating ourselves less, making fewer mistakes, spending less time searching for missing data, and onboarding new people faster.

“Sure, a centralized business dashboard sounds great,”
you may be thinking . . . but setting it up is a business in itself!

It would take years to develop these free time systems and templates to get your business flowing smoothly.

You know it’s worth having in the long run, but you aren’t remotely interested in investing your time into building it.

You want to create work on the subjects you’re passionate about, not spend time designing and troubleshooting the systems behind it.

Well, good news!

Our biggest passions are systems-building and saving you time :)

Now you can access all of our road-tested, done-for-you, turn-key Free Time systems and templates.

Enter . . . The Free Time Operations Dashboard

You’ll have the complete Free Time operating system in one place, at your fingertips.

With just a few clicks, you can instantly populate a cohesive ecosystem of pages, the foundation for your externalized business mind. From there, you will customize them for your own business, sidestepping the usual starting friction and shaving weeks (if not years) of fumbling by starting from scratch. This will allow you and your team to hit the ground running with implementation, rather than traversing software learning curves and setup headaches.

Learning to use Notion is relatively straightforward, even when you’re first starting out. Building the scaffolding that supports a small business through an interlocking set of systems and documentation is more challenging.

The best news: Alex and I have already done all the heavy lifting for you. With such powerful, flexible software, anything is possible.

The bad news is that you’re often starting from a blinking cursor on a blank page, or from someone else’s templates that are built with more general needs in mind. Some systems and courses offer way more than you need, leading to systems fatigue.

We have designed everything you need to run a Delightfully Tiny Team, powered by Custom AI agents, so you’re free to operate with joy and ease, where no one on your team has to work full time — including you.

The Free Time Operations Dashboard represents a culmination of over 15 years as a small business owner, and six years of running our business operations entirely through Notion. Alex and I personally refine and polish every template over weeks and months, so that each one is easy to use and highly effective.

Every area of the Operations Dashboard has a high bar to meet. It can’t just be nice to look at; it has to work for freeing up significant time and energy: first in my business, then in yours. Every area and template makes life and business easier, otherwise it goes straight into the Archive bin.

With a centralized business dashboard, you can eliminate the friction weighing you and your team down.

Instead of wasting time searching for information across various apps—scattered across email, Slack, Google Docs, Sheets, AirTables, Asana, or Trello boards—or repeating yourself when answering questions, your business will start running like a well-oiled machine.

🤖 Now Powered by Agentic AI

For the first few years of ChatGPT, I was simultaneously impressed and underwhelmed — generative chat tools didn't add anything essential to my business operations, the output always felt Bro-y, and I disdain AI-slop writing output.

Now, I can barely sleep at night with all the exciting new developments in agentic AI and what’s possible for us to set even more time free through smarter systems! We solo+preneurs are all right at the front of the wave — bigger companies will take time to figure this stuff out; we are small and agile and so well-positioned to lead the way :)

Earlier automation tools like Zapier could follow very specific if-this-then-that instructions, but agents are so much more capable — dynamically pulling information from all your systems and software, alongside context about you and your business. You can guide them as you would any team member, with patience and feedback, until the output matches exactly what you're looking for.

With Notion's Custom Agents (launched February 2026) your Delightfully Tiny Team becomes even more capable — around the clock.

Every day, a team of Notion Custom Agents sends me:

• A high-level morning brief of the day ahead

• A summary of what's happening with my speaking and coaching clients — scanning my calendar, inboxes, and client trackers, flagging action items at risk of falling through the cracks

• A digest of 50+ publications in my SaneBox filter, calling out the ones most relevant to my interests (and ignoring all retailers)

Sometimes I assign a task I know will take time, leave my computer running, and take Ryder out for a two-hour walk while listening to podcasts. By the time I'm back, it's done. I am not outsourcing writing to AI, but I have been automating operations-related workflows with absolute glee. I feel freer, more inspired, more generative, and more creative than I have in years.

Resource-constrained small business owners can now do even more with Delightfully Tiny Teams powered by agentic AI. We can lift routine maintenance, monitoring, and reporting off contractors' plates too — freeing them to focus on higher-level, higher-touch work in their biggest energy-strengths.

The Dashboard now includes agent-ready templates and context files so you can set this up for your own business — with our help.

Are you ready to work smarter?

It’s time to save hundreds of hours each year—if not every month!

Through greater operational efficiency, you will:

• Breathe easier knowing your business isn’t subject to “key person risk.”

• Scale with ease, by mapping and optimizing the core processes to run your operations

• Never be more than a few clicks away from the information you need, as your entire business knowledge base will be searchable by you, your team, and AI-powered assistants

• Release the burden of being the All-Seeing Questions Answerer for your team; they will spend less time confused and overwhelmed, able to focus on their most important work.

• Feel relief knowing your team members are clear on the tasks, projects, and metrics they own.

You will make an ongoing practice out of moving from friction to flow, powered by streamlined systems.

What would be possible if you could set your business up today in a way that frees your time far into the future?