Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business with Free Time by Jenny Blake

Discover the transformative power of “Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business” by Jenny Blake. This groundbreaking book empowers entrepreneurs to streamline their operations, cut through the noise, and rediscover their passion for their business. Dive in to unlock a new level of efficiency and fulfillment.

Ready to revolutionize your business and reclaim your free time? Keep reading to learn how “Free Time” can help you break free from busywork and fall in love with your business again.

Genres

Business, Productivity, Entrepreneurship, Self-Help, Time Management, Personal Development, Leadership, Career, Work-Life Balance, Motivation

In “Free Time,” Jenny Blake presents a compelling case for entrepreneurs to eliminate busywork and focus on what truly matters in their business. She argues that by streamlining processes, delegating tasks, and leveraging technology, business owners can free up valuable time and energy to invest in growth, innovation, and personal fulfillment.

Blake provides practical strategies and real-world examples to help readers identify and eliminate time-wasting activities, build efficient systems, and create a business that supports their desired lifestyle. The book emphasizes the importance of setting clear priorities, establishing boundaries, and cultivating a mindset of abundance and joy in both work and life.

Review

“Free Time” is a must-read for entrepreneurs who feel overwhelmed, stuck, or disconnected from their business. Jenny Blake’s engaging writing style and relatable anecdotes make the book accessible and inspiring. The actionable advice and practical tools she provides are invaluable for anyone looking to optimize their business operations and reclaim their time.

Blake challenges readers to question the status quo and embrace a new approach to entrepreneurship – one that prioritizes efficiency, fulfillment, and joy. While some of the concepts may be familiar to those well-versed in productivity literature, Blake’s unique perspective and emphasis on aligning business practices with personal values make “Free Time” a standout resource. This book has the power to transform not only your business but also your overall quality of life.

Recommendation

Running a business can be rewarding and satisfying, but it can also be overwhelming and exhausting. If you’re a business owner experiencing burnout, business strategist Jenny Blake urges you to treat your stress as a signal. By embracing her “free time framework,” you can reclaim your time and sanity, prioritize work that energizes you, and create a business that doesn’t demand your constant attention. Learn to grow your business with systems that reduce stress and create efficiencies, and gain insights into why your free time might just be your biggest source of abundance.

Take-Aways

• Running a business need not exhaust you.
• Smart systems can free you from many of the burdens of leading a business.
• Stop trying to be “chief everything officer.” Create a small team, and delegate as much as you can.
• Foster flow by streamlining operations and aligning tasks with people’s strengths.
• Build your values into your business by translating them into operating principles.
• As you reclaim your time and energy, put them to the best possible use.
• Reconsider any limiting beliefs you hold about your business’s value and growth potential.
• Aim for both sustainable growth and a sane, humane work life for yourself and your people.

Summary

Running a business need not exhaust you.

If you’re a small business owner or founder, you might have experienced “burn-it-all-down mode” — the state of feeling so exhausted, overwhelmed, and exasperated thinking of all your responsibilities that you fantasize about throwing it all away. Fortunately, a burn-it-all-down moment can lead to a breakthrough by drawing attention to the fact that you’re working in an unsustainable way.

“Instead of growth at the expense of your health and peace of mind, listen to the urges to simplify, streamline, and de-stress.”

Running a business needn’t be overwhelming, exhausting, or all-consuming. It’s possible to transform your business so it can operate on its own, smoothly, without your constant attention. Author Jenny Blake runs her business in 20 hours per week and earns more than $500,000 in gross revenues annually. She does it by aligning her work with her strengths, values, and energy levels, and by designing systems to achieve outsize impacts from manageable amounts of effort. She also relies on a small team — just three people, each working five hours per week — to whom she delegates every task except those she absolutely must do herself. She takes two months’ vacation each year, and she schedules all her meetings to fall on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. She hires specialists to look after legal and accounting affairs. She spends $1,500 each month on software that boosts her efficiency. Her “free time framework” can work for you too. It can lead to a life of “high net freedom,” in which you enjoy not only financial abundance but also ease and joy.

Smart systems can free you from many of the burdens of leading a business.

