📘 The Free Time Book's Missing Mantra

Tired of repeating yourself? Train the system, then the person

Apr 04, 2025

Hi Free Timers,

Stress, frustration, and overwhelm: these are systems flags from your business, asking for renewed attention on a bottleneck—a friction area slowing things down and draining energy.

One of my biggest pet peeves is repeating myself; thus, a bonus mantra that’s missing from the Free Time book since it popped into my head a few months after the launch: train the system, then the person.

Right after the book launched, as I was onboarding two new virtual assistants (I have since downsized back to the tiniest possible team, thank goodness), I found myself repeating the answer to a small email-related process question to different team members for the fourth time in as many months. This is no one person’s fault—other than mine!

My aha moment: I needed a strategy for training the system to get smarter first, then I would teach the team how to better leverage that system, which also reduces confusion, making their work faster, easier, and more frictionless. It also means that if there’s any team turnover the system still holds strong and I don’t have to start from scratch teaching-wise.

For example, I use HelpScout for our team email inboxes. It’s great for creating workflows (automation), assigning messages to different team members, writing notes to each other that the client doesn’t see, saving drafts for someone else to take over, and viewing customer communication history.

Instead of just documenting email SOPs in Notion, I now automatically append a note to certain types of frequent incoming messages telling any team member exactly which SOP to reference and what the high-level next steps are.

🎧 Listen to Episode 92 of the Free Time podcast for more details »

🌟 Key Takeaway

Create a Manager Manual and separate Email Guide. With AI, soon you’ll be able to share that database with tools like Delphi, creating a private chatbot for your business, allowing team members to query the AI directly with process questions. Here’s my email guide:

📝 Permission

Stop repeating yourself! That’s a sure sign that the business area is ripe for systems reinvention.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Start an Email Guide with your most common decisions and process questions. Create filters in Gmail (or workflows in HelpScout) to automatically label incoming email messages with the short link to the Email Guide process entry and/or key next steps.