#256: How to Find More Time: Balancing Creative Projects, Business, and Personal Life

Jay Clouse [00:00:13]:
Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. We got another solo episode for you this week going into my mind, which has just been a hectic, hectic place lately. Let me tell you. Most mornings, I journal, and I do it in the style of Julia Cameron's morning pages. And earlier this week, my morning pages sounded a little bit like this. I'm actually just gonna read this verbatim from my morning pages from May 12. I said, I'm feeling internal stress because there's a misalignment between where my energy is required and where my time is pulled.

Jay Clouse [00:00:49]:
Sort of an intrinsic versus extrinsic tension. And what was happening here, this came from Monday of last week. And what happens on Mondays is I typically have the day completely open. I have left my schedule open on Mondays and Fridays. Those are typically my deep work thinking on the business type days. But for the last month, I have one single call on Monday morning, and that is with my developmental editor for the book proposal that I am working on. And we get through those calls, and I am just on fire excited to take on my homework that I have assigned myself or in some cases that she has assigned to me and work towards this book proposal, except I feel like I can't a lot of these days because the business requires me in different forms. This is the challenging thing about this book proposal process.

Jay Clouse [00:01:42]:
Right now, this is an experiment. This is a small part of my overall portfolio of where I'm spending my time. It is not a sure thing that this book proposal will shape up to be something that I'm excited to write at the end of this. I think it is, but we haven't finished the proposal yet. And I don't know that proposal will ultimately be for a book that I'm excited to write. And I'm not going to send a proposal that I'm not excited about to potential publishers. I need to be excited about it. So we're still in the stage of, will this proposal actually come out to be something that is good? And even beyond that stage, then we have the question of, will a traditional publisher be interested in it? And beyond that question is, is their offer interesting to me? And beyond that question is, if not, do I still want to write this book in a self published or hybrid way? So there are all these steps that are laid out in front of me on this book project that are totally uncertain, and there's a lot of time between now and having that clarity.

Jay Clouse [00:02:46]:
On one hand, it's just uncomfortable to sit in a place of uncertainty, and that's a skill that I think as a business owner, you have to get increasingly used to. But it's uncomfortable not knowing exactly how this is gonna go yet. But I leave these meetings, and I'm excited about it. I am just pumped. I have so much energy. But because I have kept it a small part of my overall expectations and truly, there's not gonna be any revenue from this for quite some time. Maybe there's a book advance, but royalties in this book wouldn't happen for for probably literal years beyond the advance. So it's not a revenue generating activity in the business right away.

Jay Clouse [00:03:26]:
And so I have to continue keeping my eye on the ball, keeping the main thing, the main thing, and pushing the business forward. And if you've been listening to the show for any period of time at all, you know that we still have a really small team. I'm doing a lot of the operations in the business myself. And now that I'm a dad, I have less time than ever to do all these things. And now I'm saying, let's actually throw in a giant disruption and a giant project of a book on top of that. But the reality is I am pulled to writing. I am pulled to doing this book. And besides just the the obvious stuff of like, okay, mechanically, we have to put a proposal together to write a book.

Jay Clouse [00:04:05]:
There's a lot of research and first party interviews that I wanna do for the book. So it's truly a very large undertaking. And where do I put it? Where where do I put that? So this is what I've been working on this week is dealing with this tension of internally, my energy is drawn to this book, but I have to continue doing the things that generate revenue, that run the business, that create value for the audience, that create value for our family, which depends on this business, to make a living and still continue forward on this book project, leveraging as much of that energy as I can. That is the challenge. And this little solo episode I want to talk to you about today, I'm gonna run you through basically the, the work I've done to figure out, okay, where can I create more time? How am I dealing with this tension I'm feeling of internally I want to do this book project, but I know I need to keep focused on the main thing, which is the core business. How am I going to do that? So to continue forward with this journal entry I had, I continue to write, I'm pulled to writing, reading, writing this book, but I'm needed in audio. I'm needed in video and I'm needed in supporting the community even a little bit on social. I just don't really wanna do that right now.