Your systems should keep your business operating smoothly, freeing up your time and energy for more fruitful activities. Regularly look for bottlenecks in your business — points within your process where you lose momentum and lack flow. Strategically test new systems and tools that can help you improve inefficiencies and save time. For example, software such as Notion can serve as an “externalized mind” for your business and assist in simplifying many tasks, such as managing production schedules and tracking metrics.

“Stress is a systems problem.”

Create systems that put your values into practice. If, say, surprise and delight rank highly among your core values, you might create a system for rewarding customers — for instance, a database where you track information such as gift ideas, personalized messages, and customers’ orders.

Systems can relieve much of the pressure you feel in your daily work, but stress can also come from attempting to control what can’t be controlled. Stop obsessing about hitting specific metrics or achieving certain outcomes, and accept that you can control only so much. At Basecamp, a music streaming platform, co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson eschew goal setting. Rather than fixate on controlling the uncontrollable, the duo simply focus on producing the best work they can every day.

Stop trying to be “chief everything officer.” Create a small team, and delegate as much as you can.

Building a small, efficient team can free up your time to focus on your priorities. To keep the team agile, limit its size to between four and nine people — a “delightfully tiny team.” To select members, imagine the most tedious tasks you’d like to offload, and then visualize the kind of person who’d be best suited to help you. To match people to projects, encourage team members to let you know when their work feels overly draining or uninteresting. This feedback signals that they’d be better suited for other tasks. When people make mistakes, treat them as learning opportunities both for them and for you. Consider how you could improve systems to help people perform their tasks better.

“It will be impossible to truly free your time as a business owner if you work entirely alone.”

You should have a clear understanding of the work each team member does, but don’t try to track everyone else’s deadlines. Instead, create systems that support people in completing tasks and projects on time. Encourage team members to anticipate next steps for their own tasks. Constantly checking in slows down processes. Have a plan for replacing people seamlessly, should it become necessary.

Foster flow by streamlining operations and aligning tasks with people’s strengths.

Flow is a productive and enjoyable mental state that results from focusing on critical tasks that align with your strengths. When you’re in a state of flow, time passes unnoticed, and you might even feel a blissful sense of immersion in your tasks, resulting in almost effortless work. A McKinsey study showed executives’ productivity increases fivefold when they’re in a flow state. The flow state also results in a high level of awareness that enables you to recognize and maximize opportunities.

Friction, on the other hand, is a state where people experience disharmony, resistance, procrastination, overwhelm, and dread. Friction results from too-low pricing and taking on excessive numbers of clients in an effort to make the numbers work. Friction also arises from poorly defined interpersonal boundaries, leading people to become drained. Friction results in frequent mistakes, work falling through cracks, and an overall sense of things going haywire.

“Friction indicates an opportunity to transform your business into the next more sustainable operating phase.”

Friction points to places where you can simplify and streamline operations, thereby redesigning your operations to be more sustainable — as well as freeing up time and energy. When you notice areas of friction, resolve to move from a state of firefighting to one of systems thinking. To foster flow, ensure everyone’s work aligns with each person’s natural talents and interests. This creates a positive and fulfilling work environment. Focus on the most vital projects and clients, and ensure that every task has a clear owner — ideally, one who is not you. Make it known who will do what by when. This structured approach will reduce day-to-day distractions and annoyances for you and your people, eliminating friction and ultimately paving the way for flow. As you make changes to increase flow, you’ll transform your overall approach to work, leading to a better balance of productivity, fulfillment, and sustainability.

Build your values into your business by translating them into operating principles.

Much of the stress of running a business comes from a mismatch between your values and the business you’ve built. If the work you do doesn’t energize you, consider whether your current revenue streams, projects, and commitments align with your personal values. Establishing operating principles that reflect your values will guide the business to embody those values. For example, FitFighter, a fitness business, holds service as one core value. FitFighter translates this value into a commitment to treat customer exchanges as collaborations rather than rigid contract negotiations. Look for moments of disconnect between the values you claim to hold and those your business presents to the world.

“You can work with integrity, honoring the health and humanity of all involved.”

Set intentions for your business that will achieve the impact you desire to make in the world. If someone asks you to do work that doesn’t feel aligned with your intentions, don’t be afraid to say no. Tap into your intuition: Pay attention to inner nudges that indicate whether you’re about to make an aligned or unaligned choice. For example, if your body instinctively recoils when you consider an offer, your physical response might be signaling a lack of alignment.

