Everyday is a Free Day Until It’s Not – Episode 278

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

[00:00] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast, fresh alternative personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your host, bestselling author, Kim D.H. Butler. Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Today we’re talking about a case study, but we’re actually not going to dive into a specific person. We’re going to dive into a specific situation, and it’s because we’re seeing this pop up more and more with baby boomers retiring, and we’re going to be talking about the retirement phase, and we’re going to get into a specific piece, but first, Kim, are you there with us? I am, Spencer. Thank you. Well, it’s wonderful for us to understand the transition of work, work, work to

[00:56] all of a sudden play, play, play. I think it’s something that a lot of people just can’t quite understand, and so we’re going to title this episode, Every Day is a Free Day, Until It’s Not. The free day word needs to be given credit in the form of Dan Sullivan and Bab Smith at Strategic Coach. A free day by strategic coach definition is 12 hours, midnight to midnight. I’ll come back to that. No business activity. For a retiree, that would mean no anything activity that wasn’t something that they wanted to do. The entrepreneur’s challenge is every day is a work day. Well, the retiree’s challenge is that every day is a free day. That’s actually the challenge, and what we mean by that is that if you have

[01:54] no longer a need for work in the typical sense, then every day is supposed to be a free day, and yet as a human being and potentially a homeowner, there are things that you have to do that you may not want to do. Mowing the yard could fall into that category, even something like a doctor’s appointment, et cetera. All of those things now become your, quote, work, and so to finish up on the definition, so Dan Sullivan at Strategic Coach says free day, midnight to no business activity. Well, so what else? A focus day is the second type of day that he speaks about, which is supposed to be 80% of the time on your, quote, work activities. And then the third type of day, and these are all midnight to midnight, by

[02:41] the way, is a buffer day, which is, as the term implies, the day in between, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, the focus days and the free days. And so here is the biggest challenge that I think retirees have, and that is, as the title of the podcast suggests, that every day is a free day until it’s not. And just like a working person, especially an entrepreneur, that can typically work sort of 24-7 because they own a business and that’s an actual problem, the retiree has the same problem because every day is a free day. Consequently, there’s no time requirement for them to get stuff done, like clean the house, do the yard, go see the doctor, or whatever their things are that they need to get done.

[03:34] And consequently, all of those types of things can sort of just fill the envelope of time and not in a good way. What I mean by that is they have this obligation, this got to clean the yard, got to do the house, whatever, and it’s always hanging over their head because they don’t buckle down and actually get the job done, or got to go see the doctor, got to do this, got to do that. And so they’re free days when they choose to take them. Let’s say they want to go on a hike, they want to go to the park with the grandkids, whatever it is, end up with this cloud hanging over their head because the to-do’s, the doctor’s appointment, the yard, the house, are there. It’s no different than the business person who brings home a file over

[04:24] the weekend intending to get to it. And it might even just sit in the trunk of their car the entire weekend, but it’s hanging over their head as a cloud. And it reduces the value and the goodness that are supposed to happen on free days. That’s a really interesting point. Now, for you and Todd, and I want to get specific. You guys have a policy in the house, we’ll call it. And isn’t it the no movies on school nights policy? Yes, you could say that school nights being interpreted as any time that the workday is next. OK, so with that, would it be setting up, we should call it policy systems, styles of working where you could say, hey, there’s certain things that we’re just not going to do or we’re

[05:10] going to eliminate so that we can be all in whenever we’re in our work or not in our work? Yeah, I think that’s a good way to say it. And so the transition, if you will, to the retiree’s schedule is that they get these muddied days, which have all kinds of good and then I’m going to call them necessary items in them. But never is there because there’s no time limit, never is there a clear focus on the necessary items versus the more fun stuff. And consequently, they don’t get the value of doing either, because just like the entrepreneur who thinks they’re working 24-7, the retiree is cleaning the yard while they’re sort of thinking about wanting to go to the park. And then when they’re at the park, they’re sort of thinking about the

[06:02] fact that they still need to finish cleaning the yard or whatever it is. And neither place gets the good focus and the awesome opportunity that comes from it. You know, even though cleaning the yard may not be fun, depends on your definition. I like to do it. But if you aren’t really giving the focus that is necessary, then it isn’t ever really done and you can’t cross it off your list. And then same is true, of course, at your time at the park. It’s if it isn’t getting the focus that’s necessary, then you’re not getting the goodness out of it and the freedom and the fun that you should have by focusing on it 100 percent. So what are some of the similarities that you see in retirees that are actually implementing this style of living successfully?

[06:49] Well, I would sure love to hear about more people that are, because frankly, I don’t know specifics because I’m not seeing a lot of people do that. I’ve made some suggestions to a variety of people to try it, to try living their way, living their life that way. And yet I’m not really seeing it happen a lot. However, I can visualize it because I know what an unbelievable difference it’s made in my work life as I’ve implemented this. It’s called the Entrepreneurial Time System from Strategic Coach for literally almost 25 years. I think it’s been 24 years so far. And believe me, I’m not perfect about implementing it. I don’t mean to imply that at all. In fact, it probably took me a good three or four years

[07:39] to figure it out, even though it was introduced like day one inside Strategic Coach. And yet I would love to see some retirees try this because I think they would get so much more out of life. They would have so much more of a sense of accomplishment, which is super, super important for a retiree because they’ve lost their typical sense, their traditional sense of accomplishment. And then as I’ve indicated, I think they would get so much more also out of their free days. Now, I wanna separate out free days from vacation. Like vacation should be free days too, but vacation, it’s a little bit easier. I’m just talking about the normal day-to-day operation. And so I wanna just, if I may, share some quick examples of how I implement this.