Jay Clouse [00:05:25]:
Right now, I wanna hide in a cocoon and work on the next stage of the business because here is what I believe. Self paced courses are sorta done for. I do kind of believe that. I believe that cohort based courses are going to have a resurgence over the next few years. Communities will get stronger, but they'll require in person experiences and will also consolidate, meaning there will be fewer overall communities that people will be a part of and will have kind of a winner take most landscape of communities. And generally, I think people are less interested in social media content that's like, Hey, teach me how to do a thing with the exception of maybe LinkedIn, because LinkedIn kind of lags behind the culture of other social platforms by a couple of years. But stories are king. Emotion is king.

Jay Clouse [00:06:14]:
We want to feel better about ourselves and our lives and our choices when we see someone else's content. This is still me reading just verbatim what has come out of this journal entry, by the way. I think my content needs to evolve. My community needs to evolve. I need to evolve. This period of evolution is scary because it may feel like a short term step back. I may get less visibility. I may earn less, but I want to be able to earn less without feeling like less.

Jay Clouse [00:06:44]:
I want to do less without being less. So this is me working out on the page. This reality I'm facing of the things that I wanna do this year are going to look and feel like a reinvention of myself and the business in some ways. You know, it's still gonna be the creator science brand. A lot of the content is going to be similar. But where I think I really need to focus my energy is making the community better and better and better and working towards this book, which has a huge uncertain return. And I was talking to some folks in the lab about this. The hard thing is I could see a world where the book actually has a big outcome on the business as a whole.

Jay Clouse [00:07:26]:
But if I justify more time on the book because I think it will have a big outcome on the business, Now, I've suddenly put a bunch of pressure on the outcome of the book, which I don't think is necessarily wise for that type of project. I think books are a hard thing to do really well and have a big outcome from. So, if I want to remove expectation of the outcome of this book, then it gets really hard for me to justify the amount of time that is required to make a great book because the reality is I'm probably giving it 10% of my time right now and I can't write a truly great book in 10% of the time. Or let's say I did write a pretty good book in 10% of my time. What would that have looked like if I had given it much more of my time? But, you know, I I think I'd be lucky if I could write a great book with a % of my time. The community is the same way. The lab, you know, it can't thrive if I'm giving it 10% of my time. Right now, I'm probably giving it, like, 50% of my time, so it's in a good spot.

Jay Clouse [00:08:27]:
But what I'm saying is if I want to continue to ratchet up how much time I'm spending on this writing project, I would have to take that from somewhere. And there are lots of things in the community that don't need to be me. And I'll talk about that here in a second. So I was trying to figure out what can I do? And naturally, I came up with kind of a framework, which wasn't really what I wanted to do. I was just playing with words and I really liked it. And so I came up with these five lists in a linear order of what I think I can do to find more time. And these five categories are concentrate, eliminate, consolidate, automate, and delegate. They all rhymed.

Jay Clouse [00:09:08]:
That's pretty nice. But to say it again, concentrate, eliminate, Consolidate, Automate, Delegate. The idea is if you go in this order, this actually helps you prioritize as you go. So concentrate that category means what are the Eliminate is where can I eliminate my involvement entirely? What are things that I can stop doing? I shouldn't say eliminate my involvement. I mean, literally stop doing. What are things that we can cut out of the business as a whole? Consolidate means are there some efforts that we can actually kinda fold together? Are there things that I'm doing that right now are bespoke and disparate, but I could actually combine into a singular process or, you know, period of time? Automate is pretty obvious. What can I make no human involvement necessary? What can I do to take what may be taking up time right now and actually just automate that behavior? And then lastly is delegate. If I can't eliminate something, if I can't consolidate it into something else, if I can't automate it, I can at least delegate it.

