As I share in Free Time, nowhere is entropy more visually evident than in older homes or ones in nature. I remember staying at a cabin in the Catskills, where I could see right before my eyes all forms of plants and animals encroaching on the once-pristine house.

Without upkeep, a dead tree teetered precariously toward the roof, weeds started overtaking the grass, spiders made themselves comfortable in bathroom corners, giant carpenter ants traversed the kitchen counters, and we spotted a garden snake crawling into the crevices of the outdoor hot tub.

Entropy, defined as a gradual decline into disorder, is intrinsic to all organic systems, and it’s happening in your business, too. In this episode, I’m talking about entropic bloat and why we need to actively decide to do less, giving our business regular “haircuts” along the way.

If life is a circus, then maybe there’s a way to get better at performing in it. As Laura shares in this conversation about ways to calm time chaos, “Nobody gets shot out of a cannon at the wrong time in a circus . . . it’s a miracle of precision.”

In this week’s episode, you will learn how to shift from a sense of time scarcity to spacious serenity, how to overcome “horror vacui” and guilt when creating a more open schedule, the importance of margin and creating back-up slots (”rain dates”) for building a resilient a calendar, and committing to time that’s just for you.

What steps can you take now to free your time far into the future? Longtime listeners know this is one of the central questions and strategies throughout Free Time, a book that helps you build the muscle of continually freeing more of your time.

Today, I’m sharing three strategies to set your time free in 2023. For added accountability in freeing your time in the year ahead, I encourage you to check out the Free Time Leader Kit—you can work through the sections of the book with your team or in a mastermind group (or join us in BFF!) for even more support.

🎁 Give the gift of Free Time! Buy the book for your team members and business besties. We’ve reopened our BOGOGO promo for the holidays: Buy One, Get One, Give One.

According to SignalFire, the fastest growing type of small business is one that revolves around content creation, also known as the creator economy. There are over 50 million independent content creators and counting: About two million are professionals making content full-time (and earning a living from it), and the remaining 48 million are “Amateur Individual Creators,” monetizing content creation part-time.

In this conversation, Kim Kaupe and I explore favorite tips and tools for designing our calendar to support creative work, strategies for staying consistent, paying for accountability, “fishing where your fish are,” batching to get more done in less time, and how Kim prepared for her successful Shark Tank pitch several years ago.

Your creativity and entrepreneurial spirit got you here. Smarter systems will take you there.

There is less friction in your operations and a 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, powered by a Delightfully Tiny Team.

It’s time to stop working full time and start working free time: by applying agile operating principles toward building smarter systems, starting with a centralized business operations dashboard if you don’t already have one.

If you’re a business owner thinking, “My platform is too small to land sponsors,” today’s guest will encourage you to think again. Instead of counting yourself out purely because of the numbers—consider shifting your mindset from how you can help brands to how you can serve your audience best.

In this conversation, sponsorship coach Justin Moore shares his hard-earned wisdom on forming mutually beneficial partnerships between brands and creators. He shares tons of tactics on the power of specificity, creative partnership approaches, why you shouldn’t put prices in your media kit, the halo effect, and so much more. As Justin says when it comes to working with brand partners, “You’re not just a creator; you are a consultant.”

There’s a missing chapter in Free Time that, over the course of editing, got condensed down into a single bullet point. When someone new joins your team, even part-time, those first few days, weeks, and months have potential to transform your manager manual—in ways that you would otherwise miss. I encourage you to share this episode with your new team members as they join!

For many of us running Delightfully Tiny Teams, the ideal team set-up is one where no one works full time — including the owner. Today Kaneisha Grayson returns to the pod to share with her signature transparency her lessons learned about onboarding part-time team members, designing effective hiring and vetting processes, teaching sales skills, and scaling without breaking the bank. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out our previous conversation in episode 131: Scaling Your Joy While Streamlining Business Overhead and Navigating ADHD.

How do you define enough? Today, Jenny is sharing a bonus episode from the private BFF podcast feed where she’s talking about how to refocus on what enough looks like, and how you can celebrate exactly where (and who) you already are—in business and in life.

Do we really all have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé? That’s our tongue-in-cheek title, pulled from Tara McMullin’s new book, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting, for a recent Spotify Live conversation.

