About the Book

Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business by Jenny Blake

Genre: Entrepreneurship Management, Business

Release Date: March 22, 2022

Book Review

This book is for everyone who feels like they can’t take the space to breathe. Jenny Blake shows us how to find time for ourselves and our creativity even while running the most hectic of businesses. While this was aimed at female entrepreneurs, it has sound advice for anyone managing staff and operating at a high level.

She starts with a core premise: stress is a systems problem. She takes readers through her three basic steps: align, design, and assign. In align, readers will be prompted to think about the values of their brand and how they can systematize those. She also encourages the reader to adopt the framework of thinking: what is my job today? Then that all-important task(s) should be slotted into your golden hour, whenever you are most alive, creative and driven.

Design will help you create space for your most important work, ignoring distractions along the way.

By solving many of the day-to-day problems through systems and procedures, you can create time to listen to feedback from your community and be ready for your next big idea. One of the ways Blake advocates doing this is building “free time containers.” These are days where you do not deal with mundane tasks or schedule calls or meetings. This keeps these tasks from draining all of our energy and leaving us too busy to innovate. The depth of Blake’s suggestions on how to create systems to relieve yourself of energy-draining tasks left me with so many useable takeaways.

In her final part, Assign, Blake gets into the nitty-gritty of making sure that you can afford to take time away from your business. She talks about how she put together what she calls her “delightfully tiny team” and how she learned to delegate. Every task must have an owner, and her team members need to be empowered to take the next steps and only bring her the really big things.

For me, the most helpful chapters were on time-blocking. While I’ve heard of the concept before, it really does help to do similar tasks together. When you can focus on one thing, it’s easier to be in a rhythm than when you piecemeal it throughout your schedule. This allows me to feel more peaceful when working on tasks. She also encouraged looking for ways to automate things that you did repeatedly, which made me take a long, hard look at my systems. What do I do repeatedly that I could make easier on myself? Freeing up thought space allows your brain to use that bandwidth for more creative pursuits.

Blake even provides a link in the back of the book to templates for putting the book’s principles to work, including a manager’s manual template, a two-day strategy sprint template and a list of 75 things she delegates. I found this to be very helpful in putting the book’s principles into action.