As you reclaim your time and energy, put them to the best possible use.

Reclaiming your time doesn’t mean avoiding work or doing the bare minimum. It means choosing to run a business that energizes everyone it touches, including team members, clients, and you. Prioritize the work that matters most. Make the most of your time and energy by identifying your “golden hours” — the times during the work day when you experience peak creativity and focus. Once you clarify your most important goal for the day, schedule time within your golden hours to focus on it. Give yourself “founder time,” too — that is, space to ideate, dream, and strategize. As a founder, your most valuable assets are your mind and ideas, not your labor. Make sure you carve out enough free time to ponder, imagine, consider, and plan. Start by scheduling a recurring two-hour block of founder time every week.

“You do not free your time by earning it, getting ‘enough’ done, or waiting until no one is asking you for things. You free your time by freeing your time.”

Set healthy boundaries with your team and others. Ensure people know you won’t be available during times you’ve blocked off for golden hours and founder time. For more strategies to increase and protect your time and energy, consider the following:

• Create containers for deep work — Productivity expert Cal Newport describes deep work as a state where you’ve eliminated distractions to enable sharp focus on a demanding task. By engaging in deep work, you can achieve fulfilling results because the level of focus enhances learning and enables you to produce better work. Consider blocking out days, weeks, or even entire months when you’ll dedicate yourself to deep work.
• Schedule free time — Put free blocks of time on your calendar for working spontaneously on projects and activities that pique your interest.
• Batch tasks — For efficiency, group similar tasks together — for instance, responding to emails — and complete them all at once.
• Automate — Notice when you do recurring tasks, such as rewriting some variation of the same email over and over, and find ways to automate them.

Reconsider any limiting beliefs you hold about your business’s value and growth potential.

Another major source of stress and pressure for a business owner comes from setting prices too low. A practice of pricing your products or services too low isn’t sustainable, even if it comes from a genuine desire to cater to your customers’ budgets. You’ll quickly learn this lesson as soon as you start to scale your business. Many service providers should be setting rates much higher than they do to account for the costs of overhead, taxes, and their own time.

“Your time is far more precious than money. It is your life, your energy, your presence, your memories, your dreams, the quality of any given moment.”

Break free of any limiting beliefs you hold about how quickly you can grow your business. Just because your income has always grown at a slow and steady rate in the past doesn’t mean that you couldn’t suddenly experience an explosion of profits if you seize the right opportunity. Be open-minded to the possibility of achieving breakthroughs where the business’s growth becomes nonlinear. Identify new opportunities by systematizing the process of listening to your customers. For example, consider embedding listening loops, such as regular subscriber surveys, into your community interactions.

Nonlinear scaling becomes possible when you’ve established the following: scalable streams of income with no bottlenecks, teams and systems capable of handling the necessary activity, a specific offering for an identified audience, a website and autoresponders that will attract and hook customers, and a readiness to handle the scrutiny that a higher profile can bring.

Aim for both sustainable growth and a sane, humane work life for yourself and your people.

You don’t need to run your business like a machine. Instead, think of it as a living organism that’s continually adapting and growing. Over time, your interests and energy levels will shift, unexpected events will disrupt global markets, and technology will progress. A business that you run like a living organism will have the flexibility to adapt and change.

By founding your business on agility, simplicity, and integrity, you create a “heart-based business.” This mode of operation enables you to make the impact you seek by being thoughtful about whom you serve and how. Heart-based businesses aim for sustainable growth while honoring health and humanity. You and your team work with ease and joy, engaged in life-giving practices that counter today’s hustle-and-grind culture.

“You deserve to honor your life while you build your business.”

Running a heart-based business within the free time framework puts you on a pathway toward freedom — whatever that means to you. You’ll gain freedom from your own inner limitations, freedom from worries about having enough money, and freedom from social pressures and structures. You’ll become freer to honor truth and authenticity in your actions, and freer to build a business that serves the highest good — including your own.

About the Author

Jenny Blake is a career and business strategist and international speaker helping people build sustainable, dynamic careers they love. She’s the author of Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One and Life After College. She hosts two podcasts: Pivot with Jenny Blake and Free Time with Jenny Blake.