While we’re still not resuming the podcast’s regular publishing schedule, I’m popping into your feed today to share a fun conversation with my friendtor of over fifteen years, . We’re discussing his new book, Time Anxiety: The Illusion of Urgency and a Better Way to Live — it was too aligned with Free Time not to share!

More About Chris: Chris is the author of several other bestselling books to help you live an unconventional life, think for yourself, see the world, and earn extra money, including The Money Tree, The $100 Startup (a global bestseller), and The Art of Non-Conformity, which was translated into 30+ languages. Every day since January 1, 2017, his podcast, Side Hustle School, has offered a new idea, tip, or short story to help listeners create a new source of income without quitting their jobs.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• There are two main forms of time anxiety: EXISTENTIAL—“Time is running out in my life,” and DAILY ROUTINE—“There is not enough time in the day.”

• On the Inbox of Shame: “When you’re drowning, you can’t just swim faster.” A few tips that might help assuage guilt and stress: send shorter replies, use delayed send, and recognize the power of doing what you can.

• Make free time more memorable by planning a mini-adventure for an upcoming weekend: Having an adventure is an exciting or unusual experience that is often associated with novelty, challenge, and exploration.

📝 Permission

Drop the belief that you’re too late, or that you have missed your chance.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, try this quick end of day checklist (“no affirmations, no scientific review, no detailed procedural to plan the next day. I just asked myself what would be enough, and when the feelings of overwhelm crept in later, I tried to remember the answers.”):

• Did I create something?

• Did I help someone?

• Did I take some amount of time for myself?

• or just one question: Did today matter?

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Chris on the web, IG, X, LinkedIn

• Articles: Time Anxiety Is the Most Pressing Problem of Our Age ⌛️

• People: Emily McDowell (Web, Substack), Laura Vanderkam, ADHD Coach Nicole Bulsara, Brad Montague

• Rolling in Doh:

  • 🧺 Why There Are Crumpled Laundry Piles All Over My House, Part One

  • 🐌 Are you mad at me? Part One and Part Two

  • "I AM DOING THE BEST THAT I CAN!"

  • 🥴 Meet Bob the Neck Throb, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three

  • New to Rolling in Doh? 🤗 Start Here: A Mad Lib (+ Template!)

📚 Books Mentioned

• Time Anxiety: The Illusion of Urgency and a Better Way to Live by Chris Guillebeau

• Chris’s earlier books to help you live an unconventional life: Gonzo Capitalism, The Money Tree, The $100 Startup, and The Art of Non-Conformity

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

• How to Keep House While Drowning by K.C. Davis

• Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

• The Executive Functioning Workbook (get 20% off with promo code EXECUTIVE20)

• Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and Daily Rituals: Women at Work by Mason Currey

• Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks

• Wanting by Luke Burgis

🎧 Related Episodes

• Chris’ podcast: Side Hustle School

• Emily McDowell’s podcast: Quitted

• How to Fail with Elizabeth Day

• Pivot: 023: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking with Oliver Burkeman

• 305: Is What You’re Wanting Actually What’s Best For You? With Luke Burgis

• Free Time: 002: Eliminate Email with Cal Newport

• 027: Time Management for Mortals with Oliver Burkeman

• 046: Time Margin—Are You Drowning, Treading Water, or Gliding?

• 052: Perceived Capacity vs. Actual Capacity

• 151: Calm Time Chaos with Laura Vanderkam

• 141: Process, Permission Slips, and Business Pivots with Tara McMullin

• 143: Exploring Time, Money, and Energy Capacity with Tara McMullin and Charlie Gilkey

• 199: Creating Happier Hours and the Diminishing Returns of Too Much Free Time With Cassie Holmes

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Share with friends: https://itsfreetime.com/episodes/273

“How do you decide who has the power to judge you? Who are you seeking to please? Is that validation directly in alignment with how you are rewarded and how you're organized?”

Seth Godin is back with a brand new book, This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans, and if you loved Free Time, I know you will love this one for geeking out on systems thinking! Even though the podcast is still paused, I couldn’t resist the chance to drop this special conversation.

We discuss how his author strategy has shifted over time, why he’s piloting a new type of publishing contract with this book, how he felt when asked to leave a weekly poker game for not taking big enough risks, and how The Innovator’s Dilemma relates to companies like Google, NPR, and Netflix (he was in the room as NPR purposefully missed the boat on podcasting).

More About Seth: Seth Godin is a renowned author, entrepreneur, and marketing expert who has profoundly influenced modern business thinking through his blog, with over 9,000 daily posts and counting. Known for his innovative ideas on marketing, leadership, and personal growth, Godin has authored 22 bestselling books in over 39 languages. He is also the coordinator of The Carbon Almanac, which he calls “the most important project of my career.”

🌟 5 Key Takeaways from This is Strategy

• Social media: Avoid projects where the system is organized to take all the value you create.

• Building community: Create a strategy where the scale is the magic. Start by serving a small group of people who would miss us if we didn't exist.

• Pricing: Price is a story, a signal, and a symptom of your strategy. “Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of useful ideas."

• Decision-making: It's impossible to consistently have perfect outcomes. It's easier to imagine that we're able to make good decisions on a regular basis.

• Ignoring sunk costs: All of your assets and experiences are a gift from your former self. You're welcome to leave them behind.

📝 Permission

Stop seeking authority and start taking responsibility. Time is ours; sooner or later, the story we tell ourselves belongs to us. That doesn't mean it's easy. It just means that given the situation you're in, you could make something better and no one can stop you.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

If you feel creatively stagnant, try switching up your environment. For example, Seth took train rides with no destination in mind to get into a writing groove. Bonus: Try asking Claude.ai to expand on a list or framework you’ve created. What might you be missing?

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Seth on the web

• New Book: This Is Strategy

• Community: Purple.space

• Udemy course: This Is Strategy

• Publisher: Authors Equity

• Seth’s articles: Books don’t sell and Firing the New York Times Bestseller List

• Rolling in Doh: Is Kevin Bacon in His Flop Era?

• 🚬 Smoking is Essential for Your Success, They Said 🙄

• If Your Business Could Talk, What Would It Say?

• People: Shawn Coyne of Story Grid

• Tools: Claude.ai

📚 Books Mentioned

• This Is Strategy

• Song of Significance

• The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

• Visit the shop to see all of Seth’s books . . .

• Your First 1,000 Copies

• The Innovator’s Dilemma

• Atomic Habits

• Thinking in Systems

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Seth’s podcast: Akimbo

• Free Time: 092: Train the System, Then the Person

• 056: Set Your Compass—Systems vs. Goals

• 268: Strategies for Surpassing “The Magic Number” of Book Sales, and 271: Todd Sattersten Part Two

• Pivot: 254: The Practice—On Generosity, Peculiarity, and Showing Up with Seth Godin

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays at

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

I’ve been in talks with SPI for the last several months about ways we can collaborate, especially for those of you seeking the more in-depth community support that BFF previously offered. I have learned so much from them over the years, and really admire what they’ve built, so it was a joy to hear them share how they’ve built SPI pro, what’s next, and even a few spicy takes on the difference between audience vs. community.

