Shawn Blanc is a longtime creator, writer, and small business coach who helps creative professionals build thriving businesses without burning out. With over 20 years of experience, he’s developed practical systems for managing tasks, time, and ideas—anchored in clarity, margin, and meaningful progress. A former full-time blogger and founder of The Focus Course, Shawn now coaches entrepreneurs and creatives on how to do their best work while living a balanced, intentional life. He lives in Kansas City with his wife and three sons.
1) The concept of ‘margin’ is central to your work. Can you quickly explain how you define margin and what led you to see margin as a non-negotiable component of long-term success?
Yeah, I love this. So, as far as how we define margin, we define it as “breathing room,” and there are a lot of different areas in your life that require it. Your finances are an easy one to think of, and your schedule another—those are two pretty obvious ones.
You need breathing room with your finances. Otherwise, you’re living paycheck to paycheck (or worse, beyond your means). So, you should have financial margin in business as well as in your personal life.
It’s the same with your schedule. You need breathing room in your calendar so you are not just moving from thing to thing to thing. Especially with professionals and entrepreneurs, you see a lot of folks who literally have meetings that overlap. Like, “I’ve got three meetings at the same time,” or everything is back-to-back. There’s just no breathing room.
So, margin is breathing room. It’s the space between what we’re carrying and our overall capacity—so when you have margin, it means you’ve got a buffer built in.
Beyond finances and time, other areas where we need margin include our physical health, our emotions, and our mental space—like our willpower, so to speak. We shouldn’t be redlining in any of those areas. When everything’s maxed out, there’s no room left. You don’t have any capacity for error. You have no space for emergencies, so when something unexpected comes up, you’re suddenly overextended or beyond what you’re capable of doing—which can lead you into crisis.
But when you do have breathing room—say, financial breathing room—and something unexpected comes your way, you have the ability to handle it without it becoming a full-on emergency. It doesn’t throw everything off-kilter. The same is true with your time, your emotions, and so on.
Why do I see it as non-negotiable? A lot of it has to do with the fact that margin is health.
I think, Mike, you and I—we grew up with this old guard mindset, where if you’re busy, then you’re important, you’re cool, you’re special. That was the narrative. And for a lot of us, especially in the early days of our careers, we felt like if we were busy, that meant we were important. The busier we were, the more valuable we thought we were.
And that’s just an egocentric mindset—I’d even say there’s a slight narcissistic taint to it—that busyness equals importance. But the truth is, if you’re super busy, you have no margin. You have no space for error. And how is that healthy? How is that sustainable? Who actually wants that?
If being constantly busy is your badge of honor, then your identity is built on the wrong foundation.
So, I came to see margin as non-negotiable once I realized that this is what health looks like. This is what financial health looks like. I mean, no one says that being financially healthy means spending more than you earn. That’s terrible financial advice!
If margin is essential to health, we should prioritize it. It should be non-negotiable. That shift was a huge challenge for me—personally and professionally—to say, “We are going to prioritize breathing room in this business. We will not go pedal to the metal at all times.”
Now, here’s the thing—I know in business, there’s a lot of value placed on speed and agility, and that’s true. But it’s not true for everything. Speed in the right direction? Absolutely. But in order to do that, everything else shouldn’t be weighing you down.
My point is that you can only prioritize margin in your business if you also know what actually works to grow your business. Clarity lets you prioritize. Once you’ve identified what matters most, everything else can fall into place and serve that one essential goal.
Then, you can pursue it at a healthy, sustainable pace—with as much energy and speed as possible—without burning yourself out. Because once you solve that problem, there will be another problem, and then another. So, you’ve got to think long-term with this stuff.
2) Acknowledging that creating margin takes work, what initial advice do you give to someone interested in creating margin when it is clear that their life is stretched thin?
We work with a lot of folks who are in crisis mode, and there are really two ways to restore margin. Suppose margin for you is the breathing room between what you’re responsible for and what your total capacity is. Then, to increase margin, you either increase your overall capacity—what you’re capable of doing—or you reduce what you’re responsible for. Or, ideally, you do both.
So, for a lot of folks, especially busy entrepreneurs who come to me in crisis, the first step is to pause. Take some time. Maybe it’s an hour, maybe it’s half a day, maybe it’s two full days—whatever you can manage. You pause for a minute and start asking some upstream questions about what actually matters most.
Usually, people in crisis mode are dealing with everything at once. There are a lot of fires, and they’re spending tons of time on busywork and doing a hundred different things to try to grow their business. And the truth is, they don’t know which of those hundred things actually work. So they keep all of them going, just in case. There’s so much happening, but no visibility into what’s effective or aligned with their goals—because half the time, they’re not even sure what the actual goals are.
So, being able to pause and take a step back to answer some of those upstream questions: What matters most in the business? What matters most in your schedule? What are you trying to prioritize or optimize for? What do you even want? What are your core values?
That’s a big part of it. When you get clear on that, then you can look at everything you’re doing—all the chaos, all the fires—and say, “If this isn’t serving what matters most, it has to go.” You either delegate it, stop doing it altogether, or find a simpler way to get it done. Maybe you stop trying to optimize it and instead do the minimum required. That kind of clarity helps you decide what to prioritize, and then you start subtracting the rest.
