What is your relationship to information? Scattered and chaotic, or clear and navigable? Do you have streamlined systems for saving, distilling, and crafting original thought-leadership from what you encounter and store, or are you stuck when it comes time to create order from the chaos?

Our guest this week, Tiago Forte, is here to teach you how to develop a second brain—a mindset that transcends toolset—through information-wrangling habits that will change the way you think and create.

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 tasks.

Today I’m sharing the initial post-book launch quiz results with insights on how Free Timers are navigating their businesses. Alongside every data point, I give an antidote solution to help move the needle in the right direction.

“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 the planning process.

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.

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 during this juicy follow-up conversation with financial behaviorist Jacquette M. Timmons. Listen to our previous conversation in episode 20 on Pricing Psychology.

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 creating time clutter and how to start reducing it. With only a few tidbits about the science of bug splatters

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.

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.

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. 

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 are committed to our “take a penny, leave a penny” Brilliance Barter philosophy, I encourage you to learn more and join us!

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 products or services because of a recommendation from someone they know.

Dearest Free Timers: I can’t believe it, but this marks the 100th episode of this show since launching on March 21, 2021! I have learned so much from every guest, and from challenging myself to also publish a solo episode once a week.

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.

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; often it creates more.

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 horseshoe, if your team is too big, you may feel burdened by pressure and complexity.

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 recording together in person at a studio in midtown Manhattan. In the first half of this two-part episode, we delve into fending off an attack from “the perfect predator” of competition, Amazon.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!).