Huge thanks to all of you who were able to join live — I can’t tell you how wonderful it was to see your bright, beautiful faces again after all this time. I miss you!! 🥹 Detailed show notes are below :)

💚 SPI Resources & BFF Discounts

• SPI Pro with pre-approval for BFF members

• All-Access Pass (includes their 18+ course library)

• Any follow-up questions about either one? Feel free to email Matthew Gartland: matt@teamspi.com

💌 Reminder re: BFF-Lite & Artist’s Way

You will still get weekly Free Time emails and lifetime complimentary access to Doh (normally $11/mo), but to continue with the paid features within our BFF community-lite, please renew your subscription at $5/mo or $48/year at a special BFF discount here » (good through the end of May)

• Next up is an Artist’s Way accountability group for the summer, starting in June. We’ll be piloting within Substack’s chat feature . . . I have no clue if we’ll like that mode of communicating yet, but I have seen some other groups having a lot of fun with it! I did The Artist’s Way in December and it was so creatively energizing — I know it can spark new insights and “creative unblocking” for you too, even if you’ve done it before :)

• The only thing you have to do to join is renew your subscription and get your copy: Amazon (paperback is currently $8.30!), Bookshop

🧡 Just launched on Substack! 🎉

• ’s

• ’s

• ’s

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Networking group for women (from Megan): The Dames

• Coach (from Megan): Ellen Moore, Super Tight Branding focusing on LinkedIn as a platform

• Strategic Sprints with Stephanie Huston + Social Media Audit

• VIP Day with Jenny: via Free Time Operations Dashboard

• Join the waitlist: 1:1 Voxer Coaching, Business Bestie Brunch + Pop-up Mastermind

• Apps: Notion, Substack, Baremetrics, ProfitWell

📚 Books Mentioned

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller

🎧 Related Episodes

• Free Time: 51: How to Replace Yourself as CEO with Michael Bungay Stanier

• Smart Passive Income: SPI 559: How to Get More Free Time with Jenny Blake

• SPI 249: Pivoting: How, When & Why to Do It with Jenny Blake

• SPI 155: 9000 Unread Emails to Inbox Zero

• SPI 345: The Next Big Steps in Business - With Matt Gartland from Team Flynn

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• ​Runs a small business with a Delightfully Tiny Team, even if no one works full time (including you)

• ​Feels like your mind is cluttered, and you’re

• ​Struggling to keep up with endless pings and inboxes while important information and ideas fall through the cracks

​I have good news! Most business stress is a systems problem—and it can be solved easier and faster than you think. In fact, I have already done ninety percent of the work for you :)

​If you are drowning in the riptide of reactive work, barely treading water even on your best days, you don't have to continue working this way—this session will help you earn more while spending less, as you free your mind to do even more of your best work.

​Even if the phrase operational efficiency makes you cringe, once you are 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, either. The mark of a good system is that it’s harder not to use it.

​If you’re a small business owner with a Delightfully Tiny Team, this workshop is for you. Based on key operating principles from my award-winning book Free Time, you will learn how to pass The Fiji Test, a thought-experiment to ensure that if you or anyone on your team were whisked to Fiji for three weeks with no notice, no devices, and no ability to communicate, the business would continue running seamlessly.

​​It’s time to say goodbye to repeating yourself, death-by-a-thousand-question cuts, struggling to remember where something lives, and letting important client work fall through the cracks. Freeing time is a skill, and it is one you can get better at.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• 🧰 If you’re ready to go all-in: get the done-for-you Free Time Operations Dashboard » (promo code FIJITEST good through March 30)

• Join the waitlist: 1:1 Voxer Coaching, Business Bestie Brunch + Pop-up Mastermind

• Software: Notion, Substack, HelpScout, TextExpander, 1Password

• Templates: Free Time Toolkit »

• Article: McSweeny’s—My comments are in the Google Doc linked in the Dropbox I sent in the Slack . . . what not passing the Fiji Test sounds like 😆

📚 Books Mentioned

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• 228: The Burdensome B’s—Four Red Flags Signaling it’s Time to Make The Big (Delegation) Leap

• 148: How to Build a Business Operations Dashboard

• 104: Save Someone Next Steps

• 102: 12 Systems-Thinking Steps for Moving from Friction to Flow

• 146: New? Help Us Welcome the Next You (A Message for Your New Team Members)

❤️ Enjoying the show? Please leave a rating or review :)

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to ‘casts: http://pod.link/freetime

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter: http://itsfreetime.com/join

Today we’re digging even deeper into what helps new books achieve escape velocity.

Welcome to part two of my conversation (recorded live for paid subscribers, big thanks to all who joined!) with Todd Sattersten, publisher and owner of Bard Press. Todd is so committed to helping his authors succeed that he only publishes one book each year.

In this conversation, Todd shares ways of investigating and possibly repositioning when a launch isn’t gaining traction, his three-sentence problem statement that has the greatest chance of attracting ideal readers, and why the design and readability of the Table of Contents and first chapter are essential parts of the marketing process.

More About Todd

Before Bard Press, Todd served as general manager of IT Revolution and president of business book retailer 800-CEO-READ (now Porchlight). He is the author of Every Book Is a Startup and the co-author of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time (Portfolio, 2009). Todd lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Amy and their three awesome kids.

🌟 5 Key Takeaways

• Advance copies are a marketing event: Will they do something with the physical book that I send? The importance of giving them the thing to share and consider a bulk purchase is a critical component. The authors we tend to with typically have some other activity that is connected, like speaking or training. JB tip: Create an advance copy survey to start sending and collecting email addresses even a year before your publication date.

“As someone who reads over 80 books on my computer a year (to index them), holding a book in my hands makes such a difference.” —

• Two B’s for categories of people that can be most helpful:

  • Bulk buyers—is there someone out there who could buy a box of books? Includes book clubs—to help activate communities within your ideal readership. Think leaders (book clubs, companies, associations).

  • Broadcasters: who are the people, big or small, who have an audience of people around them? From ten to ten thousand (and beyond).

“What’s easier: selling one book at a time to 100 people or 100 books to one person?”

• Most book launch activities don’t scale: There are a lot of people who want to “buy the single ad that costs $1,000 and have it be magical,” but you are the beacon for people to find the book. Connect them to the felt need, and the beginning that felt need is because you wrote it. Don’t be shy about buying a few boxes of books and sending them yourself if your publisher doesn’t agree to send galleys (also known as ARCs, or Advance Reader Copies).

• Title should always be a change function: show the change that they will experience reading the book with the title, subtitle, and book description. For example: Good to Great, Never Eat Alone, and If I Stay (fiction).

  • Statement 1: State the truth (ie you don’t have enough time).

  • Statement 2: What’s the surprise, the unexpected thing, the thing I don’t know? (ie your time is far more precious than your money).

  • Statement 3: Ex: It’s always your move . . . there’s always time for. What could I take from all this feedback to turn it into what’s true, what’s the unexpected twist, and what’s the second unexpected twist that drives the point home?

• The Table of Contents is marketing copy! It should read like sales copy, break the rules! You are trying to draw people in. Chapter one is also marketing copy, and be sure to include a quick win, because most people won’t finish (sadly). And write short chapters! Give the reader payoffs.
  

📝 Permission

Drop the idea that your launch day is 24 hours. We are still running marketing campaigns for The One Thing and it’s going into its eleventh year. Taking a page from Tim Grahl’s Your First 1000 Copies, just do one thing a week. Use the HBO model of a little bit every week, not the Netflix binge release-watch.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

With the Free Time book approaching its two-year bookiversary on March 22, 2024, I encourage you to grab your copy if you haven’t already! For a limited time, I’m re-opening the launch BOGOGO campaign (Buy One, Get One, Give One) if you want to 🎁 give the gift of free time in 2024 :D

• Don’t miss the handy Chapter Summaries and Leader Kit (PDFs)

• Want to try before you buy? Read the free excerpt here » (Web)

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Todd on the web, IG, X, LinkedIn

• Publisher: Bard Press

• Bard Press Articles: The Magic Number

• The Few, The Many, and the Reality of Power Laws

• Hilarious article from McSweeney’s: MY COMMENTS ARE IN THE GOOGLE DOC LINKED IN THE DROPBOX I SENT IN THE SLACK h/t

• Jenny’s Author Toolkit and Free Time Leader Kit

• Take the Free Time reader survey I sent, whether you’ve read the book or not!