So, for people who want to create margin, that’s a great place to begin.
One cheat code? Literally, just schedule a day off that you wouldn’t normally take. Mark your calendar: “I’m out next Thursday.” And then actually take that day off. Don’t do anything. Sleep in, go to lunch with a friend, or give yourself a beat to reset.
Because sometimes, you’re so maxed out—your nervous system, your brain, everything is on such high alert—you’re anxious and overwhelmed, thinking, “I can’t even tell what matters right now.” And that’s real, so even just taking a break can help prove to yourself that you can take a break. You return the next day and realize, “Hey, the office is still standing. I’m not as essential as I thought I was.” And that’s a good thing.
So sometimes the cheat code is just stepping away for a minute—then coming back to ask, “Okay, what actually matters most?”
And listen, some people may not want a life with margin. Or their version of it looks totally different. That’s fine. Everyone gets to choose how they spend their time.
But for me personally, I don’t want a career that wrecks my marriage—or my second, or my third. I don’t want that. I want to feel good during the day. I want to sleep well. I want slow mornings. Those are choices I’m making for my life.
So I prioritize margin not only to protect those things but also because, for the kind of career I’m trying to build, I want that type of breathing room. I want the downtime to think, to plan, and to build the business and the life I’m hoping for. That space lets me solve interesting problems, connect the dots, and create meaningful things. It keeps me from being buried under distractions, notifications, meetings, and noise.
More huge reasons why margin matters.
3) In my experience working with individuals on balance, a significant starting problem is busyness is conflated with success. How do you help individuals break that mindset and instead focus on constrained yet meaningful productivity?
The shift from seeing busyness as a proxy for productivity, to seeing meaning as the proxy—that’s the key. And again, it comes back to answering those upstream questions about what actually matters most.
A lot of the time, when people are busy, it’s because they lack clarity. Busyness is a symptom. It’s a byproduct of ambiguity. So the solution is getting clear.
When you’re clear on what the goal is—or what’s required to accomplish the goal—or what your values are, or what your desired outcomes look like—that clarity helps cut through the busywork. It gives you the space to say, “Okay, this is what matters. I’m going to prioritize that and say no to everything else.”
There’s also another layer I’ve seen, both in myself and in the people I work with. It’s around work ethic. A lot of us have internalized beliefs like: “I’d never ask my team to do something I wouldn’t do myself.” Or, “If I’m the leader, I have to be the first one in and the last one out.” But that doesn’t scale.
You can’t be the very first person in the building and the last one out every day. That’s a 20-hour workday. It’s not sustainable. So, you have to find a different metric for what success looks like as a leader and a different metric for your own self-worth, both as a contributor and a leader.
You have to decouple your value from the number of hours you work. That can’t be the metric anymore.
And the best managers already get this. If you’ve ever worked for someone who micromanages your hours—asking how long you worked rather than what you accomplished—that’s not great leadership. The best managers say, “Here’s the result I’m looking for,” and they don’t care whether it takes 30 minutes or 30 hours. What matters is the output, not the time clock.
And we need to do that for ourselves, too.
So, clarity about what matters most—paired with a healthy view of your self-worth and your personal measurements for productivity—that’s what helps you focus on whether you’re actually making progress toward the goals you’re trying to achieve. Not just, “How much time did I spend on it?” And doing that work is hard to do. It’s very difficult. I think a lot of us have some broken work habits around that, and they take time to untangle.
4) You and I advocate the advantages of celebrating progress. In The Fun Habit, I quote BJ Fogg as saying, “In my research, I’ve found that adults have many ways to tell themselves, ‘I did a bad job,’ and very few ways of saying, ‘I did a good job.'” In the spirit of Fogg’s assertion, how do you advise folks to celebrate their progress in a way that feels authentic and fulfilling?
I’m a big fan of this simple prompt at the end of the day: “Today was a good day because…” Or even just, “Here’s what I did today…” And then literally listing out the things you did: “I woke up at this time, I spent the first hour doing this, I made progress on that project, I sent this email.” Recognize your progress!
Shawn Achor talks about this in The Happiness Advantage and Teresa Amabile in The Progress Principle—both dig into the science behind it. So much research shows the value of simply noticing what you did. You don’t even have to spin it into something positive or feel-good. Just noticing it is enough. And if you pair that with a little bit of gratitude, it goes a really long way.
So yeah, I’m a big fan of that. I use a journal app on my phone, and I’ll jot those things down at the end of the day.
I do wish I was better about celebrating milestones. I tend to have this big, hairy, audacious goal that’s six months out, and then I focus on what I’m doing every day to get there. But I don’t really have much in between. It would help to set some milestone markers—like one at three months, or six weeks in, something to aim for along the way. But right now, I don’t really do that.
5) If there’s one change you could inspire in how people approach productivity and focus, what would it be and why?
Clarity. It would be around clarity.
Just being able to answer: What matters most? Because all productivity stems from that. Once you know what matters most, you then have to answer the next question: What will I do about it?
For me, that’s productivity in a nutshell—What matters most? What am I going to do about it?
A lot of productivity advice focuses on tactics, tools, tricks, or efficiencies—which are great—but those are all downstream from knowing what actually matters most.
