172: Free Time Isn’t Just for the Fun Days

Written By Jenny Blake

Free Time. The phrase connotes, leisure, fun, time off, vacation—as if we're skipping through meadows with butterflies! 🦋and unicorns!🦄

But if you’re a long-time listener, you know that I think of free time as a verb. It is a skill, a muscle we can build. Freeing Time is something we can get better at. By creating smarter systems and taking small steps today, we can set our time free far into the future.

Today’s episode is a reminder about why it’s important to leave abundant margin on your calendar, especially for the days when you need it most (what previous guest Laura Vanderkam calls a “time emergency fund”), without punting problems to your future self.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways:

  • Avoid a cascade of cancellations in case of emergency (or the need to rest) by leaving more space than you think you’ll need in any given week.

  • Create a time emergency fund by blocking days of the week, weeks of the month, and months of the year where you have nothing at all. Set these to recur annually (and indefinitely) so you only make exceptions as these open windows approach.

  • Before reflexively saying yes to a meeting, reflect: “Would I say yes if this were tomorrow?” Or replace it with a decision filter of your choosing, such as the classic question Derek Sivers popularized, “Is this a hell yes?” If not, it’s a no.


📝 Permission: Build abundant free time into your calendar. What would it look like if you reduced your meetings by half, only filling up to 40% full in advance? Then you can wait until closer to the approaching day or week to add things—only if/as they resonate in real time.


✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: When you’re feeling low on energy (or time), if you’re going to say yes at all, transition requests to meet with you (especially for “pick your brain” conversations) to asynchronous apps like Marco Polo, Voxer, or Vocaroo. After you’ve fielded more than one on the same subject, consider creating a public-facing resource, such as the Author Toolkit. As I say in Free Time, every question lives three lives: the original request, saving your response in your internal documentation, then adding it to your website to help clients and friends answer their own questions even before they have to ask you.

📘Books Mentioned:


🔗Resources Mentioned:


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Jenny Blake

Jenny Blake is a career and business strategist and international speaker who helps people people organize their brain, move beyond burnout and create sustainable careers they love. She is the author of PIVOT: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, September 2016). Jenny left her job in career development at Google in 2011 after five and a half years at the company to launch her first book, Life After College, and has since run her own consulting business in New York City. Find her on Twitter @Jenny_Blake and subscribe to the Pivot Podcast. 

http://PivotMethod.com
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