You can try to have this perfect picture of how you want to spend your day, but have it blown up in seconds – and you’ll running all over the place. But you don’t have to operate this way. The path can be a bit tricky, especially for entrepreneurs and start-up CEOs, but not totally impossible!

Jenny Blake is a podcaster, host, speaker and author. She helps organizations and business owners – young or old- organize their plans through smarter systems. She joins the podcast to talk about managing time, Specifically establishing systems that would skyrocket your way to success while maintaining a work-life balance.

Founder time is time that's just for you, and it's protected. And whether you work for yourself currently or you work for someone else. It is the time to be strategic and creative about your life and your business about the projects you're working on. As Michael Gerber would say, work on the business, not in the business. Like really asking, what is the one thing you can work on in this block of time that will free up your time or move the business forward?

Start with creative ways of asking, how can I afford this? And not with, can I afford this? With that, you're asking how and not with something that ends with a yes or no kind of answer. And in doing that, you're generating creative ideas. For example, hiring a team that would free you most of your time so you can build more products and services in your business. It could be expensive, but the free time dashboard has earned you back the cost of hiring this team. It just came from a slightly different channel. 

The first thing you can do is create a delegation task tracker and observe over the next few weeks but have this open in front of you. You can use a pen and paper at your desk, and it could be the notes app on your phone. It doesn't have to be fancy. But the point is that as you work on a given day or week, it will give you the most information about what you could delegate, even if you don't know to whom yet or if you can afford it. 

Start by noticing what area of your life and work is creating the most friction right now? What area drains you the most or you don't like doing? Then delegate that first! Because it's going to relieve the most pressure. And you know, there are different ways to do that, and you can even run experiments, but picking an area that has a lot of friction, will make you more motivated to solve it and more motivated to pay for it. And you're going to benefit the most from freeing that zone to do more of your best work. For example, with admin stuff, there's a lot that you can automate more than you probably think there's a lot that you can eliminate. But even if you don't know who yet, or how you're going to delegate, write the process down. 

If you google connection nodes, you'll see that the complexity of communication increases dramatically once you get over about seven people. Research also shows that about seven is a sweet spot. Work with at least a triangle formation or a square. Because if you only have you and a VA, your business is still fragile. There's a saying that one is the most dangerous number in business. If you have one of anything, you have a single point of failure, including you, the business owner, and that's quite stressful. Everything grinds to a halt if you get sick, including your income. And that's scary! If you have a VA and they leave, or they get sick, or something happens, you're still left in the lurch and going to be stressed. So, a triangle would be delightful for a square that works,