  • Our real-time ChatGPT analysis of how the NPS 9 and 10 respondents would describe Free Time to a friend

  • What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

• VIP Day with Jenny: via Free Time Operations Dashboard

• Join the waitlist: 1:1 Voxer Coaching, Business Bestie Brunch + Pop-up Mastermind

• Book Indexer: — Line by Line Indexing (web) and (Substack)

• X thread by Jason Colavito: Publishing stats for 2022 (h/t Dorie Clark)

• EPJ Data Science: Success in books: predicting book sales before publication

📚 Books Mentioned

• The One Thing by Jay Papasan and Gary Keller

• Taking a Career Break for Dummies by

• Sustainable Ambition: 12-Month Workbook + Planner by

• American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

• Your First 1000 Copies by Tim Grahl

• The Snowball System and Give to Grow by Mo Bunnell (out Aug. 2024)

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business by

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by

• Life After College by
  

🎧 Related Episodes

• Michelle Guiliano’s Freelance Indexer Exchange (for professional indexers)

• Self-Publishing School: The Engineer Approach to Millions of Copies Sold with Todd Sattersten

• Billion Dollar Creator: 018: How to Write a Book That Sells for Decades with Tim Grahl

• Free Time: 268: Strategies for Surpassing “The Magic Number” of Book Sales with Todd Sattersten

• 249: Systems for Selling Over One Million Books

• 012: Generating Personal MBA Momentum

• 117: Tiny Marketing Actions with Pamela Slim

• 064: The Vulnerability of Launching

• 084: Sprinkling the First 1,000 Serendipity Seeds of a Launch

• 077: Happy Launch Day! Antonio Neves Guest Hosts (Part 1)

• 079: Behind the Launch with Antonio Neves (Part 2)

• 103: How to Land a Literary Agent and Publisher with David Moldawer (Part One)

• 105: “Don’t write the wrong book!” with David Moldawer (Part Two)

• 203: 🎢 Riding the Emotional Rollercoaster of Launching with Natalie Lue

• Pivot: 207: How to Develop Your Book and Big Idea (Part 1)

• 208: Your Book and Big Idea (Part 2)

• 49: The (He)art of Book Publishing Excerpt: Land a Traditional Publishing Deal — Q&A with My Editor at Portfolio/Penguin Random House

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🌟 Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out my personal business essays at

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed to Free Time wherever you listen to podcasts

💌 Subscribe to for access to the Free Time Toolkit

As I round the corner into this ninth year of podcasting, and after over 700 episodes, today I’m announcing a pause for both shows.

Listen in to hear what factors helped me reach this decision across time, money, energy, depressing industry articles, the pace of both shows’ growth, and mix of additional business factors that make this an important moment to pause and regroup. You might also appreciate the even deeper dive with my longtime friend (and first coach) Adrian Klaphaak in Pivot episode 360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision and Dissolving Related Doubts.

While I will be sad not to bring fresh episodes to your earbuds every week, I truly want to say thank you so much for being here. This only represents a small fraction of listeners, but I was genuinely touched receiving the Spotify Wrapped for Podcasters stats at the end of 2023, after I knew I would be pausing once all the episodes “in the can” went live.

• Among Pivot listeners: for 681 this show is in your top ten on Spotify, for 373 it’s in your top five, and for 65 of you, this is your number one show (again, at least in Spotify’s podcast player)!

• Among Free Time listeners: for 423 of you this show is in your top ten on Spotify, for 247 it’s in the top five, and for 57 it is your number one show in Spotify—the highest honor!! I was shocked to see even one, truly, with so much other incredible audio content out there.

There’s one thing I know for sure: I will miss you during this break 🥹

🌟 ;TLDR/L (Too Long Didn’t Listen) Top Takeaways

• In addition to pausing my private community, I am pausing both podcasts for a bit (duration TBD) so I can clear financial and energetic space to listen to what my broader business wants to become.

• 🎧 Stay subscribed to both shows: Pivot with Jenny Blake and Free Time with Jenny Blake so that you still get episodes when I release them, even if a bit more sporadically (for now); I may switch to seasons if/when I resume

• 📧 Subscribe to any/all of my three Substacks if you’re not already: I hope to experiment with live tapings with interesting friends and guests, ones that are for paying subscribers where we can go into even more nitty gritty detail behind-the-scenes.

📝 Permission

Pause and regroup on any of your creative projects so you can create space to hear what’s next.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h: 🏆 Time to Put the Trophies Away

• Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow . . . IF

• Rebuilding from Rubble

• 👟 A Strange and Wonderful Morning: Walking Photo Essay

• Dear 2024: A Letter

• From 2024: A Reply

• What Works: Making the Content Math Work

• Edison Research: Podcasting’s Big Hits and Long Tail

• Adam Davidson: The Rise and Fall of Podcasting

• The Daily Beast: Malcolm Gladwell’s Media Empire is Being Torn Apart

• Podcast Production: One Stone Creative

• ListenNotes: Pivot, Free Time

📚 Books Mentioned

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• SPARKED: Jenny in Conversation with Jonathan Fields (Spotify Playlist)

• BFF Bonus: Upcoming Quiet Sabbatical + Important Membership Updates

• Pivot: 329: Five Types of People-Pleasers from The Joy of Saying No with Natalie Lue

• 342: “Whatever Comes Through Me Comes For Me First,” With Nicole Antoinette

• 360: 📦 Unpacking a Big Business Decision and Dissolving Related Doubts with Adrian Klaphaak

• Free Time: 042: How I Run My Business Without Social Media (Pivot Replay)

• 203: 🎢 Riding the Emotional Rollercoaster of Launching with Natalie Lue

• 250: Do what you love and the money will follow . . . IF you meet at least 3 of these 20 criteria (Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h)

• 🦧 What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client, Part One and Part Two

• 252: Taking an Accidental Sabbatical with Mel Dizon

• 193: Sabbatical Planning with DJ DiDonna

• 241: Finding Freedom and Financial Reciprocity through a Paid Newsletter with Nic Antoinette

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

“I don’t get on the airplane—and definitely not the stage—unless all invoices are paid in full.”

When my friend and fellow keynote speaker Joey Coleman said this to me over coffee, I started drilling him for details: Really?! How do you have the nerve to say that to a speaking client?! How do you avoid caving in to make sure their event doesn’t fall apart if they haven’t paid in time? What about clients who work for highly bureaucratic companies that insist on their “standard” net-120 terms?

In this illuminating conversation, Joey shares his best practices for getting paid on time—every time by setting, stating, and upholding better boundaries (and contracts) with clients.

More About Joey

As an award-winning speaker for over twenty years, Joey Coleman works with organizations around the world ranging from small startups to major brands such as Volkswagen Australia, Zappos, and Whirlpool. His First 100 Days® methodology fuels the remarkable experiences his clients deliver and dramatically improves their profits.

Joey is an award-winning speaker at national and international conferences, and former criminal defense attorney. He is the author of the #2 Wall Street Journal bestseller, Never Lose a Customer Again and the recently released Never Lose an Employee Again. When not speaking to audiences around the globe, Joey enjoys playing board games, building LEGO sets, and reading bedtime stories with his amazing wife and two young sons.

🌟 5 Key Takeaways

• “You should care a lot about what a few people think.” For Joey, it’s his wife, his children, his closest business advisors, longstanding clients. “I don’t want my creativity hampered by one person’s feedback.”

• “You need to know how to ask for the money.” Gem from Joey’s dad growing up on the most important thing to know when running your own business, about having confidence when you state the price and terms of your services without wavering.

• Don’t raise your prices just for the sake of raising them; however, as your expertise and capabilities and the cost of living and costs of running your business increase, there is a necessary understanding that prices will go up. Right before he hit send on a proposal, he would stop, go back to the original contract and raise the fee by ten percent.

• Price is something you pay at the grocery store; investment is something you are going to do to grow your operation and make it better. You will invest with me to grow your returns, and it will continue to pay dividends. As a speaker, you need to be clear on the return on investment that you’re promising.

• Invoicing: You have to pay 100% in full, 30 days before the event, if you want to proceed. To hold the date on the calendar is worth minimum of fifty percent. Remaining fifty percent is due thirty days before the event. “Once I have stepped on stage and given the talk, there is no reason other than their integrity and the contract for them to ever pay, let alone in a timely fashion. Before I get on stage, they want to make sure I get on stage.” Remember: contracts are written at the pinnacle of the relationship when everyone is most excited about working together.

