
Block scheduling breaks up your day into dedicated blocks of time for specific types of tasks or activities. This reduces decision fatigue and stress and saves a ton of time!
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I try to have a pretty hard cutoff, like if I'm switching to personal life and personal time, that's it. We don't go backwards. It can wait. Nothing I'm doing is an emergency and there's things that can be done tomorrow.
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Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host, Abigail Pumphrey, and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy.
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I figure if you press play on today's podcast, it's because you desire to make a block schedule work for you and it just hasn't stuck in the past. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it works for everyone, because it probably doesn't. But I know it changed my life and there's some things that I've done with it in the past that have worked better than others. And the way I currently have my day set up right now, I could cry. It is so good. So I can't wait to break that down for you. Just know I was definitely not always this productive. When I started my business, my days felt so chaotic. I was jumping from emails to doing design work to responding to more emails, and I was letting myself get interrupted so much and so often, pretty much anyone else's priority trumped my own. And I let other people dictate what my days and weeks looked like. There's a ton of science out there about what focus tasks can do for your productivity and when you can avoid context switching just how much more you are capable of getting done when you're doing like tasks together. That's just fact at this point. But how do you create a schedule that's tailored to your needs and stay flexible enough that you don't feel like you're living so rigid and constantly in conflict with the thing you decided to set up? If you're unfamiliar with with what block scheduling is, essentially what you're doing is you're breaking up your day into dedicated blocks of Time for specific types of tasks or activities. Instead of jumping between emails and then meetings and then deep work and then back again and then messaging on Slack and then getting interrupted by a notification and then trying to figure out what's for dinner. And then you realize you still have seven more emails to send. Gone are those days. The reason this works is it reduces decision fatigue. You do not have to think about what you have to do every day because you have a flow. Studies have shown that the simple act of context switching can lower your productivity by up to 40%. That is a lot of wasted time. So I love how this can add structure but still give you flexibility. More than anything else, this is reduced stress for me. I feel confident in how I'm handling my day. I feel good about how I'm showing up. My life feels more balanced and I definitely have more separation between work and life. So let's talk about my schedule first and then I will help you figure out how you want to go about doing this for yourself. Now, every single day follows a similar flow, but then every day of the week has its own theme. So let me break it down. Every day I kind of think in four blocks of time. My morning routine, deep work, admin tasks, and personal time. Now I don't have some crazy 17 step morning routine with all the skin care and all the things. No, that's just not how I work. Mine's pretty simple. Although I will say for this year I decided I was going to get dressed every day and this has been a massive improvement to my mornings. So I wake up, I give myself a couple minutes to acclimate, I do the thing we all do and open my phone and scroll on social and at this point I stop beating myself up about it and instead think of it as like a little check in what's going on in the world. I get up and depending on how hungry I am, I will either go get breakfast or I will get dressed. It just depends on the level of hunger. But I check in with my body. Do I need food now or can I wait 30 minutes? If I can wait, I will typically put on my clothes and then do my hair and then my makeup in that order every single time. I am a person who is fairly diligent about breakfast. Do I have breakfast every single day? No. Do I have breakfast 90% of the time? Yeah, pretty much. And more than anything else, it probably has to do with the fact that I take morning medication and I need to take food with it. I'm on an antidepressant and I try to take my vitamins so it helps me get my day started off right. But. But also I am not very good at starting work at 8am Like I will be up and thinking about work by 8am but I'm not necessarily ready to sit down in my chair and start doing focus work then. It's just not how I function now. If it had been warm out and a warmer time of year, I would have included a walk in the mix of all of this and probably would have gotten up, put on clothes, taken a walk, had breakfast, then taken a shower when it's too cold. I shower at night and I just immediately start my day. Otherwise once I'm done with breakfast, I get my drinks. I need drinks at my desk. I don't know about you, but one drink is boring. I usually have two, sometimes three, occasionally four if I'm really out of the box. But coffee and water, okay, I gotta get my coffee and water ready. I take it to my desk and then I do a little check in. Okay, I'm not immediately jumping into anything. I'm kind of checking all my boxes. I check my email, I check my