In this replay, Charlie Gilkey, Tara McMullin, and I explore the nuances of calculating time, money, and energy capacity so that we don’t tip into boredom or burnout. We share strategies for saying no, and discuss the costs of saying yes when we shouldn’t.

You’ve heard the term low-hanging fruit: the easiest thing you can do to make the biggest possible impact in your business. But not all fruit is created equal!

Sometimes, those low-hanging fruits are modest peaches or distracting, underperforming pumpkins (in Mike Michalowicz parlance) that might not be worth pursuing.

Other times, you’re so close to your own business that you can’t see the enormous, juicy, low-hanging watermelon you’re about to walk right into.

What do you do when your business model is no longer working for you? When your current income streams and activities are not just tiring but draining you to the point of exhaustion? My guest today, Tara McMullin, is someone I have long admired for her willingness to question dominant narratives about how things should be done, instead emphasizing what works for each individual person and business.

In this conversation, Tara shares her journey of making one of the toughest decisions in her business. As heart- and gut-wrenching as it was to make, it freed her energy for deep work that is even more aligned with her interests, energy, and identity of who she’s most excited to become. She gave herself permission long ago to drop the “expert/guru” model and focus on asking bigger, bolder, better questions instead.

Licensing your IP to companies can be lucrative and a tough nut to crack. Pricing is opaque, deliverables and tracking can get complicated, and companies with a smaller Learning and Development function may call it by another name (such as Train-the-Trainer).

After many years working with a small handful of joyful clients—bolstered by many mentoring sessions, lessons learned the hard way, and a whole lot of experimentation—today, I’m sharing a few pointers on how to get started. I am not an expert, but I do believe in the power of licensing to help your ideas reach even more people who can benefit without you being the bottleneck.

“Build an email list,” is business advice equivalent to “Make sure you breathe.” We all know it’s a best practice to communicate consistently with our communities, but coming up with something interesting on a regular basis is easier said than done! As is building out a paid newsletter subscription in parallel to the baseline missives.

Thank goodness for our guest today, David Elikwu (also a fellow Notion nerd), who is taking us behind the scenes of his business to share how he organizes information and builds automation into his newsletter sequences, and the strategy and software behind his paid subscription.

In today’s episode, I’m sharing a section from Free Time about one of the topics interviewers ask me about most: Sailing the Sea of Shiny Shoulds. You’ll hear why I’m such an advocate for writing permission slips to do the things we really want to and dropping the things we don’t.

As you all may well know by now, I am a social media curmudgeon. But that doesn’t mean I’m not inspired by success stories of business owners applying these tools joyfully to create leverage in their business marketing!

My guest today is one of my longtime IRL besties, Inna Aizenshtein, who has been successful at filling her coaching and hypnotherapy practice primarily with leads from TikTok. In this conversation, we discuss energy ebbs and flows and creating authentic content without letting appeasing The Almighty Algorithm suck joy out of the process.

In the spirit of “truth while it’s fresh,” one of my core values for this podcast, today I’m sharing a truth that has been on a low simmer for two years but that I’ve never quite shared publicly. I’m taking you behind the scenes of my explorations around potentially selling the Pivot side of my business—and why I chose not to (for now, unless you know of any $5 million to 10 million buyers around! ;)

Creating online courses does not require a huge investment in time or money. Although they certainly can cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, with professional video editing and branding, they don't have to. In fact, my favorite way to create and launch a course is with my future students!

This follows agile design principles (check out the agile manifesto here). The goal is developing rapidly, with frequent input from key stakeholders, not building so much behind the scenes that what you’re working on becomes out-of-date or out of touch with what your audience and potential future students actually need.

My heart was thumping out of my chest as I sat at the front of the room for my first paid, in-person speaking engagement since February 2020—two and a half long years ago. Could I still do this? What if the content doesn’t resonate? I hope this goes well so it can help generate future work!

I’m grateful to share that the event was a smashing success—with enormous thanks to my cohost, who brought me in. Today I’m sharing the strategies that help me prepare for high-stakes speaking engagements like this one.

Are the systems I share on this show and in Free Time just a “Jenny Blake Thing?” Rest assured, the answer is no! If you don’t see yourself as a tech geek or systems person, have no fear—Terri Trespicio is here to share her journey with implementing the principles and the difference she is seeing in her life and business as a result.