Jay Clouse [00:10:23]:
I can at least hire somebody else to do that thing. And so that's what I work through. And I'm going to share some of the items that I put on this list for how I'm gonna free up my time through Concentrate, Eliminate, Consolidate, Automate, Delegate. And I will do that after a quick break from our sponsors. We're back. Let's start with where am I going to concentrate my time? Where am I going to concentrate my effort, my energy, my attention? And the top point on my list here is what feels alive? Basically, it kills me that I have this excitement leaving my Monday morning meetings, and then I feel like I cannot indulge in that. I cannot press forward on that. That type of excitement, that type of enthusiasm, that is the good stuff.

Jay Clouse [00:11:10]:
That is where your best work comes from, and I need to allow myself to concentrate on that and lean into it, whether it's the book project, whether it's something under creator science. When you have when I have this type of enthusiasm, I need to follow it. And I think that's a signal you should listen to in yourself as well. Item number two on this list is actually my fitness. What I have realized is exercise is my antidepressant, and hopefully it's not like a problematic thing to say. It is what makes me feel better all day long. I know that if I get up early and I do something that is good for my fitness, if I move my body, even if it's just going for a walk around my neighborhood in the morning, I know that I'm going to have a better day afterwards, and I need to give myself permission to do that. I need to make that less of a luxury to do item.

Jay Clouse [00:12:05]:
Some days it feels like that's the thing that's got to get cut because work's got to happen. Baby needs to be washed and cared for. Baby needs to go to bed. Maybe I'll work out after the baby goes to bed. Well, I can't really conjure the energy a lot of days to do that. Whereas in the morning, if I get out first thing in the morning, baby's still asleep. I can really set my day up for success. I need to concentrate on making that a non negotiable Things number three and four are both related to the book, and that is the proposal as well as overall studying the subject matter because a lot of what I want to write about are firsthand experiences.

Jay Clouse [00:12:45]:
Sure. But there's also a lot that I need to research and a lot of people that I wanna talk to about this. And I know I'm being vague. I know I'm being opaque. Once we have the proposal done, I will record an episode talking about that process and what the actual proposal of the book is. Until that time, I'm gonna be a little bit opaque because we're still a ways out, but I want to make this an explicit area of concentration. I want to give myself the chance to do this to its fullest. I don't think you should take on a book project if you aren't willing to do what it takes to make your best version of that book.

Jay Clouse [00:13:21]:
That's the bar. It's not New York Times bestseller. It's your best version of the book. If you don't give yourself the time and space to do that, I think you'll regret it. I think I would regret it if I wrote a book but didn't write a book to the degree that I thought was possible for me. Thing number five, which really should go above the book proposal, but you'll see this is why I have so much energy around it. Thing number five is the lab. The lab is by far and away the most important part of the creative science business.

Jay Clouse [00:13:55]:
And what I'm realizing is I think in person experiences are going to be where we are focusing the majority of our attention as a team moving forward. I'm gonna talk a lot about this in the last section of this episode, but I truly, truly believe that the future of the lab is empowering local meetups all around the country, all around the world, doing multi annual summits for members in different core geographic locations. You know, we're doing our first one in Boise at the June. We might do another one later this year, depending on how this goes. But in 2026, this is where I really wanna hit the ground running with this since we all have more data and more understanding of what this looks like. But I really think we'll have a US based summit. I think we'll have an international summit. I think one of the main reasons people will join the lab over the next eighteen months is because they know they're going to have fantastic in person experiences with other professional full time creators like them.

Jay Clouse [00:15:00]:
And I just think that's the next stage of the business. And it's gonna be a new capability. It's gonna be learning something totally new. But that is the next step to do that. Well, we need more density of members because if we wanna do meetups all over the country, all over the world, we need geographic density, which means we need more members. And so it's my job to do a better job of talking about what makes the lab experience so great and sharing the success stories of members in there, sharing their voice of how they're enjoying the community experience. I know that my content, the role of it, is to serve creators like you so that you know this community is a place for you. I'm the lightning rod.

Jay Clouse [00:15:46]:
I am not the provider of all value in the community. A lot of value is created by the other members. Most of the value is created by the other members. So I've been decentering myself from the community experience for the last year plus. And, man, the caliber of members we have in the community now is just top top notch. My job is to be the lightning rod that attracts more people like that to the community, gets them in here so that we can have fantastic in person events all over the world. That is the that's the trajectory of the community. So I need to focus my energy on telling our story better to get more members in there and then obviously everything that I learn I turn around and teach in the community outside the community, but that is the next big priority.