calendar, I check Slack and I check my to do list every single day. I want to make sure anything urgent is responded to, which typically is just other like brand partners. Like not very many people have my email. So if I have an email, it usually needs responded to. And I also don't check it throughout the day. I check it at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, sometimes at lunch if I know I'm going to get something urgent that I have to deal with. But because of that I do look at it and deal with it, then not look at it and come back to it because then I will check it all over again and it throws my whole day off. I check my calendar out of habit mostly because if it's not on my calendar, I'm not going to remember it's happening. And I have dramatically reduced the number of meetings and things I have during the day so it's less relevant than it has been in the past. But it's still a good thing because I still check my personal calendar at the same time. So if I have a thing with friends or an event that I'm going to, or a class I'm going to, I kind of can map out my whole day in my head. I typically check it the night before just to like give myself peace of mind and know what I need to wear the next day. But I will check it in the morning pretty much first thing. Before I jump into dedicated work, I always sweep my slack, meaning I make sure everything is responded to and checked. I can't always do a of the things that need to be done, but I at least read everything. If I can't do something right, then I will either go back and mark it as unread or add it to my to do list, kind of depending on the size and scope of what it is. But what has been the biggest shift in the way I go about my schedule has been really realigning. My theme days. I've had theme days for many years and I have used them and some years I have been better about holding myself to it. But the start of this year I went off strong and I feel really good about what this looks like. There's still built in flexibility. This is not a rigid requirement. But in terms of setting priorities for the week, it really sets me off to a good pace. So let me talk about what the day to day looks like and then I'll jump back into how I wrap up my day and switch between tasks. So on Mondays, this is my dedicated meeting day. If I'm going to have a meeting with my own staff, with outside people, with anyone, I try, try, try, try to get it. On Mondays there's obviously the occasional I can't meet someone for lunch on that day and so I pick a different day of the week. I often if I'm gonna have lunch with a friend, I try to do it on Fridays because now I don't work. But for the most part, any sort of outside connection to the outside world, I try to put all of those things together. And what I've just noticed over the years is the more meetings I have, the less I get done. I think we all understand that in concept. But if I have a meeting and then have a two hour gap, I'm really only going to get 30 to 45 minutes of actual work done because the context switching and the things I do between tasks isn't going to be a whole lot. And so if I have more than one meeting, I may get an hour, an hour and a half of work done all day. And that feels incredibly frustrating. So instead I kind of have a day that's a little bit of a slush and not every single time is it a whole day gone. And what I mean by that is there are some Mondays where the only meeting I have is my all team meeting in the morning and then I have nothing else the entire day. Other Mondays I have A meeting with my team, my brand partner and a program meeting. And I have a little bit of time for work, but not a lot. And then other weeks, once a month I meet one on one with my staff and so I would potentially have a one on one. I do group all of those the same day. So that would be potentially a full team meeting, 3:1 on ones and a program meeting, which is a lot. But trust me, I'd rather do it all in one day and then have no meetings the rest of the week and have all of that time to be creative and really focus. It's so worth it to me. But I don't want to call Monday meeting day. That's. That gives me the ick, honestly. So instead the theme for Monday is connect, learn and inspire. And so my goal for Mondays, if I don't have meetings is to fill myself up. I want to be learning from other creators. I want to be inspired by content. So this might be me spending a little more time consuming things on Pinterest or researching hooks or looking at what is working over here or whatever, whatever is going to fill my cup up so that the rest of the week I can just like pour out. Tuesdays are now dedicated to social marketing. Now I've had enough other things on my plate the last few weeks that I can't quite get done everything I would need to get done for marketing in a single day. But it does set me up for success for the whole rest of the week. So I attempt to get a week worth of content done and scheduled or in drafts, as well as prepare anything for paid social media. So we just started ads back up. We're at the very beginning stages. We were running our first campaign and as part of our first campaign I had 1, 2, 3, I think it was like four or five different ad sets. They all need a different creative and all need a different copy. And so for about two weeks, that was a good chunk, maybe about half my day. But what I like about having it so early in the week is what I tended to do was put it off towards the end of the week and then it would be the thing that didn't get done. And then I'd wake up the next week and I wouldn't