Stop the Busywork and Start Scaling

Ever feel like you're doing everything but getting nowhere? In this episode, I dive into how I reclaimed my time, energy, and CEO role by doing a time audit (yes, it's annoying—and yes, it's worth it), delegating what no longer served me, and creating intentional blank space on my calendar. Spoiler alert: focus is the real F-word in business. If you’re ready to stop spinning your wheels and start scaling with clarity, this one’s for you.

Click play to hear all of this and:

[00:50] Why focus is the F-word entrepreneurs need most

[02:50] The power of a Time Audit (yes, even if it’s Annoying)

[03:47] A powerful way to align team productivity with company vision.

[04:47] Working myself out of a job (and why it matters)

[05:50] The Uncomfortable Truth About Blank Space on Your Calendar

[06:57] The 3 questions every visionary leader should ask before launching the next thing.

Listen to Related Episodes:

• How to Double Your Energy and Focus with Tanessa Shears

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Transcript

Jasmine Star 00:00:00  Be prepared when you're going to be walking into something where, you know, like, oh, this is going to be challenging. My focus. Commit to mantras that you know to be true that will help you stay focused and keep you understanding that while that looks better, shiny, sexier, it's also a distraction from keeping the main thing the main thing. Have you ever had a thousand things vying for your attention? Have you ever been doing something and then you just feel tempted to stop because you're not sure it's going to work? And so then you go and you start something new. What if I explained a different way and perhaps a better way? What if the real solution is to believe that doing less leads to more? Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show, where I empower seven figure entrepreneurs to scale to eight. And normally on the show, I have a big focus on marketing and sales and branding. That's kind of my jam. And today we are going to talk about focus. Yes, the F word.

Jasmine Star 00:00:50  Okay, so I believe I wrote some notes and I wrote my notes based on like a belief that I have I believe that I have is focus can be your best friend if focus is your best friend, if you keep her number one at all times and focus is going to be your best friend. If two. You decide to stay monogamous with this best friend and you have to be determined to keep focus at your side the whole time, every day, all day. Now, focus can also be your frenemy, right? Your frenemy if you don't adhere to her stipulations. If you don't keep her number one. If you are not monogamous, and if you are not keeping her at your side all the time. Now, I understand that as business owners, we want to focus. I know you do, but there are things that, like we need to do. Oh, we need to respond to that email right at this very moment. We need to doom scroll Instagram. We just need to because it's market research.

Jasmine Star 00:01:49  We need to catch up on a lot of busy work that we've been putting off. We need to address the pile of laundry that's sitting in the room we hand to heaven. We really need to focus on the business, but there's another business that I'd really like to focus on, because focusing is really great and fun. When focusing becomes a little too hard on something that might not be working. Is it anyone? Is this just me? Does anybody else struggle with focusing? It has been not to get super meta, but focus has been my main focus for the past two years, and I want us to all realize that you're not alone. In fact, as I was struggling with my focus, I did a little bit of research. The Harvard Business Review wrote that most entrepreneurs experience attention residue due to wearing multiple hats, which is directly impacting sustained focus. And a zero. Study said 77% of business owners feel burnt out and have difficulty focusing. That was from a 2022 study. Okay, so I've experienced this before, but I wanted it to stop.

Jasmine Star 00:02:50  So for the last two years, I have focused all of my attention on focus, and I started it with one thing that you're probably going to roll your eyes and you're absolutely, probably going to hate. I began to hone my focus by doing a time audit, a time audit, and at a time audit did was basically go about and chronicle everything I was doing, not just in a day, but I did it over a two week time span. And yes, it was annoying. And yes, it took extra time. But I have to tell you, understanding how I was spending my days and then understanding what I was spending time on, that took a lot of time that didn't actually move a lot in the business became very revealing. I started asking myself, is this actually proportionate with what I was working on, proportionate to where the business was going, or just simply keeping the business in its current spot? It was eye opening, and it was so eye opening that the second thing I did to hone my focus was to ask the team to do a time audit.

