Intro: My coaching client, Laura, recently told me that she saved more money than she spent on my coaching because I helped her simplify and consolidate her tech stack. And now I want to do the same thing for you, too. I have put out a free tool called the Tools Audit. It will help you determine what tools you use, how much you're paying, and where you can consolidate and eliminate to simplify what your small business tech stack. You can go to streamlined.fm/tools to get your free tools audit today. That's streamlined.fm/tools.
We are about a month out from the Olympics as you're hearing this. And if you are on my newsletter, you'll know that the Olympics kind of dominated my thinking and my writing for a couple of weeks. I really enjoyed comparing kind of what we were seeing in Milan and Cortina with what people are doing and saying and the way they're acting online. And so today I want to give you 3 lessons for solopreneurs that I took from the Olympics. Let's dive into it.
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Streamlined Solopreneur. My name's Joe Casabona, and I help solopreneurs replace manual tasks with reliable systems so they can take worry-free time off.
Now, why is it important to take time off? Well, this is the first lesson that I want to talk about, based on what I was thinking about with the Olympics, right? Elite athletes don't give 100% every single day, right? They know that they need to push themselves to get better, while not pushing themselves so hard that they'll get hurt or they won't have energy for the actual competition. They know they need to take breaks if they're going to perform at the best possible level when they need to. And this is something that we all need to do if we're running a business.
Last month I was testing a positioning statement where I said, "Take a laptop-free vacation”, and people had strong feelings about that. There were people who told me they didn't want to do that. Someone straight up said solopreneurs do not take weeks weeks off. I am proof that that is not true. And the skepticism that solopreneurs don't take weeks off is a symptom of hustle culture. We've been told for years that in order to be successful, you need to work non-stop, that if you put the most hours in, you are going to make the most money. That the value we provide is in always being available.
All of these things are categorically incorrect. The truth is, if you actually want to be good at your job, if you actually want to run your business well, you need to take time off. Managing your time and energy is the difference between an amateur practitioner and an elite athlete; the latter is going to perform best when they need to instead of always being on the verge of collapse.
And there are so many studies. I will link to some of them in the show notes. The benefits of taking time off are plentiful. Better sleep, less stress, clearer thinking, more energy. All these things you need to be better at your job, at your business, to better serve your clients.
If you think that never taking time off proves that you're dedicated to your work, you are wrong. You are just making yourself worse. It's like saying, I'm dedicated to losing weight, so I am not going to eat. You need to eat. You need to take time off. I look at these cross-country skiers in the Olympics, and if they trained as hard as possible the day before the race, they wouldn't be able to actually finish the race. They know that the day before the race is a taper day where they significantly reduce their distance so that they have enough gas in the tank to actually finish the race.
We, as solopreneurs, need to build in recovery time for ourselves if we are going to run a successful business. The way that you do that is through timeboxing, understanding your systems, creating time and space to do your real work, so that you can take that time off. So that's the first lesson.
Working harder does not make you better at running your business. It makes you worse at running your business. By the way, all of these are based on articles I wrote that are over on streamlinedsolopreneur.com. So I will link to those as well.
The second lesson is that we need to go beyond box-ticking. I was really into the Olympics this year more than usual, and part of it was Lindsey Vonn's story. You know, she's just showing true grit. Part of it was Alyssa Liu's story, how she retired several years ago at like 17 and then came back and gold-medaled at 20. And, part of it was Abby Winterberger, right, who's like 15 and competing in the Olympics.
All of these things were truly amazing. And they all demonstrated something that all of the Olympians competing had to overcome great odds. They sacrificed everything, and they showed incredible physical and mental toughness to get where they are today. It shows the kind of work you need to do for greatness, and there are no shortcuts to glory.
The real reason I was into the Olympics this year is because we're so focused on shortcuts to glory. Oh, I use ChatGPT to do these things so I don't have to. You can't ChatGPT your way into the Olympics. You can't Claude code the necessary experience to compete. You can't open-claw your conditioning. And there are people who say use AI or get left behind.
The Olympics are a celebration of the fact that there are lots of things that you can do to not get left behind. The true power and toughness of the human condition. And I'm not saying that Olympians and athletes don't use technology. They have technologically improved gear. I'm sure they use AI to help them analyze courses and their techniques, but AI does not and cannot do the work for them.
To achieve greatness, you actually have to perform. And I'm under no delusions that anything I do will be Olympic-level glory. But that's not the lesson that you or I should take from this. It's that we need to do the work to stand out. And to do that, we need to create time and space. We need to move away from the instant gratification of ticking a box on our to-do list in favor of the lasting gratification of completing something worth doing.