Jay Clouse [00:16:32]:
I've been developing a curriculum around building a signature product. I've been doing that in the lab publicly. It slowed down over the last couple of weeks as I've been doing the book project, but I do believe that is the next major like educational contribution I'm making to the community as a whole. I want people to be able to come in and work through this process and come out the other side feeling really confident about what their signature product should be, how to design it, how to market it, how to sell it. That is the next major educational component to the lab. Maybe we'll make it available for sale outside of it. Maybe we'll do a cohort based course around it at some point. But right now, it's being developed in the lab and will be available first for members of the lab.

Jay Clouse [00:17:18]:
So that is concentrate. That's where I'm concentrating my time. What feels alive? My fitness, the book proposal, the lab and that signature product curriculum inside the lab. Next up, we have eliminate. Where am I spending time that simply does not need to be spent? And this was really, really hard because I am somebody who is already very intentional with how I spend my time. There aren't a lot of things that I have taken on that I hadn't immediately dropped if they were not worth my time. So this is really picking things that I still believe are worthwhile. But maybe in terms of comparison to other things, they might need to go.

Jay Clouse [00:18:02]:
So thing number one is welcome calls for the community. And to be honest, I'm still totally on the fence here. The secret is when people join the lab, the first thing that happens after you join Standard and VIP is you get to book a one on one welcome call with me. And that's kind of a surprise feature of joining the community. I have a one on one call with everybody who has joined Standard and VIP for for the lab. And I really like this because I get a better sense for everybody who joins. I can figure out, okay, have you spent any time in the community? Are you stuck? Do you need recommendations? Is there someone I can introduce you to? I think they're really, really valuable. But what I find is when we have periods of a lot of people joining the community, suddenly my schedule gets really constricted.

Jay Clouse [00:18:47]:
And then subconsciously, I start to do things to not promote the community because I don't wanna fill my week with welcome calls. And that's not a healthy trade off. So it's not an explicit promised part of the membership now. During my paternity leave, I didn't do welcome calls and things were okay. But it's something that's on the chopping block. I don't know. I don't know. I want to provide a really good onboarding experience, but I don't know if a twenty to thirty minute welcome call with me is the way that it needs to go because those really do add up.

Jay Clouse [00:19:24]:
Next on the chopping block are social media expectations actually shared a reel a week or two ago where I explained that I think I'm over social media. The goal of social media in my mind is to reduce your dependency on social media so that someday you can stop using social media if you want. And I genuinely think I am at that point where I could focus 100 on writing great emails, recording podcasts like this one, doing YouTube and tending to the community. I think I could do all of that and continue to grow the business. I think I could still pull people in through the Creator Network, through YouTube. Because right now, you know, the reason I do social media is because for a long time, that was the best means for getting people to email. You get in front of new people. You say, check out the link in my bio or go to this website or comment this word and I'll do the many chat automation.

Jay Clouse [00:20:23]:
And that stuff still works to some degree, especially the many chat stuff. But moving people to email from X or LinkedIn, it just does not work like it used to. And so why am I still stressing about how much I'm posting to those platforms? Why do I feel like I need to post on threads every day? Even though I've literally never had like a straight line successful proven thread post that move people to email. I've never even like really tracked that or experimented with it. Just felt like I need to be doing this every day because that's what we do as creators. And I just don't think it's true. I think I have worked hard enough to get to the point where there are enough people who have said, I want you to help me, that I could just focus on making my long form content better. And better long form content, I think, will still spread.

Jay Clouse [00:21:14]:
I think people will share the word, and I think that will bring in higher quality people anyway and free up all of the time in my brain of, gotta post to LinkedIn today. Gotta post to Instagram. I'm not saying that I won't ever post to social media, by the way. I'm just releasing the expectations because maybe you can relate to this. Most days, I have this, like, because maybe you can relate to this. Most days, I have this, like, nagging voice of, have you tweeted today? Have you posted to Instagram today? What are you gonna post today? It's silly. It's crazy. There's not an alignment between how much time I spend thinking about that and doing social media activity and the value it brings to the business.