📝 Permission

It is unbelievably challenging to start and run your own business. Because you are so bold to do that, give yourself permission to courageously set your boundaries. The more clear and comfortable you are stating how to work with you and holding firm when pushed, the happier you will be as a business owner, and the longer you will be in business.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Try Joey’s approach to sharing the investment for working together. List a range on your website, and the first time your desired client learns how much it costs to work with you should be hearing it from you, not reading a document.

On your exploratory call, try phrasing it as follows: “Now let’s have the conversation that I know you’re super excited to have - what is the investment for us working together?” Make sure to also share how the payment terms work too (see invoicing bullet above).

If they hesitate on price, say “Let’s get creative—are you willing to brainstorm some ideas together?” How can we get from their $X budget to my $Y fee by working together? For example, a budget for gift bags—can you include a copy of my book?

🔗 Resources and Books Mentioned 📚

• Joey on the web, X (Twitter), LinkedIn

• Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention

• Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Joey’s podcast: Experience This!

• Free Time: 083: Breaking through Buyer’s Remorse—Never Lose a Customer Again

• 201: Never Lose a Team Member Again with Joey Coleman

• 107: How to Know When You’ve Gotten Pricing Wrong with Jacquette M. Timmons

• Pivot: 155: Becoming a Successful Speaker with Grant Baldwin

• 329: Five Types of People-Pleasers from The Joy of Saying No with Natalie Lue

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

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📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

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What mysterious ingredients make a book launch successful? What number of first-week and first-year sales truly make a difference to a book’s longevity? What can you do to turn lagging numbers around?

These vexing questions set today’s guest on a quest to examine a dataset of five years of book sales data across 6,775 titles in business and self-help to find answers—and he did.

In a flagship illuminating post for the industry, Todd Sattersten, publisher and owner of Bard Press, shared his findings in The Magic Number. In this behind-the-business conversation from October 2023, you’ll hear him generously talk me through how I could help Free Time get there—with a much-needed morale boost at the end.

After you listen to this episode, check out part two of our conversation here:

More About Todd

Todd Sattersten is the publisher and owner of Bard Press, a book publisher that works with authors to create best-selling books in business, personal development and technology. Before Bard Press, Todd served as general manager of IT Revolution and president of business book retailer 800-CEO-READ.  He is the author of Every Book Is a Startup and the co-author of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time (Portfolio, 2009). Todd lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Amy and their three awesome kids.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• A book launch is a set of activities to engage people and create momentum, and there is no common blueprint for success. “Each book is different—in its approach to a problem and delivery of solution. Each author is different—in what they bring to the launch. And the world itself is different every time you bring a book into the world.”

• The Magic Number: The data says is that if you can get into the 10,000 to 25,000 copy range for first year sales, you have a 42% chance of selling more than 25,000 copies in lifetime sales. If you get past that 10K mark, there is a 4 in 10 chance of getting beyond 25K copies sold.

• Endorsements should triangulate the reader to think this book is for them. Who is the highest comp author? A practitioner (someone doing the work or even a related recognizable company), a reader who demonstrates utility.

📝 Permission

Put your ego down. Remember, you want your readers to be better, to improve their lives. Our job is to find more people to help, and there are still so many opportunities for that. You don’t actually have to stop promoting the book after it’s launched—there is nobody stopping you!

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Send a survey out to your readers and community, ideally 90 to 120 days after the book comes out. Check out the one Jenny sent here—and please take it if you can at the same time!

Your introduction / call to action might sound like, “I need 90 seconds of your time. I want to ask you about {Your Book Tile}. It’s just three questions, would you take the time to give me some feedback?”

Questions to ask (see full show notes here if you can’t see these):

1. Did you get a copy of the book? (Did they perceive the value? This thing fits for me)

   1. → Branching, end the survey there

   2. Multiple choice: Was it time, money, not the right topic?

   3. For the first 100 people, if they don’t have a copy, send one, then follow-up with those 100 people → does it work?

   4. If they say no, they would ask, can I get you a copy? Send you a copy? First five chapters? (Trial-ability is very important)

2. Did you read it?

   1. Can I write you in a few weeks and see if the book has been helpful? 30% will give you their email and give you permission to be an accountability buddy

3. Would you recommend it to a friend or colleague? (Net Promoter Score, scale from 0 to 10; promoters are 9s and 10s, neutrals are 7s and 8s, detractors are 0 to 6s)

   1. Branch: for the promoters, ask them: How would you describe the book to someone else?

   2. Update book description to update word-of-mouth language

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Todd on the web, IG, X, LinkedIn

• Publisher: Bard Press

• Take the Free Time reader survey Jenny sent here, whether you’ve read the book or not!

• Bard Press Articles: The Magic Number

• The Few, The Many, and the Reality of Power Laws

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score

• Technology Adoption Life Cycle: Innovators → early adopters → early majority → late majority → laggards

• BookBub and The Fussy Librarian for ebook promotions

• X thread by Jason Colavito: Publishing stats for 2022 (h/t Dorie Clark)

• EPJ Data Science: Success in books: predicting book sales before publication

• The Honest Broker: 10 Reasons Why I’m Publishing My Book on Substack

• Jenny’s Author Toolkit

• Free Time Leader Kit

📚 Books Mentioned

• The One Thing by Jay Papasan and Gary Keller

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

• Your First 1000 Copies by Tim Grahl

• Traction by Gino Wickman

• The Snowball System and Give to Grow by Mo Bunnell

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Self-Publishing School: The Engineer Approach to Millions of Copies Sold with Todd Sattersten

• Billion Dollar Creator: 018: How to Write a Book That Sells for Decades with Tim Grahl

• Free Time: 249: Systems for Selling Over One Million Books

• 012: Generating Personal MBA Momentum with Josh Kaufman

• 117: Tiny Marketing Actions with Pamela Slim

• 064: The Vulnerability of Launching

• 084: Sprinkling the First 1,000 Serendipity Seeds of a Launch

• 077: Happy Launch Day! Antonio Neves Guest Hosts (Part 1)

• 079: Behind the Launch with Antonio Neves (Part 2)

• 103: How to Land a Literary Agent and Publisher with David Moldawer (Part One)

• 105: “Don’t write the wrong book!” with David Moldawer (Part Two)

• 203: 🎢 Riding the Emotional Rollercoaster of Launching with Natalie Lue

• Pivot: 207: How to Develop Your Book and Big Idea (Part 1)

• 208: Your Book and Big Idea (Part 2)

• 49: The (He)art of Book Publishing Excerpt: Land a Traditional Publishing Deal — Q&A with My Editor at Portfolio/Penguin Random House

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

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📝 Check out full show notes and share!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

Listen to part two of our conversation here:

Laura Mae Martin has a fascinating role as the Executive Productivity Advisor at Google in the Office of the CEO—one that she helped create six years ago (with big thanks to Jenny Wood for introducing us!). She coaches Google’s top executives on the best ways to manage their time and energy and sends out a weekly productivity newsletter that reaches over fifty thousand employees.

Today we’re talking about her forthcoming book, Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing. We discuss what the most senior-level executives do differently when it comes to time management (and what they still struggle with), five strategies for saying no, taming inbox stress with The Laundry Method, cozy corners, pairing activities with certain locations (hot spots and not spots), and what differentiates truly excellent executive assistants.

More About Laura: During her nearly fourteen-year tenure at Google, Laura Mae Martin has worked in sales, product operations, event planning, and now executive coaching. She holds a bachelor of science in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and three children under five.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• Laura’s 5 C’s of Productivity: Calm, Create, Capture, Consolidate, Close. Create a system that you truly trust: where new tasks get captured and where you know you will see them again. No matter when or where a loop comes from (i.e. on a walk), ensure you have systems in place for the entire loop lifecycle from capturing to closing.

• Five Ways to Say No to Incoming Requests: ask more questions to better understand the time commitment and see if it aligns with your top three priorities; say you’ll think about it or don’t respond right away to buy yourself time and prevent a knee-jerk response; imagine two scenarios playing out for yes and for no (to help you decide); say no, but _______ (send helpful resources); say no, because _______ (give a little context).