We do that by using technology to help us, not to do the work for us. We automate repetitive tasks. We use AI to find patterns in the data and pose interesting questions to us. We use it to put the polish on the final product. Not create the initial draft of the product for us. By taking everything off our plate except for our most high-leverage work, we move from too busy to having the time and space to excel and to take the much-needed time off to refresh and come back better than ever, to focus on being Olympic caliber at whatever we do and not just another average solopreneur who's trying to take shortcuts. We need the time and space to excel. Otherwise, we're going to be wondering why we haven't advanced in our business. These things, doing the work, will help us truly stand out.
Which brings me to the last lesson I learned from the Olympics. And this is actually something I've been thinking about since the last Olympics, uh, 4 years ago, when curling got really popular. I really loved watching curling this year, specifically mixed doubles, and the women's US team was— they were just so fun to watch. And my daughter's really into it too. I think we're gonna go to a curling club, probably like when it dies down a little bit, because lots of people are going now.
But if you are unfamiliar with how curling works, the idea is to throw a stone or a rock— it's called both— down ice into a target called the house. And the way you score is irrelevant to this, but you want to get the stone closer to the middle of the house called the button, closer than any of your opponent's stones.
But you don't just throw it down and hope for the best. You control the speed and direction of the stone through something called sweeping. You're using brooms to reduce the friction of the ice on the stone. You release the stone, and then you sweep faster or slower to control the speed. You can also sweep at certain angles to make the stone curl. The ice also matters here. Small changes or oddities in the ice may affect how the stone moves, especially with respect to speed. And if you watch the sport, you know that there is a lot to manage. But it mostly comes down to friction management.
And I think about this all the time, how you can properly apply friction to your business to create more time and space. Add a little bit, and you prevent yourself from going down the wrong path, like getting distracted by social media. Remove it, and you can accomplish your goals faster. Applying friction might mean creating barriers to make tasks harder, like using app blockers, Pomodoro timers, or setting your partner's number as your two-factor authentication contact so that if you want to log into Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you have to ask them for the code.
Something I did for Lent this year was stop purchasing on Amazon. And what this did was create friction for me to spend money on needless things. If I really needed something, I would have to go out and get it or buy it from some other place that didn't make it as easy as Amazon makes it, which allowed me to save money and, you know, not overconsume. So that's applying friction.
Reducing friction can be removing steps, automating, or delegating. So, as you consider how to sweep your business, which in this instance would be reducing friction— you can't add friction to the ice, you can use the friction of the ice and release it, release the stone a certain way.
But as you sweep your business, there's a lot that you want to consider. So here's what I recommend, and this will give you the time and space to go beyond box ticking, to work on your most important work, which will allow you to take the time off that you need and deserve.
So here's what I recommend. Think about the points in your day that prevent you from achieving your goals. These could be distractions, tasks, apps, or services that make it harder for you to do your job. It could be email. Email's a huge one, right? Because email is basically saying, I'm putting everybody else's needs above my own, right? So it could be anything, anything that makes it harder for you to do the thing that you actually need to do to make money and grow your business. You don't need to be too formal about this. Make a note whenever you feel like there's friction, like keep a piece of paper next to you. And just be like, I'm trying to do this, and here's what's preventing me from doing it.
Then figure out one way to smooth out one of those points. It doesn't need to be hard or complicated. You can turn off notifications for certain apps during the day, right? You can remove an unnecessary step from a task that you already perform, or you can even just learn a keyboard shortcut to an app that you use every day.
I use text snippets and Stream Deck buttons, and yes, maybe I'm saving 10 seconds, but 10 seconds per common action adds up, and it prevents me from context switching, right? How many times have you gone to your browser to like grab a link or check something, and then you suddenly find yourself on LinkedIn or Instagram, right? So doing things to remove that friction, to make your life a little easier, will help win back some of that time and space.
The goal is to make small adjustments over time that build up to a smoothly running business. Do this a few times, and you'll gradually change how you work by removing small efficiencies that add up to big results. And before you know it, you'll be moving towards your goals with less resistance. You'll have that time and space, and you will be able to take that time off.
So there you go. 3 things that I learned from the Olympics this year.
1. Reduce or control the friction in your business to help you win back time.
2. Create that time and space to do your most important work, your Olympic-level work, your high-leverage work.
3. And then use that extra time and space to take time off, to refresh, to recharge, and to come back and run your business better than you were before you were on the verge of burnout.
That's it for this episode of the Streamlined Solopreneur. Let me know what you think, or just let me know what you thought of the Olympics this year. You can write in or leave an audio note over at streamlinedfeedback.com. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Check out all of the resources in the show notes. If you want to free up some of your time and space by looking at maybe some tools that are creating friction in your life, you can take my tools audit. That's over at streamlined.fm/tools.
Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, I hope you find some space in your week.