Jasmine Star 00:03:47  So we asked all of our W2 employees to do a time audit over two weeks so that we would be able to understand where are they spending their time, and is it reflective of where the business is going, not just where the business is. I heard this same feedback from the team that I experienced myself. They were wildly underestimating how some tasks that were like small or menial, how long they were actually taking them, and they wished they had more time to do bigger, higher level thinking for the other projects they wanted to pursue. So after that, I began the process of working myself out of a job. So number one on honing focus was to do a time audit. Number two was to have the team do their time audits. And then number three, I wanted to work myself out of a job. What were the jobs within the organization, within my business that I didn't want to do anymore, that were no longer serving the future version of the business? And in order for me to stop doing and being in the business so that I can work on the business, I had to work myself out of the jobs that I was doing.

Jasmine Star 00:04:47  I had to earn my right to sit as CEO and visionary and not get caught up in the weeds. So once I created systems and once I turned over elements to other team members to be responsible for. Once, I stopped going to meetings that were not really serving me. In the big picture. I noticed on my calendar I had pockets of open space, of blank space. And I have to tell you that over the last two years, that blank space has been the most agonizing and the most rewarding thing that I have done in my business. I have never been the type of person who could just sit and be. I've never the kind of person who was just like, I just love pontificating. It makes me very uncomfortable to be alone with my own thoughts in my own ways. It makes me feel very responsible to cast a vision of where we are going. And sometimes that responsibility makes me feel uncomfortable because there are so many people who depend on what this vision is. So once the blank space opened, I started asking myself a few things.

Jasmine Star 00:05:50  What was I good at? Number two? What did I actually want to build? Not what I thought I should build. Not what the market was saying. What do I. As a human with a purpose and a vision for my future. What do I want to build? And lastly, what was the market looking for? After years of so much change. I will tell you that in 2025, the general sentiment for people who are creating digital components to their business, they have seen a pretty significant downturn in what the digital offers are yielding in comparison to previous years. So what I was able to do by stepping out is that we saw these peak years of 2019, 2020 and 21 when we look back at what was happening in the digital space in 20 and 21, where people were at home, they had extra money to spend and they were looking for ways to dive into digital communities. Like we saw this massive spike of growth. And then what happens is, like there's been a trickle down effect and there's been a loss of trust in people who are selling and creating on the internet.

Jasmine Star 00:06:57  So in 2024, I'm looking and saying there is a big gap here. And things have fundamentally shifted so that when we moved into 2025, I realized, oh, I saw the writing on the wall and I started building towards the future. Not what the high days of the past that wouldn't have happened if I actually hadn't taken time to assess. What do people want? Where are we going? What do I want to build and what am I actually good at? When I answer those three questions, I could not help but focus because it became very clear that what I had been and what I had built was great for the time it was, but for who I am now and for who I want to be in the future and for where I think the business is going to be in the future. I needed to change, and change was going to require me to hone in a new level of focus that I had never experienced before. Once I did that, then I created, and I think that is very different than other things that I've done in the past.

Jasmine Star 00:07:51  It was like I was a I am a creator, I am a generator. I can come up with things and I'm moving quickly and and fast and I loved it and it served me well. But it's not going to serve me as I step into the next iteration of my business. I want to go deep and I want to go very high, and that takes time. It was after I answered those three questions, then I created and if it was part of my focus, part of my vision, then I was doing it. And if something else came as a beautiful, shiny, amazing, sexy distraction, I was not going to judge it. And that was very hard because as business owners, we are not lacking for opportunity. People who know how to make money. People who know how to create content. People who know how to create trust. People who know how to make an offer and people buy you. You're not lacking for opportunity. In fact, it's death by opportunity because you say yes to this opportunity and yes to this opportunity.

Jasmine Star 00:08:47  And all of a sudden you just realize I've built like 100 short ladders. I've done that. I'm at a point in my career where I'm focusing on one very tall ladder. Regardless of how long it's going to take for me to build it. So if it was a distraction and wasn't pointing me to the big goal, I stopped doing it. So in 2024 and up into this point of 2025 at recording, I have done less. Speaking, I have done the least amount of speaking than I have done in years. I am done the least amount of podcast. I'm not guesting on podcasts right now, and I have done the least amount of media interviews, writing submissions. I'm just focused on keeping the main thing, the main thing, and those other things are just a distraction. I don't need amplification as I'm building, I need to build. Then I want to amplify. So I've been doing a lot of working and building behind the scenes. I've been sharing some of that on the podcast. I probably am my most real and my most authentic and my most okay, this is the real ugly on my podcast and on social media.