• The Laundry Method: Think about your inbox the way you think about your dryer. You would never process clothes one item at a time—whether drying, folding or putting away—and yet that’s how many people tackle email. Process in batches instead. Treat sorting, reading, and answering as separate activities. If you have only twenty minutes, pick one of those activities.

📝 Permission

Give yourself plenty of down time in order to have highly productive uptime; drop the guilt! Rest leads to better overall productivity.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Stop wasting energy points! Eliminate any emails from your inbox that you don’t need to see: the unread, notifications, newsletters (Jenny uses SaneBox for this), and make sure you help the things you need to see stick out.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Laura on the web, IG, LinkedIn

• Articles: Business Insider—6 tips a productivity advisor gives Google executives to better manage their email, meetings, and workload

• Google Blog—5 things I learned from Google’s productivity expert

• CNN—She helps Google workers be productive. Here are her pro tips.

• Video: Top 3 Google Workspace tips

• Apps: SaneBox, TextExpander, HelpScout

📚 Books Mentioned

• Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Free Time: 019: Most Valuable Activities with Dave Crenshaw

• 154: The Hard No

• 027: Time Management for Mortals with Oliver Burkeman

• Pivot: 289: Stealing Wi-Fi as Career Strategy with Jenny Wood

• 307: Pivoting from Google to Launching People Playbook with Tony McGaharan

• 318: The Beauty of Late Bloomers with Jenna Valovic

• 309: Wayfinding and Developing Identity Agency with Ciela Hartanov

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

While the title of this episode, The Framework Framework™ is tongue-in-cheek, I’m pulling this out of the BFF bonus vault because it’s one of the community’s favorites.

I’m sharing the first steps to how you can set up a framework to help bolster your IP and your business; either by scaling through programs like certification and licensing, and to make your material more memorable and accessible to the groups you care most about reaching.

I shared this in June 2023 as a follow-up to the fantastic workshop that Pamela Slim did for us on Certification and Licensing. You can access over 100 bonus episodes and that workshop by joining Free Time as a paying subscriber. You’ll get instant access to Stephanie Huston’s How to Batch Create and Customize Your Annual Content Calendar, with an epic multi-tab template in Google Sheets. Be sure to also check out the resources below, including Wes Kao’s detailed LinkedIn post on how to turn your ideas into frameworks.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways of the Framework Framework™

• Solves a problem (people know they have), answers a question (BookRx)

• Action-oriented → Transformation Journey or Comprehensive (Whole body/self/org). Name your process

• Memorable, concise name and stages (ideally 3 to 4 stages)

• Bonus: Tie-in a metaphor, hook, and/or story

📘 From Built to Sell:

• TED’S TIP # 3 Owning a process makes it easier to pitch and puts you in control. Be clear about what you’re selling, and potential customers will be more likely to buy your product.

• TED’S TIP # 6 Don’t be afraid to say no to projects. Prove that you’re serious about specialization by turning down work that falls outside your area of expertise. The more people you say no to, the more referrals you’ll get to people who need your product or service.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Here's a photo of my journal where I first started trying to piece the Free Time Framework together, brainstorming themes before eventually shifting from Mind/Time/Team to Align -> Design -> Assign :)

• Articles: Martha Beck’s Growing Wings: The Power of Change

• TED—The 7 types of rest that every person needs

• Wes Kao’s detailed LinkedIn post on how to turn your ideas into frameworks

📚 Books Mentioned

• Built to Sell

• The Referral Engine

• Finding Your Own North Star

• E-Myth Revisited

• The Power of Full Engagement

• The Lean Start-up

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• BFF Bonus Workshops: Pamela Slim’s Certification and Licensing

• Stephanie Huston’s How to Batch Create and Customize Your Annual Content Calendar

• Free Time: 189: Jay Acunzo's walkthrough of his Intellectual Property (IP) Development OS — check out the diagram here

• 256: Behind-the-Business: 1:1 Voxer Coaching Summer Pop-Up—Structure, Systems & Pricing

• 135: How to Rapidly Prototype a Course (Pivot Replay from Dec. 2019)

• 187: Licensing 201 — Q&A on Pricing + Packaging, Train-the-Trainer, Delivery, and Legal

• 186: Licensing 201 — Q&A on Product Development, Attracting Clients, and Sales Process

• 185: How Licensing Helps Serve the Queen Bee Role + Stop Keeping up with the EntrepreJoneses with Mike Michalowicz

• 140: How to License Your IP (Intellectual Property)

• Pivot: 281: Feeling Impostery? Become a Qualified Curator Instead of an End-All-Be-All Expert

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

What do you do when you lose your biggest client? Today, I bring you part two of the What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client compilation. If you haven’t already, listen to 264: What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client (Part One) — and save these links for a rainy day!

The next time you’re going through something challenging in your business, remember: you are not alone! I hope you find comfort through the voices of some of my dearest friends, former podcast guests, and favorite Heart-Based Business owners who are speaking from experience about how they've handled situations just like this.

If you want the full scoop on what founding BFF member Leanne Hughes calls “business reality TV” on how I have been handling losing my biggest favorite client, I encourage you to check out the full series of posts at Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h. Thank you for listening, and huge thanks to everybody who submitted for this compilation!

📝 Contributors & Permission Slips:

• Stephanie Polen, founder of The Polen Group: “Give yourself permission to be emotional and recognize that that's your humanity - that is the thing that makes you special and the work that you do. And it's probably why that big client hired you in the first place.”

• Khe Hy, founder of RadReads: “View these challenges not as a death of identity, but an opportunity to recalibrate your emotional resilience.”

• Marisol Dahl, cofounder of Together Agency: “When you part ways with a big client, give yourself permission to take a beat so that you can reflect and digest on your own experience with this client.”

• Chris Wilson, founder of Simplify Your Why: “Try more experiments with your business; give yourself the chance to iterate and fail (it helps if you live below your means!). It's rare that your first business model will work.”

• Maya Middlemiss, founder of Remote Work Europe: “Give yourself permission to do something for yourself in terms of your interests and professional development. Don't let anybody own so much of your time.”

• Check out the other half here, from Kelli Thompson, Kristoffer Carter, Pamela Slim, and Charlie Gilkey: 264: What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client (Part One)

🔗 Articles Mentioned

• Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

• This is a Wonderful Day

• An Honest Accounting: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

• Am I Running a Zombie Business? Part One and Part Two

• Ghost Self: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

📚 Books Mentioned

• The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks (mentioned by Chris Wilson)

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Free Time: 264: What to Do When You Lose Your Biggest Client (Part One)

• 173: Cut Your Losses—Even While Pivoting in Public—with Khe Hy

• Check out our full Rad Reads x Pivot Spotify Playlist

• Pivot: 355: Building a Brand Strategy from Scratch with Adam Chaloeicheep of Together Agency

• 356: Four Brand Personas with Adam Chaloeicheep

• Future is Freelance with Maya Middlemiss: From Freelancing to Delightfully Tiny Teams: Embracing Automation, Empowerment, and Emojis with Jenny Blake

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

What do you do when you lose your biggest client? That was my Spotify search query for podcast episodes on this topic in the summer of 2023. It came up empty—there was not a single podcast episode on this topic. Of course not. Who wants to admit out loud and in their archives that they've lost their biggest client? In the past, I probably wouldn't have fessed up to this either. Except for the fact that now it's what I wish I could see, read, and hear. Today’s compilation episode is here to fix that!

If you've been reading Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h, you know that the origin story for my new-ish paid Substack was losing my biggest, most beloved corporate client in the summer of 2023. Getting The News shook me up so much because not only was it one of my longest-running favorite licensing clients, but it also represented at least six figures of income for the next six months being instantly wiped off the table.

Now, at least, we will all have something to turn to (and return to). My goal is not to provide advice but rather to offer some comfort through the voices of some of my dearest friends and favorite Heart-Based Business owners who are speaking from experience about how they've handled situations just like this.

