I'm excited to bring you an episode from the Pivot podcast vault today—this is a conversation with a longtime friendtor, Mike Michalowicz, that stuck in my mind long after we recorded on February 5, 2020. The episode launched on March 20, 2020, and the last group gathering I attended was Mike's in-person Fix This Next workshop at his office in New Jersey on Friday, March 13. Boy was the world about to get weird! Mike explains how to identify and serve the Queen Bee Role in your business, the cli...
May 02, 2023•57 min•Ep. 185
It was a hot summer day, and I’m grumbling while dragging a rolling carry-on suitcase full of books to sign and send to the post office, starting to build resentment at how much time it was taking. After two hours of signing, writing notes, punching endless kiosk buttons, I start tsk taking myself, saying I should never do this myself again (I’m the owner of the business, after all! This is admin I should surely be delegating out!). But alas, I ended up with one extra copy, curious at who I miss...
Apr 28, 2023•26 min•Ep. 184
“You have to live spherically—in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm—and things will come your way.” —Federico Fellini This week’s delightful guest, Madeleine Dore, reminded me of this wonderful quote while reading her book, one that I know you will love as much as I did: I Didn’t Do The Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt. We talk about widening the measure and meaning of a day beyond our to-do lists, discovering the call of a new topic, shaping a big idea “blob of cl...
Apr 25, 2023•46 min•Ep. 183
📣 We’re publishing this week’s solo episode a day early as a friendly reminder that the Free Time podcast is nominated for a Webby Award, the "Oscars of the Internet!" Please visit http://itsfreetime.com/webby to cast your vote by the end of today, Thursday, April 20! This nomination alone is a major achievement, putting us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 projects entered—thank you so much for being here and for your support :) There’s a wall in my house that I know would look gorgeous if it we...
Apr 20, 2023•40 min•Ep. 181
Hi Friends! I'm re-airing this announcement as a friendly reminder that the Free Time podcast has made it to the nomination stage of the Webby Awards, the "Oscars of the Internet!" The Webbys celebrate the best and most innovative online content across websites, podcasts, games, apps, and videos. 📣 Between now and TOMORROW, April 20th: Please visit itsfreetime.com/webby and cast your vote for Free Time! This nomination alone is a major achievement, putting us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 pro...
Apr 19, 2023•8 min
📣 The Free Time podcast is nominated for a Webby Award, the "Oscars of the Internet!" Please visit http://itsfreetime.com/webby to cast your vote for Free Time between now and April 20! One thing I love about Jay Acunzo is that his body of work is a love letter to craft and quality. We talk about mindset shifts and practices to help you focus more on resonance than reach; how to do work that matters to you so that your work can matter more; how he worked through his own existential creative cri...
Apr 18, 2023•54 min•Ep. 181
📣 The Free Time podcast is nominated for a Webby Award, the "Oscars of the Internet!" Please visit http://itsfreetime.com/webby to cast your vote for Free Time between now and Thursday, April 20! This nomination alone is a major achievement, putting us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 projects entered—thank you so much for being here and for your support! What business best practices drive you nuts? What are the best practices you wish people would follow, but they don't? These are clues to thin...
Apr 14, 2023•38 min•Ep. 180
📣 The Free Time podcast is nominated for a Webby Award, the "Oscars of the Internet!" Please visit http://itsfreetime.com/webby to cast your vote for Free Time between now and Thursday, April 20! This nomination alone is a major achievement, putting us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 projects entered—thank you so much for being here and for your support! “Start with the truth, then edit.” That’s a gem that today’s guest, Jacqueline Fische, picked up while working in corporate communications tha...
Apr 11, 2023•44 min•Ep. 179
📣 The Free Time podcast is nominated for a Webby Award, the "Oscars of the Internet!" Please visit http://itsfreetime.com/webby to cast your vote for Free Time between now and Thursday, April 20! This nomination alone is a major achievement, putting us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 projects entered—thank you so much for being here and for your support! What if time wasn’t something we had to hoard, protect, or chase? What if we could change our relationship to time—to life itself—expanding be...
Apr 07, 2023•39 min•Ep. 178
Friends!! I can't believe it!! The Free Time podcast has made it to the nomination stage of the Webby Awards, the "Oscars of the Internet!" The Webbys celebrate the best and most innovative online content across websites, podcasts, games, apps, and videos. 📣 Between now and April 20th: Please visit itsfreetime.com/webby and cast your vote for Free Time! This nomination alone is a major achievement, putting us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 projects entered. We're up for best individual episode...