Jay Clouse [00:21:53]:
So I am releasing expectations of anything social media related for the coming however long. I will say, ironically, I've posted maybe three times a week to LinkedIn lately, and all of the, like, average engagement metrics of those posts has been higher. I think part of that is there is more longevity to post on LinkedIn now, except when you post something new, it kind of cuts off the previous post. And so I think I'm giving all of my posts more space to breathe. And also, I'm not posting garbage that is just being posted for the sake of posting something today. I think this is gonna be a good move. I do think that I have earned flexibility to do that. If you don't have an email audience or a podcast audience or a private community, if you don't have a means of reaching people outside of social media, then you probably still need to use social media.

Jay Clouse [00:22:48]:
I would prioritize trying to get people off of social media, but you probably still need to use social media. I just think I'm to the point where I've done it long enough that I don't need it to make the business run or grow, actually. And so to pair with that, I wanna remove social media from my phone. Right now, I have this little product called Brick. It's like this NFC near field communication magnet that I go up to with my phone and I can use Apple's screen time to automatically block certain apps when I do that. And then I can't unlock my phone without going back to that spot. So the name of the game is putting it in an inconvenient location, bricking your phone, which you can actually just do from the app, but then you can't unbrick it. You can't go back to the apps you wanna see without physically going to that product.

Jay Clouse [00:23:39]:
And if you make it inconvenient to get there, you end up getting a lot of time back. Every time I brick my phone, days pass more slowly, more things get done. I truly sink a lot of time into social media for no reason it's like blacking out and I go through an hour of reels and it was enjoyable I had fun but at what cost a pretty high one to be honest And then lastly, on the eliminate front, things that I wanna eliminate are whatever I'm telling myself I should do whenever I feel like I have this word should, I want to just question it and say, why should for who, for what purpose? Why should I do that? What are the innate assumptions as to why I should do that? It's because I think there's opportunity there. Any opportunity I want to pursue, I'm not gonna be successful unless I'm enthusiastic and excited about it. So should is not sufficient for doing something. I need clear interest to actually do it. So we're two out of five here. We've done concentrate, eliminate.

Jay Clouse [00:24:41]:
Next, we have consolidate. What are the efforts that I'm doing that I can consolidate into making them more streamlined, making them less time intensive? Number one is content ideas. Writing, podcasting, and video should all be more efficient. Maybe use the same idea optimized for different context. Somebody that does this really well is Dan Coe. I haven't actually looked at his stuff in a while, so I don't know if he's still doing this. But I remember back in the day, I realized he was basically writing a newsletter and then he would make a video script out of that newsletter and he would record a podcast that was just him reading the newsletter. So, it was literally one piece of content put into multiple forms.

Jay Clouse [00:25:23]:
It's smart. It makes sense. We all know that that is something that is possible and probably smart for us to do. And yet here I am still creating bespoke pieces of content for, like, every platform. Everything feels bespoke. Like, should I have just read my latest newsletter for this podcast episode? I probably could have because did you read the newsletter? I don't know. Part of me assumes that everyone listening to the podcast also reads the newsletter, but that might not actually be true. And even if it is broadly true, it might not be specifically true where you read this specific newsletter and you probably wouldn't have minded hearing an audio version of one of my better pieces of writing.

Jay Clouse [00:26:04]:
So I'm trying to streamline my content ideas, look at all the things that I'm producing and say, do they all need to be bespoke ideas? I don't think so. We can take the same kernel, contextualize it to these different platforms. That's not a new thought, but it does take some new focus and discipline. Next up on the consolidate list hot seats in the lab. So this is something that you may or may not know about membership. Any member of standard and VIP has the opportunity to reach out to me and say they want to do a hot seat. Now I only do two of these per month. So there is a little bit of a limitation.