[08:24] And maybe there’s some retirees out there that could pick up on the benefits that I’ve received, which I’ll elucidate as we go along, and apply that to their own lives. Is that maybe helpful? Oh, I’d love to hear that. Let’s hear those. Okay, so the first thing that’s important is to block out the free days first. And so for a retiree, maybe it’s three or four or even five days a week. It might be Saturday and Sunday, and then maybe Monday and Friday, and then maybe they pick another day in the week as well. For me, of course, I have my Saturdays and Sundays as free days, and then I have my vacation time. And then I occasionally will pick a Friday or a Monday that I am choosing to have be completely free.

[09:10] Free from the obligation to get anything done. And also free to be about rejuvenation. That’s important as well. It needs to be free from, but it also needs to be free to. Free to rejuvenate you. So whatever days you pick, you wanna block those out on the calendar for maybe a couple months in advance so that they don’t get overrun by other things. Then you switch gears and you go to your focus day. So for me, focus day is pretty obvious. It’s here with you recording podcasts. It’s meeting with clients. I have specific days that I do that, typically Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for clients. And then my Mondays end up being a lot of focus activities as well. So the retiree is going to pick their obligations.

[09:58] So what are they? Maybe it’s church duties. Maybe it’s yard or home duties. Maybe it’s doctor’s appointments. I realize you can’t always control the doctor’s appointments, but you can try. Whatever it is that is your volunteer work, et cetera, et cetera. Pick a day or two a week where you can consolidate all of those things and get them done on that particular day. And again, remember, focus day is only 80% of the day. So it still means you can have breakfast with a friend. It still means you can take a nap in the afternoon if you want. It still means you can have a little workout, like physical or mental or spiritual workout time. But for the bulk of the time of the day, just your normal day,

[10:39] I’m not necessarily speaking about the evenings, you are going to get your obligations handled. And then the buffer day is so important. And it’s probably only gonna be maybe a day a week for a retiree. For a business owner, it’s usually one or two days a week. But that’s when you do all the other stuff that needs to get done. Now, maybe for a retiree, they just consider buffer and focus the same. That would be one approach to it. But I know for me, as an example, just kind of a simple personal example, I really try to schedule getting my hair cut, which is a necessary thing for women, guys too. We need to get our hair done on buffer days because I don’t want it messing up my free days because I’m not the kind of person

[11:24] that enjoys that process. Some people do and that’s awesome. You should schedule getting your hair cut on your free days. But for me, it goes on my buffer days. And then the other thing that I will do on buffer days is try to get other important errands and aspects done of both my personal and my business life that just don’t fit into the category of free or focus. Focus is generally money making, focus for the retiree is your obligations. And then of course, free we’ve defined. So this schedule, this entrepreneurial time system, which I’m encouraging retirees to adopt as the retirement time system, instead of ETS, it can be RTS, I guess, is just a completely different approach to time than is normally held by our society.

[12:15] Wow, what a wonderful framework. I actually wrote those notes down and I’ll make sure that those notes go inside of this episode’s show notes. So that was really valuable. Oh, that’s nice of you. And there’s one last thing that we have to address, which is the midnight to midnight thing. And so a lot of people would say, well, I can do free days in the morning and focus days in the afternoon. And yes, you can, but is that the best? And the answer is no, because as we all know, sleep makes a very hard dividing line between things, and it’s an important one. And so whether you call it midnight to midnight or 10 p.m. to 10 p.m. or whatever, I am going to encourage people to really break up their days and divide them by sleep,

[13:05] not try to do a havesy havesy. That makes a lot of sense. And that resets our mental computer every single day. So wonderful way to approach that. Yes, and again, I just wanna really thank Dan Sullivan. He’s an excellent strategic coach for the Entrepreneurial Time System. And I encourage any retiree out there that’s listening to give it a try and email us and let us know how this is going. And there’s two ways you could let us know. One, of course, is our special email, hello at partners4prosperity.com. And then the other thing is if it’s easier and you wanna pop into iTunes and put some comments in the review section, and that might be an easier way for you to say, yeah, I tried this and it worked,

[13:51] or I tried this and it didn’t work. And what else would you suggest? Tell me what’s not working about this. And let’s see if we can brainstorm some solutions. Wonderful idea with that. And for our listeners, we’ll make sure to put an easy link inside the description. It’ll be at the bottom of the show notes. You can click so that you can leave that review and tell us your comments, if it’s working or if it’s not. So thank you for this framework of how we can optimize our RTS or our ETS, the entrepreneur retirement time system, and help us to have better free and focused days. Sounds great. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you,

[14:40] visit us at partners4prosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.