Apr 06, 2023•7 min
I’m delighted to welcome Daniel Doyon to the pod this week, co-founder of one of my favorite software services, Readwise. Every morning while I have my coffee, I look forward to checking out the daily email roll-up of five serendipitous snippets pulled from my entire library of Kindle highlights. In this conversation, we cover: how Dan and his cofounder handled the famous “hug of death” from Tim Ferriss recommending their service in his 5-Bullet Friday newsletter; the perils of premature optimiz...
Apr 04, 2023•45 min•Ep. 177
“Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple, and it's that hard.” —Danny Meyer, Setting the Table Danny Meyer is a famous restauranteur responsible for founding some of my favorite spots, including Gramercy Tavern, Eleven Madison Park, and the popular Shake Shack chain. He pioneered the philosophy of “enlightened hospitality.” That’s the thing about engineering surprise and delight moments in your business. Like the example I share in this episode, while they ma...
Mar 31, 2023•43 min•Ep. 176
“You are making a choice every time you undercharge.” How’s that for a splash of cold water to the face?! Bad pricing strategy puts your business—and your body—at risk. As today’s guest, Erin Haag says, when your prices are too low, “You are choosing to work an additional 10, 20, or 30 hours per week to generate the income you need to survive.” In this conversation, Erin shares what led to two hospitalizations from back-to-back stress-related illnesses, followed by her aha moment: doing the math...
Mar 28, 2023•46 min•Ep. 175
🎉 This week marks the one-year bookiversary of Free Time making its way into the world, and the two-year podiversary of launching this show. 🥂 As I reach these milestones, a question looms: Has the book writing, launching, and marketing been a success, as I would define it? In today’s solo, let’s ride the mindset rollercoaster of launching something new into the world, and I share specific one-year sales stats for those who are curious—similar to episode 096: Book Sales Stats—One Month Post-La...
Mar 24, 2023•46 min•Ep. 172
“How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” —Ernest Hemingway That’s the kick-off quote from returning guest Khe Hy’s recent pivot-in-progress big reveal, taking us behind the scenes of his business in a recent post titled, “The $645,099 business pivot.” Khe is the founder of RadReads and former Wall Street managing director. Khe returns to the pod today (as our first three-peat Free Time guest) to share his experience from the belly of the Pivot beast. If you haven’t already...
Mar 21, 2023•54 min•Ep. 173
Free Time. The phrase connotes, leisure, fun, time off, vacation—as if we're skipping through meadows with butterflies! 🦋and unicorns!🦄 But if you’re a long-time listener, you know that I think of free time as a verb. It is a skill, a muscle we can build. Freeing Time is something we can get better at. By creating smarter systems and taking small steps today, we can set our time free far into the future. Today’s episode is a reminder about why it’s important to leave abundant margin on your ca...
Mar 17, 2023•17 min•Ep. 172
“What’s the highest level I can serve?” That’s one of the driving questions that today’s guest, Melissa Hughes, helps business owners answer while building companies and making an impact on the world with grace and ease. She believes that the more of us who can shine our lights unapologetically, the better off we all are. In this conversation, Melissa shares how she knew it was time to leave corporate, launching and later shutting down her brick-and-mortar spa business and the “blessing wrapped ...
Mar 14, 2023•47 min•Ep. 171
Feeling slow, stuck, uncertain, or in the midst of a morale dip? If so, today’s minisode is for you—or for a business bestie who might need a little pick-me-up. I share a surprising shift from an encounter with Serendipity Signage; a portal to gratitude on a random New York City train station wall under a set of shattered windows. When you feel down, remind yourself (as I do) what Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic, said: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things ...
Mar 10, 2023•19 min•Ep. 170
Stephen Shapiro is a quintessential Free Timer. Throughout his 20+ year self-employment tenure, he has run a variety of experiments to optimize for freedom and joy. To name just a few: working one hour a day (for years!), clearing space for 15 weeks of travel and/or vacation each year, and week-long hotel stays for focused work sprints. We also talk about the “existential meltdown” that led to a business model redesign, and why he doesn’t need or want to build a team right now, beyond an extende...
Mar 07, 2023•46 min•Ep. 169
One of the biggest lessons I learned from author Nassim Taleb is that whenever he finds himself bored with what he’s writing, he stops. His logic? Surely if you are bored as the author, your readers will be too. Taleb takes it as a sign to drop that direction or concept altogether unless he figures out a way to get excited about it again. In Free Time, I share a similar sentiment: how we bake is as important as what we make. That means that working on your big ideas—whether a project as complex ...
