Optimize Monthly (January 2025)
Welcome to Optimize Monthly!
Each edition shares bite-sized insights, useful tools, and thought-provoking ideas I've discovered while helping companies and teams work smarter.
These snippets are intended to spark ideas and highlight possibilities—reach out if you'd like more details about anything that catches your interest!
If you haven't used your complimentary pre-New Year audit yet, January is the perfect time to gain clarity for 2025.
And speaking of 2025, wishing you a year filled with growth and purposeful optimization!
Happy Optimizing!
Never Stop Optimizing: A Lesson Learned
Summary
Energy drains compound over time unless consistently balanced with activities that recharge you.
More
While we all have activities that energize or drain us, the impact of draining tasks multiplies unless intentionally balanced with rejuvenating ones. As leaders, recognizing these patterns early and prioritizing balance is crucial for preventing burnout and maintaining peak performance.
Context
Being in the weeds depletes me, which is why I shifted away from zero-to-one work as a fractional COO. Yet with FrUn, our free community's limited resources mean I still manage the automations and backend ops I built. Recently, I found myself taking things personally and feeling irritable over minor issues. The holiday slowdown gave me the bandwidth to realize that these operational tasks weren't just increasingly draining me, they were also impacting my strategic thinking. I have now prioritized hiring a part-time ops manager in 2025.
Tool Tip: What I’m Excited About and Why
Summary
SavvyCal revolutionizes calendar management with smart time blocking and comprehensive scheduling limits.
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While most scheduling tools eliminate back-and-forth emails, SavvyCal goes further. It allows calendar overlay for easy comparison, creates flexible time blocks that can be linked to different scheduling links, and uniquely offers limits across all scheduling links—not just individual ones.
Context
As an introverted leader of a large community, I needed a structured approach to balance connection and energy. I restructured my calendar into four meeting "buckets" (FrUn, networking, work, and ASAP for emergencies), each with its own scheduling link and time block. With a weekly three-meeting limit per bucket (plus team meetings), I maintain my maximum of 18 meetings while ensuring balance across categories. The ASAP bucket provides flexibility for true urgencies.