Jasmine Star 00:09:50  It's just keeping things going and keeping people engaged. Small little tidbits and peeks into it. But that's just the real deal. So we privately launched the consistent 10-K in August of 2025. We started off very small and we started off with intention and we started off with the foundation. Now, we started with a wait list of just a few hundred people. We have hundreds of thousands of people on a newsletter and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. And we decided, nope, we're building the foundation and we're setting the intention. So once we launched consistent 10-K, something that we've been working on since the end of 2024, we went from creation to iteration. So what does this mean? That once it was out there, we had to learn those lessons and we wanted to learn them as fast as possible so that we could change and serve people extraordinarily well. We were not looking for scale at the outset. We're looking for results, testimonials and success stories so that it becomes proof of concept for a new way of doing something in the market.

Jasmine Star 00:10:53  And the truth was, we actually couldn't anticipate how fast we needed to learn these lessons. But, I mean, this is the real, real. I'm going to tell you it was not for the faint of heart. So this is what we did. We segmented our waitlist. Remember, this waitlist was not big. It was just a few hundred people. It was less than 600. We segmented it from going to 600. And we said, okay, we're only going to be emailing people at 150 people at a time, and we're going to measure their open rate, the click through rate. We're going to measure who's setting up calls. And then all of a sudden we realized, oh, we need to segment it again. We had too much inbound volume to actually sustain that demand. So we segmented we segmented again. And then we delayed sending out other emails because we needed to build that foundation. We needed to make sure that people were coming in at the right time. And I think there's this temptation, this temptation to say, oh, we're moving too slow.

Jasmine Star 00:11:46  The old version of me that really struggled with focus would say, we're moving too slow. We need to do more. This new version of me with a very honed focus and said, shut everything out and do it in a particular way. That version, oh, she was here and she was not playing any games. So when we realized that we had too much to do and too many people to serve, we said, okay, we're going to designate our focus. So I had a designated focus and my designated focus was going to be marketing and sales. I needed to understand the cadence. We had not even put anything outward facing, but how are we going to market to the small segments of this list and also on sales? How are we going to hire the right team? How are we going to cultivate, and what kind of feedback are we giving them? That was my honed focus. Now my co-creator, my partner, a woman who's been at my side for six years in every iteration of the things that I have created.

Jasmine Star 00:12:37  Her name is Katie. Her main focus was the community and building out coaches, so we had to build a whole system for coaches. We had never done this to this capacity before and she was also focused on community. So community and coaches were going to be her main focus. So in the beginning, Katy and I were taking 5 to 6 sales calls a day. We needed to understand who was coming in. We needed to understand our message, and we needed to focus on their needs and align our offer. Where was it hitting on all strides? Where was it missing? What could we be tweaking? And we quickly realized, okay, we have product market fit and this is great. How much can we begin to scale? But here again we said, what are we going to focus on. So we were going to be focusing on updating our scripts. We're going to be focusing on updating our data, how quickly people were signing up, how much time each coach was going to be spending per student.

Jasmine Star 00:13:27  We were literally cataloging everything. How many people logged in in the first week? In the second week, in the third week, all we were doing was tracking the data to make sure that we understood scale and how quick we would have to expand a sales team as well as a coaching team to get people those results. So we were also focused on increasing our close rates. We knew we were going to be the pace setters. We knew we were going to have very high standards for who our closers were going to be. So we said, we're only going to ask you to do what we have already proven here again. Focus. So then we began onboarding those new students. It was exciting. It was inspiring. After months and months of hard work and recording, and I think I had mentioned another podcast that I was creating these lessons at like 4:00 in the morning. I was staying late at night. It was just a sprint in regards to knowing that this program was going to change lives, and I knew what I wanted to do with it, and I was willing to make those sacrifices.