have the things and, and I would just feel really flustered. Instead. I have a really good head start and I'm way more likely to finish the week strong and have everything set in place and get myself through the following weekend by setting it up on Tuesday. I also just genuinely have less on my plate than I did last year and so I can spend more time on marketing than I was now. It's not to say that that's all I'm doing, but it's definitely the focus. On Wednesday, my focus for the day is long form content. So on Wednesdays I prep, produce, record my podcast and I do blog writing. Now my intent going into this and so far has been working, is that I'm switching off weeks. And so since we produce two podcasts a week, I'm actually recording four podcasts in one week and then the following week writing blog posts because recording content and writing are two incredibly different kinds of tasks. So it's much harder for me to record two podcasts and write one blog post than it would be to record more podcasts in one day and potentially write even more the next week. If I were to add something like long form video, YouTube content or something like that, it would fall on a Wednesday. Right now that's not a strategy we're focused on, but if it were, that's where I would put it. On Thursdays, I'm focused, a little bit split focused, but primarily on email marketing. The second part of it is product development, which both tend to be primarily writing. If I'm in product development, I would be writing curriculum or writing slides for a workshop or something like that. If I needed to record that content, it would go back on a Wednesday on a different week that I made time for. But I put that on Thursday because it is actually the thing that is the easiest to come out of me. I could write emails with my eyes closed. Emails are just easy peasy lemon squeezy. I feel really, really good about them. I it comes easily to me and so I am putting the thing at the end of the week that is the thing that I don't even really have to think a whole lot about. And if I finish up early, which I often do, then I just have a little bit of a longer weekend.
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Memorial Day Last year we started testing a four day work week. We were going to test it for the summer and then decide if it would stick or not. I can't imagine it going anywhere. So so Friday I don't work. It's not to say that I haven't prepared content on that day or don't spend some time learning from other people. I do, but I'm not checking slack. I'm not checking in with my team, I have the day off. I tend to spend a lot more time doing things around the house or doing things for myself like crafts or projects or whatever. I do try to do a lot less on my computer that day so I'm not just sitting all the time. So with those themes in mind, I am going into my focus time looking at my to do list first. So like I know on Tuesday I need to write these posts and produce this ad content and that might be grouped in a couple of different ways. So part of it might be research. Like I'm looking up ideas, I'm coming up with hooks, I'm kind of seeing what's working. I might be looking at my own analytics and insights and all of that. Another chunk of time might be writing headlines for graphics. I would then probably move into designing graphics and then scheduling content and then once it's in its slot then I go back and write captions. With the exception of reels on reels, I tend to write the hook and the caption first and then I draft the content in app and save it to my drafts. For something like long form content I would do like tags together. So if I'm going to produce four podcasts in a day, I would do brainstorming for potential episodes together, research and outlining for those episodes together and then recording together. Me going from research, outline, research, outline, record and then like looping does not work for me. I I will get stuck in a loop and I would get literally half as much done on the emails. I typically have a list that I know I need to produce for certain days. So the plan is predetermined by me. And once the plan is in place then I'll kind of do it in chunks. And it's not totally rigid, but I work for a focused period of time. Sometimes it's 45 minutes, sometimes it's two hours. It kind of depends on what it is. And then I take a break. I don't know when people decided they didn't need breaks, but you need breaks. So I love quality focus time. That's fantastic. But I need a little buffer. And so in that buffer I might run to the restroom, get a snack, get a meal. But it's also when I would do like a midday check in on Slack answer messages. I do not do midday check ins on email unless I know I'm looking for something super specific. But I check in on all of the content in Slack and make sure my team has what they need while we don't have the same block scheduling because we all have different tasks. They very similarly will do focused work for 45 minutes to an hour, hour and a half, and then check in on Slack too. So there's no expectation that you have to respond immediately. But if we're having a conversation, typically we can kind of get through stuff in a fairly quick quip. And if we're all on a break at the same time checking Slack, we can get through quite a bit. Now, in terms of what I'm doing with my team, like, I'm sending them for emails, I'm sending them the email when the email's ready because I don't do the formatting or proofreading. I mean, I do proofread my stuff, but I want someone else to have a second set of eyes. I do