Maybe you don't need this episode right now, but if something does happen in the future (even if we hope not), you'll remember that you can come back and listen on a proverbial rainy day.

Please share with any fellow business owner friends who might be going through a tough time, and enormous thanks to the wonderful group of friends and former podcast guests who shared their stories for this two-part episode!

Continue listening to part two:

📝 Contributors & Permission Slips:

• Kelli Thompson, author of Closing the Confidence Gap: “Diversify your business income and give yourself permission that you can do a lot of things that align with your mission, but offer it in many different ways that feel good for you.”

• Kristoffer ‘KC’ Carter, author of Permission to Glow: “Drop the self-judgment, give yourself more self-compassion, and just get back to work with creating the next even better client.”

• Pamela Slim, author of The Widest Net: “Give up the idea that you are in control of the success of your business. When you release that idea, then you can be more curious about how to step in and fix things that aren't working.”

• Charlie Gilkey, author of Team Habits: “Do not take the client loss personally. Stand tall, take care of yourself, and go get your next client.”

🔗 Articles Mentioned

• Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

• This is a Wonderful Day

• An Honest Accounting: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

• Am I Running a Zombie Business? Part One and Part Two

• Ghost Self: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

📚 Books Mentioned

• Closing the Confidence Gap by Kelli Thompson

• Permission to Glow by Kristoffer ‘KC’ Carter

• Escape from Cubicle Nation, Body of Work, and The Widest Net by Pamela Slim

• Start Finishing and Team Habits by Charlie Gilkey

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes — Part One

• Free Time: 188: Energy Capacity Planning, Pricing, and Finding Resonant Masterminds with Kelli Thompson

• 039: Permission to Glow with Kristoffer (KC) Carter

• 117: Tiny Marketing Actions with Pamela Slim

• 143: Exploring Time, Money, and Energy Capacity with Tara McMullin and Charlie Gilkey

• 091: Quarterly Planning with Charlie Gilkey

• Pivot: 315: Intuition-Building, Spotting Pedestal Syndrome, and Closing the Confidence Gap with Kelli Thompson

• 136: Start Finishing—Pricing, Projects, and Momentum Planning with Charlie Gilkey

Continue listening to part two:

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

“I am great in the early, messy days and I know that about myself, so I designed my business around serving others in that stage.”

In this conversation with business strategist (genius!) Michelle Warner, we cover the three growth stages most relevant to tiny business owners, how to fix broken business models, validating product-market-founder fit, the difference between traffic-based versus relationship-based sales and marketing, borrowing aligned audiences, leading a free monthly Q&A to “catch” their interest afterward, imagining sales as a downhill snowball, and how to scale while still staying Delightfully Tiny.

More About Michelle

Michelle Warner designs tiny companies that are built to last. With an MBA from one of the world’s top business schools and 15+ years experience growing small businesses, Michelle focuses on layering real world experience on top of classic business fundamentals to design businesses that are sustainable and scalable in the long term and resilient and adaptable in the short term.

It’s the way she grew her first business to 7+ figures, and it’s what she’s used to help 300+ CEO's create businesses that work for the important stuff: profit, energy, passion + time. She’s also the creator of Networking That Pays, the introvert-friendly, always awkward-free connection system that brings in reliable leads, consistent referrals and meaningful connections for your business - in 5 minutes a day.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• Three small business stages most relevant to tiny business owners (adapted from HBR): Validate—product-market-founder fit; Sell—repeatable and predictable marketing and sales; Foundation—process, team, culture)

• Relationship- versus traffic-based sales and metrics: Relationship-based business are going for smaller reach, with ideally at least a fifty-percent conversion rate on sales calls. Traffic-based marketing aims at bringing in much bigger audiences, with smaller conversion rates for things like selling digital products (pushing a boulder up hill).

• Three marketing stages: Awareness (imagine a snowball running downhill—people need to have a really big moment with you; you’ve made 80% of the sale by blowing their mind during the awareness stage) engagement, and sales.

📝 Permission

Focus on sequence over strategy: you can execute strategies perfectly, but if you’re doing them in the wrong order, it’s not going to do a thing for you.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Take five minutes a day to reach out to one person across any of these four themes: thank you’s (be specific!), connections, asks, and catch-ups.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Michelle on the web, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn

• Articles: HBR—The Five Stages of Small-Business Growth

• Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h—Climbing Down the Entrepreneurial Ladder

• An Honest Accounting (Part One)

• People: Margo Aaron, Pamela Slim, Jay Acunzo

• Tiny + Strong Table Talk: Michelle’s free monthly Q&A if you need a good idea, fresh perspective or to get inspired by what others are thinking and doing. Register here.

📚 Books Mentioned

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Off the Grid: Leaving Social Media Without Losing All Your Clients — Relationship Marketing with Michelle Warner

• Free Time: 042: How I Run My Business Without Social Media

• 181: Be Irreplaceable with My Creative Coach Jay Acunzo

• 117: Tiny Marketing Actions with Pamela Slim

• 261: Cringe-Free Launches and Evergreen Sales Considerations with Anne Samoilov

• 165: Are your clients bringing out the best in you? Engineering the Evolution of Your Business

• 229: How (and When) to Trust Yourself and Others with Ilise Benun

• 138: ⛵️Stop Sailing the Sea of Shiny Shoulds

• 136: Why I Stopped Exploring Selling the Pivot Brand and Business

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

“Things today are waaayyyyy better than Things have ever been. Cavemen had sticks. In the Middle ages they had typhoid. We have iPhones and Hermann Miller chairs and shoes with air in the soles. Inside the soles! How do they get the air inside the soles??? We are living in the Golden Age of Things, in the Golden Empire of Things.”

—Shalom Auslander's Fetal Position via Beckett Drove a Deux Chevaux

I first encountered the Apple billboard a few days after Christmas. I was walking down Fourteenth Street in the Meatpacking district, and there it was—an Apple ad declaring “Newphoria!” in enormous print.

“15” blazes like a beacon for the Apple Store below, luring and ensuring that passersby upgrade to the latest-greatest device. The ad features an intimate face-down photo of the newest iPhone’s somebody-tell-me-why-this-is-so-special camera. The lenses look like lily pads leading to the promised land of Newphoria.

We don’t need newphoria. We need oldphoria, the joy in what already exists. We need simplephoria, the joy in streamlining. We need enoughphoria, the celebration that what we have and who we are is already enough. Newphoria, at least as it relates to running a small business, is not always all it’s cracked up to be.

Today’s post is a crossover from Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h—you can read the post and reply in the comments here: Climbing Down the Entrepreneurial Ladder.

📝 Permission

Celebrate your own -phoria, the joy in running your business in the way that works best for you!

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• D🤦🏻‍♀️h Articles: Love That! For You 🙄

• COnTenT cReaToRs exist and subsist in the verrrrrrry looooooooooooong tail’s trough

• 🤬 Rant From the Wound: Why This Platitude Meme Engraged Me

• Serendipity signage

• Katherine Raz on closing the second location of her Fernseed business in Tacoma

• Emily McDowell’s experience of running a small business that blew up—in a good way—but also led to burnout: The truth about going mega-viral, part one and part two.

• Nathan Barry’s The Ladders of Wealth Creation

• Jonathan Field’s The Unfortunate Middle

• JB for CNBC: Treat your career like a smart phone, not a ladder

• NYT: Climbing Down the Corporate Ladder. Big thanks to Rob Walker for including me in this Workologist column! It’s still a career highlight. He’s now here on Substack at The Art of Noticing

• Video: If you want to geek out further on idea gathering process: here’s a Loom walkthrough of my Collection Bucket in Notion.

• Recent Free Time workshop by Stephanie Huston with a template for creating and batching content for the year ahead.

• Apps: Substack

📚 Books Mentioned

• I’m not immune from status-chasing—none of us are. In his book, The Status Game, Will Storr categorizes these games into three types: dominance, success, and virtue. My two all-time favorite books on this topic are Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety and Wanting by Luke Burgis who is on Substack at Ride or Drive and Anti-Mimetic.