Jasmine Star 00:14:21  And in the beginning, I kept on telling the team you guys were going to be unrolling it. Slowly. I kept on saying slowly, slowly. And that word was grating against me. Not only because I hate the word slow, it was also grating on me because it didn't feel true. I don't think we were moving slowly. I think that we could have gone so much faster, but they've taken away our focus. So instead, I made the intentional decision to say we're not moving slowly, we're going intentionally, and we're building foundationally. And every time I was like, okay, well, it feels like it's too slow. No, no, no, it feels like its intentional. Great. That felt like so much of a better word, and that it only happened on the back of really honing in on what we were focusing on and understanding. Our focus is our focus until we earn the right to focus on something else. I knew that I had nothing to prove. I mean, this is just real.

Jasmine Star 00:15:08  Like in the past, I felt like I would put out an offer and I wanted to prove something. Nobody was paying attention to me as much as I was paying attention to me. And so I felt like this is like an invisible person who was looking that I had to prove something to. And, you know, when I think about it, I had to prove something to my former self. I wanted to prove something to my family that I could be successful. I wanted to prove something to my friends that we can make it out from where we've come. I wanted to prove it to the shady business partners who I had, and I just wanted to be like, look at what happened. That served me up into a certain degree. And then all of a sudden I realized that I was drinking poison, expecting other people to have the after effects of it. This offer, I had nothing to prove. I'd already done things that I was extraordinarily proud of and that were wildly successful. This this was for the build.

Jasmine Star 00:15:53  This is for the legacy. I also knew that we were building foundation because we were testing systems. We had never built our systems with so much specificity and so much acute awareness of every moving piece to it. I look at these systems and I'm like, this is gangster. And I feel really proud and I feel like I can brag about them because the team was the one building the systems. The team was standing in their form of excellence, understanding they weren't moving slowly, they were moving with intention. We were also understanding here again, foundation and focus was how much bandwidth could each coach take? How accountable could they keep each student? And so we were watching the data for that. So we are watching time spent with the student. Our follow up, all of that was going into the systems. And that only happened because of the focused time that I had spent. So when we became really confident with our close rate and our systems, it was time to hire our first growth strategist. So here again, we had focused on the offer, focused on designated parts of it focused on building systems for each of those parts, and now we're focused on understanding who we are going to bring on the team.

Jasmine Star 00:16:59  So the first week that we had had this open, our Co began interviews for our growth strategists. These are the people who are just taking those sales and clarity calls. And during that first week of hiring I faced my very first big sexy glorious distraction. This is when I felt like my focus was being supercharged and super challenged. So I'm gonna pause here. There's a little bit of a backstory. I was invited to meet with a group of eight figure entrepreneurs in Chicago. It was a small group of us. We get together. It's like a peer led mastermind. And whenever I get to mastermind with these incredible women, I walk away. I am, I am challenged, I am inspired, I am motivated, I feel like I can just, you know, eat the world with a spoon. I am ready to dig. I'm ready. I'm on fire doing all of it. And I usually leave those events with so much to do. Like a list of things that I want to accomplish, a list of sparkly new funnels and marketing and all the different ways to doing it.

Jasmine Star 00:17:55  That has been my norm. That was who I was. And this time I would become a different person and I was a different person. Not because I was doing more, but because I was doing less. I was deeply focusing on the main thing. And so when I was flying to Chicago, I literally had my notebook and I wrote down to myself. Stay focused. Do not add more to your list of things to do. Resist the temptation to take on an idea and add it in right now, because we haven't tested and proven what the thing that we had set out to do. I in 2024, my word of the year was independent and not independent. Doing it on my own, it was independent. Doing it my own way. So I reminded myself in 2025 of what I had had to learn the year before. Do it your own way. Don't let other people cloud this right now. Hone in on what you know to be freaking true. So. because I knew that I couldn't get off track.

Jasmine Star 00:18:54  And let me tell you, I was so tempted to get off track because when you are in a room with any Porterfield and Jenna Kutcher and Bonnie, Christine and Stacey Tischler and Dylan Morehouse, let me tell you, the temptation is real because, oh, they have these beautiful funnels and they have golden strategies, and then they have these amazing foundations. And I'm just like, oh, I had to tell myself every time they asked a question. And every time they brainstorm and every time we mastermind up what these ideas can be and how they can uplevel and refine them, I'm like, resist, girl, resist. Focus is beautiful and it's real and depth and it's richness. So in my mind, I quietly repeated the things that I had written in my journal. And here are the things I wrote in my journal. You can try it later. You're collecting data. You're in a testing period. You will earn the right to implement these amazing ideas. So I just took notes. I listen carefully, I did not give myself something to do.