Jay Clouse [00:26:37]:
There's a little bit of a, first come first served situation. Because when someone says I wanna do hot seat, my next question is, what do you wanna talk about? I wanna make sure that it's actually relevant to other members of the community. But the idea is, it's a one on one coaching session between me and that member, but we record it on Zoom. Other members of the community can join and watch live, and then that session is uploaded as a recording. So we have, at this point probably hundreds of hot seats that are all categorized by different things like this is a membership hot seat or a course hot seat or operations or analytics. So I do these hot seats in the community, and I'm wondering if some members might be willing to record that hot seat knowing that it's actually aired here on the feed. Wouldn't be all of them. I would be sensitive to is there something in this hot seat that you don't wanna talk about publicly? And I would always get permission before we record if they're okay with it going on the podcast feed.

Jay Clouse [00:27:32]:
But I do think those are interesting assets that right now only live in the community. That would be something you might enjoy listening to because it truly is someone just like you who has a problem that you might be having, and we work through it for half an hour. Those are popular recordings in the community. They're uploaded into the lab in video, but also we have a private podcast feed for members so you can listen to it in audio. And I'm thinking I could probably do some of these as audio only podcast episodes in between our video episodes that we're putting on YouTube. So I'm gonna test that out this month when someone asked me if they wanna do a hot seat, I'm gonna see if it makes sense, if they're open to doing it publicly on the podcast as well. But I think that will allow me to one justify more time in doing more hot seats and to have some really interesting audio assets to go out on the audio feed without extra work other than, you know, maybe recording an intro. And then lastly, the reason that this hot seats idea is exciting to me is because most episodes on the audio feed should be video episodes.

Jay Clouse [00:28:41]:
We should have a closer one to one relationship between videos and audio episodes and it hasn't been that way historically because we put more time into editing our video episodes, but what we've been working on this year is building relationships with more editors so that our bottleneck is not we have one editor who edits everything. It's we have multiple editors who know our style, who know our communication, and now we can increase our publishing capacity. Now that that is more true, audio only episodes here on this feed, there shouldn't be really many. Maybe these hot seats that I'm talking about, but even this solo episode here, this should actually go through our video process. Start with the idea, start with packaging, and this should be a solo video on the channel that also has audio that becomes the podcast. That's everything for consolidate. We'll move on to step four of five, which is automate. What are the things that I can automate? And I'll be honest, I automate like crazy as it is.

Jay Clouse [00:29:41]:
I automate a lot of things in the business. My Zapier account is pretty intense. So when I was looking at this, you know, I'm trying to think near term, real time. What are the things that I'm doing right now that really should be automated? And there are only a couple of things that I came up with. One of them being, we now have this trusted partners directory in the lab. We have over a dozen, close to two dozen, I think, people who provide professional services that have been hired by members of the lab, a lot of times myself, but not all the time. And it's categorized to say, if you want someone to help you with ads, this is who our community recommends for ads. If you want someone help you with branding, this is who our community has hired and recommends for branding.

Jay Clouse [00:30:26]:
And so that process now we have, like, an almost automated process for members of the community to submit or nominate certain service professionals. But then I need to automate the actual reaching out to people once they submit that to say, hey, you've been nominated, complete this survey. And that goes to my my assistant who makes the final listing. So that's pretty close. There's just this intermediate step where if I approve somebody for the directory, they need to get an email to complete the form. And this is a short term activity. I can definitely automate this and I certainly plan to. The second one is sponsor scheduling.

Jay Clouse [00:31:06]:
I get a lot of inbound these days of sponsors who want to work with us on our newsletter, on YouTube, on podcast. And I probably work with 5% of the companies that come in. Part of that is I recognize that any sponsorship I do is an implicit endorsement, and I wanna make it an explicit endorsement. I want you to know that if I am putting a sponsor in front of you, it's because I have vetted them. And to this point, I trust them. And I believe that you can trust them too. That really tightens the aperture on who is eligible to be a sponsor for this company, basically. But then there are a handful of companies that are good fit, but I need more information.