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Listen to the audio version of Jonathan Fields reading “The Unfortunate Middle” here

• Check out our series of 12 SPARKED episodes (Spotify Playlist)

• Pivot: 305: Is What You’re Wanting Actually What’s Best For You? With Luke Burgis

• Pivot x RadReads conversations on status with Khe Hy (Spotify Playlist)

• Free Time: Here are some of my favorite Free Time conversations with small business owners who downsized their operations:

• 016: IP Licensing and “No Full-Time Employees” with Lee LeFever

• 131: Scaling Joy While Streamlining Business Overhead with Kaneisha Grayson

• 157: Downshifting to a Delightfully Part-Team Team with Laura Roeder

• 173: Cut Your Losses—Even While Pivoting in Public with Khe Hy

• 205: Turning Down a $200K Two-Book Traditional Publishing Deal with Paul Millerd

• 241: Finding Freedom and Financial Reciprocity through a Paid Newsletter

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If you’re anything like me, you may find conducting online launches for your programs or events exhausting and sometimes even cringe-inducing. Thankfully, today’s guest, Anne Samoilov, is here to help!

Anne is a long-time expert in the space who has helmed product launches for Laura Roeder, Marie Forleo, and Jonathan Fields. Today, we’re talking about why some of us find big, splashy launches so draining; how to set up automated or evergreen launches (and her take on the pros and cons of these); how to find non-cringey launch strategies; be willing to take on clients or projects that have nothing to do with your business.

More About Anne

Anne Samoilov is a launch strategist and VFX Producer. She started her work online as the creator of Fearless Launching, an online training program that teaches impact-driven entrepreneurs how to create simple, streamlined, and standout launches without relying on templates or cookie-cutter strategies. She has also led the VFX teams for TV shows on Paramount Plus and Starz. Check out Anne’s podcast, The Fearless Launching Show, where she shares insights and tips on how to have an amazing product or business launch—your way.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• Evergreen or Automated Launches: a person who is interested in what you do → signs up for a free interactive event (a webinar, challenge, email series, video series, etc.) → at some point, you make an offer by sending them to a sales page. They can do all this on their own schedule.

• Do people actually know what you offer? Three ways to make sure: communication (webinar, mini-course, offer in your thank you pages, newsletter P.S.), website updates (bio, announcement bar, pop-up, work with me page), other people (free workshop for their audience, podcast guesting)

• Get in front of other audiences by doing a workshop (webinar) tour: You can offer the host an affiliate commission for sales. Give both audiences a heads-up that you have a relationship.

📝 Permission

To take on clients or projects that have nothing to do with your business; it can bring in revenue and reconnect you with latent skills.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Spruce up your thank you pages! Put your bio, mention ways to work with you, offer a freebie. Bonus: create a launch library with some of the copy that has worked best from previous launches.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Anne on the web, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook

• Content Sprints: Stephanie Huston

• BFF Workshop: How to Batch + Create Your Annual Content Calendar with Stephanie Huston

• People: Catherine Just, Marie Forleo, Jeff Walker

• Tools: Notion

• Deadline Funnel

📚 Books Mentioned

• The White Space Solution: Make Room For Your Best Life & Work

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Anne’s Fearless Launching Show

• BFF Workshop: How to Batch + Create Your Annual Content Calendar with Stephanie Huston

• Free Time: 064: The Vulnerability of Launching

• 157: Downshifting to a Delightfully Part-Team Team with Laura Roeder

• 107: How to Know When You’ve Gotten Pricing Wrong and 020: Pricing Psychology with Jacquette M. Timmons

• 084: Sprinkling the First 1,000 Serendipity Seeds of a Launch

• 069: Evergreen Email Sequences with Allan Dib

• Pivot: 047: Live Fiercely, Study Deeply . . . While Earning a Living — with Jonathan Fields

• 358: Crossing the Cringe Chasm when Taking Career and Creative Risks with Henna Pryor

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

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In honor of our upcoming Free Time x Long Game IRL event in Miami on February 1 and 2 (it’s not too late to join!), today I’m bringing you a favorite episode from the earliest days of the Free Time pod.

In this conversation with —aka “DC”—one of my closest friendtors, we discuss how she optimizes for interesting, says no to good opportunities, builds relationships by following her “no asks for a year” rule, and when to call on trusted advisors to ensure you don’t quit something too soon.

Be sure to check out her bestselling fourth book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, for even more insights on how to apply strategic thinking to your biggest vision.

This episode originally aired on September 28, 2021.

More About Dorie

Dorie Clark helps individuals and companies get their best ideas heard in a crowded, noisy world. She has been named one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50, and was honored as the #1 Communication Coach in the world by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. She is a keynote speaker and teaches executive education for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School. Dorie is the author of The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, Reinventing You, Stand Out, Entrepreneurial You.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• Building and Maintaining Relationships: Dorie doesn’t make any significant asks from new connections for at least a year. This strategy is aimed at building genuine, agenda-free relationships, nurturing them over time, rather than using them for immediate benefits.

• “Optimizing for Interesting” Opportunities: Pursue what genuinely interests you rather than feeling pressured to follow a predetermined passion or path.

• Balancing Opportunities and Saying: It’s a skill to decline opportunities, especially alluring seemingly “free” ones. Evaluate opportunities based on alignment with your long-term goals and the true cost of saying yes, including opportunity cost, time, and energy.

📝 Permission

“You don’t have to do this,” for types of events that you hate attending! Decline joyfully.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

What decision would you make about a current or future project if you were optimizing for interesting?

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Dorie on the web, Instagram: @dorieclark, LinkedIn

• Articles: Dorie on HBR

• Video: TEDx—How to Future-Proof Your Career

📚 Books Mentioned

• Dorie’s Books: The Long Game, Reinventing You, Stand Out, Entrepreneurial You

• Decoding Greatness by Ron Friedman

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Russel Brunson's The Marketing Secrets Show

• Pivot: 298: Building a New Network and Becoming Broadway Investors with Dorie Clark and Alisa Cohn

• 268: Decoding Greatness with Ron Friedman

• 58: Monetize Your Ideas with Dorie Clark

• 66: Create Multiple Streams of Income with Dorie Clark

• 33: Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following with Dorie Clark

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

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📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

Before you post anything, ask: Why am I posting this? Is this within my brand guardrails? Even still, you may find yourself in hot water someday, and it’s important to think through how you will respond (and the pop-up team you will assemble to help) in advance.

Today, we’re breaking down the tricky art of crisis communications and apologies with Aliza Licht, author of On Brand, who brings two decades of PR experience to the conversation.

More About Aliza

Aliza Licht is an award-winning marketer, bestselling author, podcaster, personal branding expert, and the founder of LEAVE YOUR MARK, a multimedia brand and consultancy. She advises businesses and mentors individuals on brand building and career development. Licht leverages over two decades of expertise in marketing, communications, and digital strategy in the fashion industry. She was named one of "America's Next Top Mentors" by The New York Times.

Her new book, On Brand: Shape Your Narrative. Share Your Vision. Shift Their Perception is a comprehensive roadmap to building your personal brand. As a social media pioneer and one of the first fashion influencers, Licht created and was the voice of the anonymous social media phenomenon DKNY PR GIRL.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• Brand Guardrails: What kind of point of view do you have? What will and won’t you stand behind? What is central to who you are?

• Plan for Crisis Communications before you have a crisis: What team will be involved? An attorney, an HR person (if a bigger business), certain savvy friends. Put that “bat team” together, almost like your to-go bag in an emergency. You won’t be thinking clearly in the middle of a crisis when your brand is everywhere, and not in a good way.

• Social media is very siloed: If a fire starts on one platform, don’t spread your own wildfire by responding to it across every channel. Contain a fire where it started first.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

If you are faced with a crisis, first understand where you messed up. What did you do that pissed off your community? Second, how quickly can you respond to that? Finally, are there actions you need to take in addition to your words?