Jasmine Star 00:19:52  I simply said, you are going to be here. You are going to focus. You're going to earn the right to move forward after you've done this. So when it came time for my hot seat, right. This is when everybody asks a question of like, oh, what are things that I can change? Or what are things that I can do? Instead of me asking for another thing to do or something to make better? I was like, nope, no, no, no, I'm going to turn to them and I'm going to ask about something that's not related to this project that has yet to be birthed publicly. And so I am looking at these women who are fully set to answer, and I resist the temptation to ask about a business model and a business mechanism that these other women have already built. They have 13, 14, $15 million businesses that they've grown along as very similar model. And I'm like, I'm not going to ask you how you've done it. Right now. I need to focus on doing it my own way, fixing it and earning the right to ask questions when you've already been there.

Jasmine Star 00:20:45  So I need to stick to the plan. I couldn't get distracted, and I made those terms, and I agreed to the terms before I got there. And let me tell you, this was agonizing. I was like, oh, I feel like a piece of me is dying because of it. So instead, I use my hot seat to get insights on the collections of businesses that I serve on as an advisor. So I've mentioned before, back in 2023, my husband and I started a holding company. I sit as an advisor and or investors for equity inside of businesses, and I sit and I give insight and feedback on their growth strategies. This has been one of the coolest things I've ever done in my business. And so what I wanted to do is, as these women, how I want to strategically position the holding company and my time to maximize advising opportunities. The reason I asked that question is because I loved their advice and insights, but I had already set the foundations. We already had our systems.

Jasmine Star 00:21:41  We already had our operations. We know our flow. We know what we're expecting. We know the type of contracts that we want for the agreements with these founders. So getting their insights was just icing on top of a cake we had already built. I just wanted to make sure they were understanding those differences. So on the flight home, I journaled again. I said that I was really proud that I had kept my focus. I was proud that I had known that I had changed, that I was in a similar situation, and I chose a different outcome, and it confirmed that it was just a matter of time before I am pulling that lever to scale consistent 10-K. It confirmed all of those things, and I only earned the right to say those things. Because I set time for focus, I establish what focus was. I applied focus in each of those areas, and I remain focused going into something where I knew distractions were going to come. So here in closing, I'm going to share three tips for honing focus.

Jasmine Star 00:22:38  But before I do that, if you know of an entrepreneur or somebody in your life who's really trying to focus on accomplishing something, it would mean the world to me. If you sent them this podcast, tell them that you and them are going to be focusing on focusing. So the three tips to hone your focus. Number one, if you need to focus, begin by ruthlessly cutting away, ruthlessly cutting away, cutting my meetings, cutting away tasks, cutting away commitments. Number two, if you are learning how to focus, declare a season of no. I had to tell my friends. I had to tell my family. Hey, listen, I'm doing something new and I probably won't be as available for other things. Right now. My main focus is this. So that I am building a business that serves my life and gives me the freedom that I desire, not that I am forever changed to my business. And then lastly, number three, acknowledge the temptation of distraction in advance, in advance.

Jasmine Star 00:23:34  So be prepared when you're going to be walking into something where, you know, like, oh, this is going to be challenging my focus. Commit to mantras that you know to be true, that will help you stay focused and keep you understanding that while that looks better, shiny, sexier, it's also a distraction from keeping the main thing, the main thing. And as you are preparing for that temptation, you can say, I'm going to absorb this knowledge and I'm going to save it for later. Everything that I learned in Chicago to apply my business, I'm saying that's a reward. I get to pursue that. Once I set the foundations and earn my right to innovate and iterate beyond the things that I have already done right now. So if you have found this helpful, send me a DM. I want to know what are you focusing on right now? So send me a DM on Instagram. Or if you're watching on YouTube, leave it as a comment. What are you focusing on right now? I want to hold space for that.

Jasmine Star 00:24:27  I want to encourage you, and I want to tell you that the focus that I have earned the right to now is simply a doorway to earning more focus as we launch and get the consistent 10-K out to the public. I look forward to you earning the right to your focus as you step into the next level and version of your business. I want to say thank you for watching and listening to The Jasmine Star Show.