Jay Clouse [00:31:45]:
We need to go through the process of finding out their goals, what they're trying to do. We need to ultimately put a plan together, a proposal. And then once we have a proposal and they say yes, everything on the back end of that is pretty automated. But right now, there's a gap between somebody saying, I'm interested in working with you and us having enough information to make a proposal. And I want to automate a little bit more of that step. Part of it is basically all of these leads come into Notion. So I know who these sponsors are and that they might be a good fit. They have a status assigned to them.

Jay Clouse [00:32:16]:
And I basically need to automate to say, hey. They came in. I approve them. That action should trigger off an email to say, hey. Let's have a call and automate that scheduling of our intake call to learn what their goals are, so that we can make a proposal. Long term, that shouldn't even be me either. That should be an operator inside of our company, and we have at times worked with third party agencies on this. We actually have some nonexclusive relationships with different agencies who bring sponsors to us.

Jay Clouse [00:32:46]:
And when that happens, they do handle it. But when companies come direct to me, I didn't wanna give up 10 to 30% of that to an agency. I thought we could just do it in house, which I think we can. But historically, I've been doing that step, and this is something that I need to not do. Which brings us to the delegate section, our final section on this framework. What are the things that I can still delegate? Number one, there's a bunch of stuff in email that I'm still trying to work through that I think I have the the skill to do, but I don't have the time. So I have hired a guy named Jason Resnick. He's in the lab.

Jay Clouse [00:33:26]:
He's fantastic. He's been doing a lot of behind the scenes work with me in email to make my segmentation and automation dreams come true. And that's been really promising. We've seen more course sales over the last several weeks than we had for weeks prior. So we're turning a corner on identifying who is the right email subscriber for this course. Let's put it in front of them and recommend they take action. That has been promising. The next thing I'm delegating is improvements to creator HQ.

Jay Clouse [00:33:57]:
Creator HQ has sold almost $150,000 at this point, and it's just over a year old. It's our most successful digital products, and it's it's still what I use every day. I use Creator HQ to run this business every single day. I have run into a couple of things that now I want to improve and I'm going to hire somebody who's really good at notion. I already know who I'm going to hire. She's really great at notion. She's gonna come in and help me solve a problem for our company and my version of creator HQ. Then we're going to copy that implementation into creator HQ.

Jay Clouse [00:34:30]:
So new customers will get that out of the box when that happens. But I also wanna make it easy for existing customers to add that into their account. So we need to create some teaching material for how to implement it. Because the bummer about Notion Systems is that it's not software that I can just push an update and every existing customer gets that update. You now have your own version of creator HQ running. If you want to add in the things that I'm adding in, I have to show you how to do it and then you need to implement it yourself, which has slowed me down from making major updates. But there are a couple of major updates I want to make in creator HQ around navigation and sponsor management. And so we're gonna solve that for our company first, then I'm going to deploy it.

Jay Clouse [00:35:13]:
We're gonna teach you how to do it. And that is something that I'm going to hire help to do. Someone who is a little bit better at Notion than I am and who frankly has the time to invest in doing that right now. Next on the list is community experience. And this kind of surprised me at first, but then it became such a, oh, duh, no brainer thing. I think the next major hire in the company is going to be around the lab. And, you know, to this point, I've really designed the lab to not need more support than what I can give it. Like, part of the reason people love the lab is because I'm super, super accessible and involved.

Jay Clouse [00:35:52]:
I am the most active member in the community. But what I'm realizing is being the most active member in the community is just one part of what I do in there. There's so much administrative and like community management stuff that doesn't need to be me. That doesn't need to be like even a known person necessarily. But I think I'll actually hire someone who's kind of like a head of communities to learn a lot of what I do in there to free me up to be a very actively involved member to collaborate with me. But if we wanna do the in person stuff that I was describing earlier in this episode, And if I want to continue forming masterminds, which is a new thing that we started doing a couple weeks ago, to do those on a more frequent basis, at a high level, to check-in, make sure they have everything that we need to continue adding partners to our trusted partner directory, to send more frequent member digest, to continue to train our AI assistant in the community. Like, there's there's this huge list. I didn't even mention programming, event scheduling.

