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.

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 your future audience.

What type of business would you build if you no longer needed the money? After a life-changing exit from her previous company, Meet Edgar, Laura Roeder’s answer: a fun one.

She is now more focused than ever on building a business that is bootstrapped, agile, asynchronous, joyful for all involved, and powered by part-time team members who love what they do. In this conversation, we discuss why Laura downshifted from a structure with 30 full-time employees to one that’s leaner, saying no to the Business Ops Police, the perks of part-time team members (for you and them), and why “winner take all” markets are a myth.

I had high hopes for the first couple of weeks of the year, but I rang in 2023 in bed, completely uninspired by goals or ideas—anything beyond a desire to get healthy and feel human again, let alone any loftier business aims. Taking a (very loud) hint from the universe, I settled on the theme THRIVE as my focus to start the year.

One of the most common replies to my “wave a magic wand and fix one thing in your business” question when people access the Free Time Toolkit is for help with idea generation. In a meta move—seeing as I was in need of those very strategies myself to create this episode—today I am sharing 8 of them here with you!

What’s the right thing to do, and how do we do it quickly? In this conversation with Strategy Sprints founder Simon Severino, we cover: Why you shouldn’t start with your ideal avatar; setting daily, weekly, and monthly strategy planning (and measuring) habits; how he scales his business through certified Strategy Sprints® Coaches; creating self-healing loops, and greater resilience by tying roles to revenue.

As I shared in last week’s solo episode, Free Time isn’t about time management or productivity, or even simply doing work more efficiently. It is about setting time free.

If our time is trapped like a bird in a cage, unless we break free of shoulds and obligations, there it will remain. We achieve this through smarter systems, and that includes getting better at saying no.

My own tendency to say yes — in an effort to be liked, to please others, to be accommodating, or even to continue trying to “do right” by my work in promoting it — leads to burnout and resentment when to many “yeses” create time confetti and tiredness. In this episode, I’m sharing strategies that I’ve picked up along the way for doing the very hard thing of disappointing others by saying no.

Imagine my surprise when, on the Saturday before I was set to be interviewed on a podcast last summer, my phone dings. It’s Door Dash.

Huh?! I didn’t order anything . . .

Turns out it was a surprise delivery from the producer of that show, Matthew Thompson. Next thing I know, my husband Michael and I are enjoying iced coffee and yummy treats with our Sunday morning reading—I have never felt so taken care of prior to guesting on a podcast!

That’s Matt, and he’s all class (not to mention a fellow systems aficionado). When he suggested we flip the mic to talk more about my podcasting process, I leaped to say yes :) We talk about increasing the surface area of serendipity, saving time, improving interview quality with pre-surveys, and what we both learned from conducting three-month daily podcasting sprints.

As I share in Free Time, nowhere is entropy more visually evident than in older homes or ones in nature. I remember staying at a cabin in the Catskills, where I could see right before my eyes all forms of plants and animals encroaching on the once-pristine house.

Without upkeep, a dead tree teetered precariously toward the roof, weeds started overtaking the grass, spiders made themselves comfortable in bathroom corners, giant carpenter ants traversed the kitchen counters, and we spotted a garden snake crawling into the crevices of the outdoor hot tub.

Entropy, defined as a gradual decline into disorder, is intrinsic to all organic systems, and it’s happening in your business, too. In this episode, I’m talking about entropic bloat and why we need to actively decide to do less, giving our business regular “haircuts” along the way.

If life is a circus, then maybe there’s a way to get better at performing in it. As Laura shares in this conversation about ways to calm time chaos, “Nobody gets shot out of a cannon at the wrong time in a circus . . . it’s a miracle of precision.”

In this week’s episode, you will learn how to shift from a sense of time scarcity to spacious serenity, how to overcome “horror vacui” and guilt when creating a more open schedule, the importance of margin and creating back-up slots (”rain dates”) for building a resilient a calendar, and committing to time that’s just for you.