have dyslexia. I. And I am not in charge of links because me being in charge of links would mean emails would get sent with broken links. So Jared is formatting emails, Jen is proofing emails. If I'm working on a web project with Caitlin, I might provide her copy, but then she might ask me a question about that copy or a design thing. Customer service stuff tends to be handled by Jen and Jared, and if they need to escalate something, they can. But for the most part, they kind of handle that on the day to day. So even though I have themes, I may still touch other things that are unrelated by answering other people's questions. But if they have something they need me to do, I need to write copy for a landing page, then that would go on a writing day. Writing is Thursday. Before I completely close out for the day, I do do a couple things. I do one last sweep through Slack, make sure everybody's question is answered. I check my email one more time, respond to anybody if necessary, and then I check my to do list. I look at my to do list for the next few days and if there was anything that I thought of that I forgot about or didn't write down, I try to take some time. At the end of the day, what's still on my mind that I need to get out of my head. Our team does use Asana for task management, but I'll be honest, I don't use it nearly as much as the rest of the team does. For me, Asana is primarily an archive. I can go back and I could find an exact email I sent on an exact day and have access to our master spreadsheet that has the email and all of the stats and all of the links like it is where I find things and can access them easily and quickly. Whereas I feel like my team uses it more for the day to day. I have enough of a routine that unless there's something really specific that I need to put on my radar, I'm relying more on my notes app than I think my team would like. But it's really working for me and that's really all that matters. I try to have a pretty hard cutoff. Like if I'm switching to personal life and personal time, that's it. We don't go backwards. It can wait. Nothing I'm doing is an emergency and there's things that can be done tomorrow. I think with the exception of I do have social content that performs quite well if it's posted around dinner time or in that like nighttime scroll before bed. And some of that ends up getting posted live just because of if I want it to be a collab post or I want to add special music or whatever. But I try to have all of that either pre drafted, like as much ready to go as possible so I can just hit post. So I used to think that I had to start my day with the most important tasks because that's when my energy would be the best. And it's not. I'm not the best sleeper and I haven't been for a very, very, very, very long time. And I actually tend to feel my best right after lunch. I think a lot of people get like after lunch lethargia. I don't. I am like golden between 1 and 3pm that is like prime time for me to get the most stuff done out of the whole day. Like do not get in my way. I am going to be so productive, allowing myself to have a slow morning and ease into work, but then having really focused tasks. I end up getting a couple of priorities done before lunch, a couple of priorities done after lunch, and I feel really good about my day. Realistically, I can really only do two to three kind of major things a day. Like it's not going to be more than that because each of those things takes time and sometimes those things have multiple steps. There will be days that things don't go as planned and I could sit here and get really frustrated about what that looks like. But in the grand scheme of things, I have a lot of buffer time built into my schedule on purpose. I am not rigidly sitting at my desk 32 hours a week. Honestly, I'm not even really sure how much I work. It could be 20 hours, one week and then 40 hours the next. But it's not necessarily this like super linear thing. I love to write like love, love, love, love to write. And sometimes at 11pm I get this moment of I have to write this down. And I used to beat myself up about that and say, you have to wait until tomorrow or until this particular day. But if I'm feeling really into it, I let myself go be creative for an hour. My husband has his time to chill and it just might mean that I sleep in an hour later or I take a chunk from a different part of the day. In terms of how you do this for yourself, I think you really have to identify what your priorities are. What are your non negotiables, how are you willing to work and how are you not willing to work? And then beyond that, what are the three to five things that you want to prioritize every week? Because there's probably a lot about your life that while the work itself is different from week to week, there is a pattern to it. You're doing the same type of work again and again and again. The work itself may be different, but the type of work is the same. So if you're doing a lot of writing, when are you going to feel best to write? When are you going to feel the most inspired? When are you going to feel the most energy? When are you going to feel the most inspired? Because some of that is not only time of day, but day of week. Create your themes around your focused work. Now some people do this where they'll have they'll take that theme and they'll do it in a two hour block and then have a different kind of task in the afternoon. And if that works for you, great. I love the simplicity of my theme days because I always know when something is going to land and so does my team. My blog