Jay Clouse [00:36:55]:
This person could do the welcome calls I was talking about. There's so many things that happen in a community that I'm doing in the lab still that I think I could be doing better, first of all, if I had more time. And I think hiring somebody with more time is the answer, is the obvious answer. But it needs to be somebody who really understands our members. That's a tough person to find. It'll take some some time and work and some vetting to find the absolute right person. I'm not in a rush to do this because it needs to be the absolute right person who really lifts everybody up, somebody that challenges all of us. But I think that's the, the next the next major hire, somebody on the community side to really help us level up small groups and in person type programming.

Jay Clouse [00:37:43]:
There are a few more delegation items here for my consideration. I don't know what timeline I'll do these on. One, I think I could hire somebody specifically to do some of the sponsorship management I was describing. Not an agency, but have somebody on the team who's incentivized by being successful and picking the best partners possible. When I had Dan Andrews on the show most recently, he really called this out as an obvious opportunity that could have a lot of, like, incentive based pay. And I totally agree. I think it's a solvable problem and we're leaving a lot of money on the table in sponsorship right now just because I am not properly taking advantage of the opportunities that are falling at my feet so that's something I should probably look into And lastly, on the work front, I have dreams of doing my own, like, large scale event. I don't really wanna say conference.

Jay Clouse [00:38:37]:
Conference feels like the wrong word, but I think the bar is actually so low for major event programming to be better. Like, most events is just this buffet of speakers that are big names, but their talks aren't really aligned with each other. It's not a cohesive narrative of what I should get out of this event. I think the bar is really low, and I could do a really cool event, but it can't be me. Organizing needs to be somebody else, and that's been on my mind. Don't know when that will be. Don't know the relationship between that and the the in person stuff we're doing the lab. Most likely, if I had an event that was available outside of the community, we would have special experiences just for community members at that event is probably what would happen.

Jay Clouse [00:39:26]:
But then there are a couple of things. I was challenged by some friends of mine that were basically like, you know, you're doing a lot of stuff at home. You're caring for the baby. It'd be way cheaper to hire, like, a house manager than a COO of your business, you know? And that's true. But there's a lot of things at the house that I just want to do, you know? Like, it's getting warmer in Ohio. We just opened the pool, which means I'm gonna have to vacuum the pool, like, at least once a week. The yard is growing. I need to mow the yard, and that takes a couple of hours.

Jay Clouse [00:40:00]:
Those are obvious things that I could outsource and probably should. You know, there's that word should. I probably should outsource those things because it's just time. Like, it's time intensive. Other people have that skill, and I could hire it out for much cheaper than my hourly rate. But I enjoy doing it. I don't wanna give up things that I enjoy doing. And both those activities are great for thinking, by the way.

Jay Clouse [00:40:26]:
Great thinking activities. So I don't know if I will outsource that stuff with our baby girl. We don't really like, we're not doing daycare because we don't wanna do daycare. And, yeah, we could put her in daycare. We could afford it. And that would give us more time during the day to do work. But that's not the point. The point of having a business that affords a lifestyle we want is to live the lifestyle that we want, which is to not do daycare.

Jay Clouse [00:40:53]:
You know, there's no right or wrong answers. There's just trade offs and compromises. And in this season of life, I am realizing that more and more than ever before because it just hits me in the face every day that I have to make trade offs and compromises. But those are the highlights of my decisions that will hopefully get me back some time. Concentrate, eliminate, consolidate, automate, delegate. I would encourage you to do a similar exercise to run through those five items, see where you can pull out some more time to focus on the things you have high energy for. I'd love to hear what you think about this. This was literally inspired by my journal entry.

Jay Clouse [00:41:30]:
If you enjoyed hearing kind of my my journal thoughts, leave a comment on Spotify or leave a review on Apple Podcasts and let me know that you enjoyed this episode. Otherwise, thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next week.