Freeing Our Time To Grow Our Book Of Business With Jenny Blake

Welcome LinkedIn friends! Your weekly insight to grow your relationships and book of business.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jenny Blake , author of Free Time, where she strategically wrote a book in the language of entrepreneurship for those in business who find themselves struggling to find more free time.

Mo asked Jenny:

“What valuable, big idea are you focused on now, and how are you seeing it resonate in the marketplace? Just tell us about your content and what’s sticking.

Jenny responded:

"The reason the book is called Free Time is a little bit of play on words because it kind of signifies what we do in our time off from work, but as you pointed out, anybody at any level who’s doing big creative and strategic thinking, I’m using the phrase in the sense of a verb. How do we all get better at building the muscle of freeing our time?

So the big idea that I’m really obsessed with at the moment that inspired the book is - How do we get better and better at systems thinking and operational efficiency of taking small steps today that will free our time far into the future? This isn’t about How we can be more productive and manipulate and micromanage our time?… That’s not it.

The system’s thinking element is what are things we can put in place, automate, delegate, eliminate, etc., that we do once, and we see the returns ever after. Something as simple as putting a household product on subscription would achieve that. You put it on subscription once, it arrives at the cadence you need it, and it’s done. Nobody has to think about it again. Not you and not anyone on the team or anyone in your household.”

Mo follows up:

“This is great. Oftentimes times, the commonality across everybody is that they have one foot in growth activities and one foot in delivering some complicated service. What would be your advice to somebody that maybe gets measured by billable time? Maybe they have to renew the big healthcare contract every single year. They’ve got all these demands on growth and retention and all these demands on delivery. What’s your advice on carving out that free time? What activities have you seen with these folks that they can do now that will make a big impact later?”

Jenny responded:

It’s interesting that you mention the cohort that earns based on billable hours because, in a way, that’s the exact opposite incentive of Free Time in the way that I just described it. As in, you kind of want to build for as many hours as you can, but I would still think that in order to enjoy the work that you are doing within those billable hours, you want it to be your highest and best use as a person.

So you are going to want to delegate some of the more repeatable tasks, or you might have subcontractors or team managers that you are managing who help deliver some of that work, so the exercise for the manager or for anyone is to say, “Am I billing those hours most strategically?…”

Even for that person who is incentivized to build more and where it doesn’t really matter how tightly you manage within that billable hour, you still have so much adulting work to do outside of work. I don’t know about you, but I find things like taxes and bookkeeping and things that pile up, I just hate. I call them the burdensome bees. You are feeling friction in your work or home life if you notice you are feeling any of these four burdensome bees.

Those are getting bottlenecked, burned out, bored, or buried by bureaucracy. So for anybody, no matter your pay structure, whether you’re self-employed, you work for someone else, you manage a team, you work on billable hours, those Four B’s crush our spirit…

The question is, there is this mantra I adapt from the world of Agile development: each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it. For a friction area, “What in your life of work is causing the most friction, and how can we solve it?” Sometimes, it just takes pausing and actually calling out a friction area or a bottleneck and saying, “Instead of just being in this task, I need to work on the process of it.”

Dive deeper into the conversation with Jenny Blake here.

In a world where time is our most precious resource, Jenny's insights remind us to continually seek ways to automate, delegate, and streamline tasks, regardless of our professional structure. How can you identify and address the "Four B's" – bottlenecks, burnout, boredom, and bureaucracy – in your work and personal life to reclaim more of your time for what truly matters?

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If you enjoyed this conversation with Jenny, make sure to visit her website. You can also check out her book Free Time and listen to her podcast Free Time with Jenny Blake.

Thanks for reading!

-Mo