schedule is not a secret. All of my brand partners know I'm going to meet with you on a Monday. If you have questions, slack me. I'm not unreachable. I just have boundaries. I'd love to say that I work out every single day and I'm super fit and all that. No, I walk nine months of the year in the winter. I will be inside and that's okay. Could I work out inside more often? Absolutely. But I feel good about going to yoga a couple of times and calling that good enough. I do recommend that you have things in place that help you stay focused. So with stuff like emails, not having your notifications on for new emails is going to make it a lot easier for you to just check them when you have dedicated time and space to do that. During the day, I have a focus mode on my computer that's literally called work. There are a set group of people that can still get a hold of me. But if you're not that set group of people, it's going to ignore your call or your text and I'll see it at the end of the day and that's okay. If I'm doing something where I can't have any noise, like record a podcast, I go on do not Disturb and I'm unapologetic about that. I am unreachable while I'm recording this. It can wait 45 minutes. There are going to be things that you can't anticipate. So if you go about doing this, do not fill up every second of your day. You need time to go to the bathroom, you need time to take a breath. You need time to scroll social media for 15 minutes to just decompress between a task. You don't need to get lost in it, you don't need to lose your afternoon with it, but you're allowed to just take a breath. The first time you do this, it's not going to be perfect. In fact, you're probably going to hate something about it. But don't wait six months to change it. Change it. If it's not working for you, change it and check in with yourself on it. Because I reevaluate my themes about every six months, sometimes once a quarter. But I'm feeling really good about this set. I feel like I'm going to be. I can't imagine walking away from this routine, maybe ever. Like, I love it. It's really, really, really working for my brain. That said, we all have different priorities and different seasons, different things that we want to spend time on, different things we're emphasizing in our business. And you're going to have to adjust based on what that looks like. If you're doing more of one thing or less of another, where is it going? How are you fitting that in? If you say you're going to do it, when are you going to do it? This is a guide, not a rule book. Yes, I have brand partners that know that I only take meetings on Monday. But if we have something super random that we need to touch base on, I'm not opposed to jumping on a 20 minute call in the afternoon. Like, it's not a can't happen at all. It's a. I have free space on my calendar so I can spend it. How I need to I do recommend really thinking about how you're separating your work from your life now. I don't want you to get to the point like I did, where you were so good at separating your work and your life that you almost felt like you were two different people. I think that can be unhealthy. You still need to be you and ideally you're still the same version of you. However, you having clear boundaries for when you're on versus when you're not is going to allow you to better communicate with the other people in your life. What this looks like you're working from home when Your office is 10 steps from your bed. You need to decide what this looks like because so many entrepreneurs end up working far too much. Not necessarily because they have to. A lot of it is because they love it, but they also tend to burn out hard. And the better you can be about understanding when your energy runs its course, the better you're going to be about walking away at a time of day that's going to give you real rest. I want you to have more focus. I want you to have more deep work, more creative work. I think structure can be a huge aid in this happening. Start small, prioritize your time, adjust as needed. It's all going to come together. You don't need to feel overwhelmed and scattered. Just try it. Just try it for a week. You might be surprised at how much control you feel over your time, and taking back that control is going to make you feel more like you're in charge of your business and not like your business is running your life. I want to hear about what your perfect block schedule would be. Send me a DM. You can find me @bossproject on Instagram. My personal profile at Abigail says is linked there. Go give me a follow and let me know what feels good to you. And if you implement this, what was the game changer? I'd love to hear your thoughts now. In the next episode we're going to be talking more about SEO, which I haven't touched on in quite a while and answering the age old question is blogging dead. So make sure you're subscribed and tune in next time. I'll see you.
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The Strategy Hour Podcast Episode 929: How to Create a Block Schedule You’ll Actually Stick To
Release Date: February 25, 2025
Introduction
In Episode 929 of The Strategy Hour Podcast: Online Business Growth & Digital Marketing with Boss Project, host Abigail Pumphrey delves deep into the art of block scheduling—a time management technique designed to enhance productivity and balance in the hectic life of an online entrepreneur. This episode is a comprehensive guide for business owners seeking to optimize their daily routines, reduce stress, and achieve sustainable growth without succumbing to burnout.