Mar 03, 2023•27 min•Ep. 168
How do we use technology to facilitate real relationships? That’s the big question driving Gina Bianchini’s epic entrepreneurial quest. Today we’re talking about the magic phrase that will transform what you’re building, the difference between social networks versus social media, why a course is not a community, how to avoid working too hard as the host, and why you might benefit from building a small, tight-knit group before trying to grow a bigger audience. More About Gina: Gina Bianchini is t...
Feb 28, 2023•29 min•Ep. 167
How many times have you gone skidding into vacation, arriving exhausted from trying to “earn” it before you leave? Then feeling guilty for any loose ends you were unable to tie up in time, maybe even brooding the first few days because you’re so burned out that you aren’t even enjoying your precious time off nearly as much as you thought you would? Research shows that we can experience diminishing returns when we have too much free time, which might explain the onset of vacation blues. In this e...
Feb 24, 2023•24 min•Ep. 166
Here are a few food-for-thought reflection questions, inspired by today’s guest: Are you working with amateur clients or ones who bring out the best in you? Are you pricing the “aggravation factor” into your proposals when necessary? What about “throwing proposals over the fence,” creating self-inflicted stress when prospective clients ghost you as a result? Finally, are you stuck in the feast-or-famine cycle of your business? If any of the questions above resonate, you will love this conversati...
Feb 21, 2023•32 min•Ep. 165
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “A book is a business card.” That’s because what you don’t hear is that a book is a wonderful revenue generator! It isn’t — at least not directly. The extreme Time-to-Revenue Ratio of writing and marketing a book is not for the faint of heart, unless the book connects directly to a larger part of your business model, serving as lead generation for more profitable products and services. Some interesting stats for you: Even the big behemoth, Penguin Random House, ...
Feb 17, 2023•42 min•Ep. 164
Prolific punchy pontificator Khe Hy—creator of the $10K work accelerator and Supercharge Your Productivity—returns to the pod to share his strategy for collecting inspiring content, repackaging interesting tidbits, and regularly hitting “publish” on his newsletter, RadReads. Today we’re talking about idea kernels: micro-ideas that can be elaborated upon and turned into different kinds of content that help you connect with your audience and your fellow creators. If you haven’t already, be sure to...
Feb 14, 2023•34 min•Ep. 163
Should you self-publish? This is a big debate among aspiring authors, and there is no one right answer. Today I’m sharing my take on the three main publishing options you have to get a book into the world: Self-publishing (including direct-to-ebook or audiobook) where you hire your own team of specialists along the way. Hybrid where you partner with an established publisher, while fronting the costs as an author (for the team they assemble and either print-on-demand or funding a larger print run...
Feb 10, 2023•44 min•Ep. 162
Processing email and social media inboxes is overwhelming enough for one person — can you imagine creating an entire company to help entrepreneurs do this at scale?! Communication curmudgeon that I am, I most certainly cannot. That’s why I invited today’s guest, Yaro Starek, to share the systems and approaches behind Inbox Done, his company that helps clients tame the never-ending email beast. More About Yaro: Yaro Starak is the co-founder of InboxDone.com, an email management company with a tea...
Feb 07, 2023•51 min•Ep. 161
Do you ever feel like you’re just not good with systems? If so, then this episode is for you. The more efficient we can be in our operations, the more time we can set free. Today, I’m sharing five questions to keep in mind while working to increase your awareness for potential automation opportunities. Automation is a skill, and this episode will help you get better at it. For more help and inspiration as you set your time free in 2023, I encourage you to join us in BFF, my private community. If...
Feb 03, 2023•29 min•Ep. 160
Juggling a schedule for one person is tricky enough; for a two-entrepreneur household with kids, it’s another thing altogether! Learn how Jess and Dave make time for each other, for themselves, and for their deep work in today’s conversation about creating free time together as a family. More About Jessica: Jessica Marati Radparvar is a social impact strategist motivated by the belief that doing the right thing should be as easy as humanly possible. She is the founder of Reconsidered, a boutique...
Jan 31, 2023•48 min•Ep. 159
One of the most common questions from those accessing the Author Toolkit (an assembly of my best-open-sourced templates and processes from 14+ years and three books) is a variation on: How can I decide on a topic? How do I narrow down my idea? How do I know if/when I have landed on the right idea? Today I’m sharing ten filters to help you narrow down your book idea — or, if you’re not an aspiring author, perhaps your next “big IP” area that will best serve your body of work, your business, and y...
Jan 27, 2023•28 min•Ep. 157