📚 Books Mentioned

• On Brand: Shape Your Narrative. Share Your Vision. Shift Their Perception

• Humans of New York and Humans of New York: Stories by Brandon Stanton

• The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Aliza on the web, IG, Twitter, LinkedIn

• Humans of New York: web, IG, book

• Articles: DKNY Responds to Accusations that it Stole Photos from ‘Humans of New York’ Photographer

• CBS New York—DKNY, Photographer Settle After Store Uses 'Humans Of New York' Photos Without Permission

• Streisand effect: An unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing awareness of that information.

• The New York Times—Is Empowering Corporate Women Enough?

• The New Yorker—The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm

🎧 Related Podcast Episodes

• Leave Your Mark: Jenny Blake on Quietly Unsubscribing From Burnout, Harnessing Free Time, and Why We Should Stop Sailing the Sea of Shiny Shoulds

• Free Time: 005: Brand Obsessed with Emily Heyward

• Pivot: 236: We're All In This Together—From Blame to Belonging with Mike Robbins

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

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💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

What’s on your business owner to-do list? Here’s a peek at mine, full of items large, small, and existential. This is a crossover from , a recent essay that was an unexpected runaway hit—one of the most popular to date in the six months since I started on Substack.

I had no idea (as usual) whether it would resonate or not when I hit “publish,” until my friend Adam texted to say how much he could relate. “Your comments are blowing up!” he said, sending a screenshot of other people letting me know that I wasn’t alone in my itemized anxiety.

Enormous thanks to those of you who have already subscribed, read, commented, and shared—it means the world to me!

Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h with Jenny Blake

✔️ To Do: One Small Business Owner’s Checklist

Dec. 2, 2023: To Do Renew health insurance Run Gusto payroll report to reveal meager take-home pay this year Determine if this will yield higher or lower government subsidy, reducing the otherwise $1,800 per month sticker price for a family of two—more than double the cost of your first car…

Read more

2 years ago · 43 likes · 15 comments · ❤️ Jenny Blake

📝 Permission

To reward yourself with something fun after you complete the most annoying #adulting item on your to-do list.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Delegate one thing you are dreading on your own to-do list.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• NaNoWriMo cofounder Grant Faulkner

• Rolling in Doh: To Do—One Small Business Owner’s Checklist

• An Honest Accounting Part One, Part Two, Part Three—Emojij Balance Sheet

• Articles: Jennifer Egan’s “To Do”

• Todd Sattersten’s publishing magic number for book sales

• Julia Cameron’s Artist Dates

• Cartoon: “Alice in Responsibilityland” by Liana Finck for The New Yorker

• Apps: Substack

Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h with Jenny Blake

🎢 Divine disaster diaries from a breadwinning business owner living in New York City.🗽 Posts go live Wednesday and Saturday at 11:11 a.m. ✨

By ❤️ Jenny Blake

📚 Books Mentioned

• The Art of Brevity by Grant Faulkner

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Free Time: 238: Why Revenue Goals Don’t Work (For Me)

• 226: Is your business a hot mess? If yes, let's celebrate — Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

• 236: Ignore the Odds — Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

• 250: Do what you love and the money will follow . . . IF you meet at least 3 of these 20 criteria

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

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💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

“We don’t want our time to be spread thin like peanut butter on a slice of toast. You will have greater impact when you concentrate your efforts on work that is closely tied to winning—however you define it.”

Are you working in a frustration factory? If so, it’s important to recognize that not all friction is created equal. Some is good, to slow down decision-making in crucial moments, and some is bad, getting in the way of progress. You’ll need to tap into your inner “grease” and “gunk” sides to address both.

In the introduction to their book, The Friction Project, coauthors Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton share a quote from Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar. He believes that if Pixar followed overreaching executives’ advice to wring maximum efficiency and scale out of the organization, it would “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

"The goal isn't efficiency, it is to make something good or even great,” Catmull says. “We iterate seven to nine times, with friction in the process.”

More About Huggy

Huggy Rao is the Atholl McBean professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, the Sociological Research Association, and the Academy of Management. He has written for Harvard Business Review, Business Week, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Market Rebels and coauthor of the bestselling book Scaling Up Excellence. Today we’re talking about his new book, also coauthored with Bob Sutton, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• Think of yourself as a trustee of others’ time: Don’t forget that your company is a product too. Be intentional about how customers (and team members) interact with your business at every step.

• Grease people vs. gunk people: Grease people are connectors—like WD40—they like to make things easier. Gunk people are more rule and procedure-bound. These are two different aspects of ourselves.

• Think of your role as Editor-in-Chief of a newspaper: Take away stuff that bores and distracts readers. You also need to do your due dilligence: fact check, interview sources. What’s the cost of serving a large, friction-filled client? Is it really worth it? Are they the right people for you to serve? Don’t be customer compelled, thinking you have to chase every customer. A great company says yes to some customers, and no to others.

📝 Permission

Start simple: get rid of stupid stuff. How will you do this every day? Can you have one decision-making rule that a ten year-old would understand?

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Do a simple test of friction forensics. Ask: is this a one-way door decision I’m making, one that’s very costly to reverse? There are other decisions where the cost of failure is very low. When you’re making a one-way door decision, put in good friction to slow you down. For the latter, make things very easy for people to do.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Huggy on the web, Twitter, LinkedIn

• Articles: Our to-do lists can’t grow forever. It’s time to try subtraction

• Video: Huggy Rao on Scaling Up Excellence

📚 Books Mentioned

• The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Huggy Rao & Robert Sutton

• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

• Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• Friction with Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao

• Free Time: 169: Running a Goal-Free Business with Stephen Shapiro

• Pivot: 326: Fool Me Once—How to Avoid Accidental and Righteous Fraud with Kelly Pope

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

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📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit

I'm so excited to bring you a listener submission today from Renee Rubin Ross about my summer Voxer coaching pop-up. I've done these two summers in a row now, and I've learned so much every subsequent time. In this episode, I’ll share the structure, systems, and pricing that help me create a joyful asynchronous program that keeps our calendars free of “tiny boxes” (as my friend Sarah calls them).

More about Renee

Dr. Renee Rubin Ross is a recognized leader on board and organizational development and strategy and the founder of The Ross Collective, a consulting firm that designs and leads inclusive, participatory processes for social sector boards and staff.

🌟 3 Key Takeaways

• Structure: Cohorts are nice so that you can make yourself energetically available (and make extra space on your calendar for replying) for the program duration. Ask participants to put their one question for the week in big blinking lights! Ideally as text underneath their voice memo (Voxer caps memos at 15 minutes, which is a good thing!)

• Systems: Create a “how this works” program overview page that participants can reference throughout the program. Keep a participant tracker where you note their question and your answer each week, so you don’t repeat yourself (and so you can easily reference resource links that another participant might ask about later).

• Pricing: Offer your current active, paying clients and community members the first chance at enrollment and at a discounted rate. I also grandfather in their pricing for life.

📝 Permission

Design programs that are as joyful for you to facilitate as they are for others to join! At the inaugural Business Bestie Brunch we came up with the mantra, “We get to call this work.” What is your ideal “I get to call this work” format for delivering client services?

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Consider your own Voxer coaching experiment! Make sure it’s limited in scope (ie not rolling admission) and that you set clear parameters up front.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Join the waitlist: Voxer Coaching with Jenny and Business Bestie Brunch

• Apps: Notion, Substack, Loom, Voxer

📚 Books Mentioned

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• BFF Bonus: 100: Three Ingredients to Fill a Program Faster

• Free Time: 023: Determine Your True Capacity with Ashley Gartland

• 100: Top Ten Lessons from 💯 Episodes

• 106: Splatology—On Clearing Time Clutter

• Pivot: 277: Expansive Impact and Spacious Scheduling with Sarah Young

🌟Enjoying the show? The best way to thank us is by leaving a rating or review

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

💬 I’d love to hear what’s on your mind! Take the Free Time listener survey

☎️ Submit a voice question or comment: http://itsfreetime.com/ask

🎧 Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen to podcasts

📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends!

💌 Subscribe to the Time Well Spent newsletter for access to the Free Time Toolkit