Understanding Block Scheduling
Abigail begins by addressing the common struggles many entrepreneurs face with productivity and time management. She introduces block scheduling as a solution that transformed her own chaotic workdays into structured, efficient, and fulfilling ones.
“The simple act of context switching can lower your productivity by up to 40%. That is a lot of wasted time.” — Abigail Pumphrey [05:15]
The Benefits of Block Scheduling
Block scheduling offers numerous advantages, including:
Abigail’s Personal Block Schedule
Abigail shares her meticulously crafted block schedule, highlighting how each day of the week is dedicated to specific themes that align with her business priorities and personal well-being.
Morning Routine
Abigail emphasizes a simple yet effective morning routine that sets a positive tone for the day.
“I give myself a couple minutes to acclimate, I do the thing we all do and open my phone and scroll on social...” — Abigail Pumphrey [03:10]
Theme Days of the Week
Abigail structures her week with distinct themes, ensuring focused effort and strategic progress in various aspects of her business.
Monday: Connect, Learn, and Inspire
Mondays are reserved for connecting with team members and external partners. Abigail also dedicates time to consume inspiring content, research, and gather new ideas to fuel the week's activities.
“My goal for Mondays, if I don't have meetings, is to fill myself up... so that the rest of the week I can just pour out.” — Abigail Pumphrey [10:25]
Tuesday: Social Marketing
This day is dedicated to creating and scheduling a week’s worth of social media content, preparing paid social media campaigns, and ensuring all marketing efforts are aligned and ready to deploy.
“I have a really good head start and I'm way more likely to finish the week strong...” — Abigail Pumphrey [11:40]
Wednesday: Long-Form Content
Wednesdays focus on producing substantial content such as podcasts and blog posts. Abigail alternates between recording multiple podcasts in one week and writing blog posts the next to maintain a balanced workload.
“Recording content and writing are two incredibly different kinds of tasks... I'm actually recording four podcasts in one day...” — Abigail Pumphrey [12:55]
Thursday: Email Marketing and Product Development
This day is split between crafting engaging email campaigns and developing new products. Abigail finds writing emails to be an effortless task, allowing her to efficiently handle both responsibilities.
“Emails are just easy peasy lemon squeezy. I feel really, really good about them.” — Abigail Pumphrey [14:20]
Friday: Personal Time (Four-Day Work Week)
Embracing a four-day work week, Fridays are reserved exclusively for personal activities, reducing work-related stress and fostering a healthy work-life balance.
“I don't work on Fridays. I spend time on myself, doing crafts or projects...” — Abigail Pumphrey [18:05]
Implementing Your Own Block Schedule
Abigail offers practical steps for listeners to adopt block scheduling tailored to their unique needs:
“Just try it for a week. You might be surprised at how much control you feel over your time...” — Abigail Pumphrey [35:30]
Overcoming Challenges
Abigail acknowledges that implementing a block schedule isn't flawless from the start. She advises listeners to remain adaptable and make necessary adjustments without waiting for prolonged periods to see results.
“The first time you do this, it's not going to be perfect. In fact, you're probably going to hate something about it. But don't wait six months to change it.” — Abigail Pumphrey [34:50]
Conclusion
Abigail Pumphrey’s insightful discussion on block scheduling provides a strategic framework for entrepreneurs aiming to enhance productivity, achieve work-life balance, and drive their online businesses forward. By adopting a structured yet flexible approach, Abigail demonstrates that it’s possible to manage multiple facets of a business efficiently while maintaining personal well-being.
Key Takeaways:
Next Episode Preview
In the upcoming episode, Abigail will explore the intricacies of SEO and address the perennial debate: "Is Blogging Dead?" Subscribers can look forward to valuable insights and actionable strategies to enhance their online presence through effective content marketing.
Engage with Abigail
Listeners are encouraged to share their block scheduling experiences and perfect schedules via Instagram @bossproject. Abigail is eager to hear feedback and celebrate the game-changers that block scheduling brings to their businesses.
For more resources and detailed show notes, visit bossproject.com/podcast.