A few weeks ago, when I asked people on Instagram what to record a podcast episode about next, three people asked me to share about my time management journey. So, here goes!
In addition, a heads up that:
- My Jan-Mar 2025 program is the last time I plan to run it in a “cohort” format (i.e., you go through it with the same women for eight weeks) as I’m going to have it open more often on a rolling basis to allow people to jump in when it works for them between September and April each year.
- Enrollment for the Jan-Mar 2025 Bright Method program opens this Friday, November 1 at 10am CT. You can jump on the waitlist & add it to your calendar here.
Thanks for being here!
Below is a transcript of the episode. Enjoy!
Other links you might enjoy:
✨ The full Bright Method™️ program: If you’re ready for a full time management system that’s realistic, sustainable, and dare I say… fun, check out the Bright Method program. It’s helped hundreds of professional women take back control of their time—and their peace of mind.
🌿 Free 3-Day Time Management Program: Get three short, practical video lessons packed with realistic strategies to help you manage your personal and professional life with more clarity and calm.
📱 Follow me on Instagram: Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women—like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time.
Full Transcript:
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Hey, hey, and welcome back! All right, so today we’re gonna do something a little bit different, and I am gonna talk about my own time management journey. And the reason I’m doing that is a couple weeks ago you might remember I had a couple curveball weeks, kind of ten days of just kind of chaos in my life, and at the other end of that, I was needing to record a podcast episode, coming up blank, asked people on Instagram what I should record an episode about, and actually three people asked me to talk about my own time management journey. So I’m gonna do that today. If you’re not interested, totally get it. Feel free to skip along. But if you are interested, that’s what we’re gonna dig into today.
Now, just to be really clear, I don’t remember it perfectly because it happened over many years and many phases of my life, and I didn’t always realize what I was doing or the implication of certain experiences and how it would shape my path going forward. But I’m gonna do my best to tell it to you succinctly and logically.
Kelly’s Background – 1:26
So a very brief, deeper background is I’m the oldest of three girls, which gives you maybe some insight into my personality. I know that eldest daughter thing is all the rage. [Laughs] And I also moved a lot. I was born in Minnesota, and then we moved to Dallas, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Mexico, back to Dallas, London, and Minneapolis. And so, I did all of that from five years old to fifteen years old and then lived in Minnesota for most of high school, like sophomore year onward.
And so, while I have this maybe oldest daughter thing, I also moved a lot, and I really enjoyed it, just to be really clear. It was not a traumatic thing. I loved it. It got harder as I got older, but I liked it. And I also was not very good, and still I’m not very good at organizing physical things, like my room and the kitchen and anywhere I am. I can tend to become a disaster pretty quickly.
And so, I think that between my natural tendencies of being a bit of a tornado through spaces and then also my life involving a lot of change even though it’s awesome change, I think I enjoyed a little bit organizing what I could in probably a paper planner-type thing, and organizing information, I loved school too, things like that. So I think that I always had maybe an interest in organizing that because that was an area that I felt like I kind of could exert I guess kind of control over my little world and in a way that I couldn’t with physical things.
I Started With Paper Planners – 2:57
So, for most of my childhood, I loved paper planners. I was always pretty into paper planners. All the way through college I was using paper planners and even into law school. In college, I remember really relying on paper planners. I probably still have mine somewhere from college, but I remember starting to see the cracks in it a little bit then. The biggest way I remember that still sticks with me, and some of these stories, by the way, if you’ve hung out with me for a while, you’re gonna have heard them before. So apologies for the redundancy. They’re just part of my journey. I think it was my junior or senior year, I had scheduled to grab lunch with the oldest, most tenured female faculty member at Dartmouth, which is where I went to school. We’d scheduled it for lunch. I had a class beforehand, and I remember just being really tired, and I just went home after class and took a nap. And this quite elderly woman with her cane walked across campus to, I think Murphy’s (which is where we were having lunch) and waited for me, and I no-showed her, and it still sticks with me. I still remember waking up from that nap and being like, “No!” I remembered, as soon as I woke up from the nap, that I had totally no-showed this professor. And it was just awful, and it just was a really great moment of, “Huh.” Planners only work as well as they help us do the things we planned. Not just do the planning but actually live out the plans that we wanted.
That said, at that time that was probably ‘06, ‘07. I’m sure Google Calendar was there. I was not using it. It didn’t even occur to me to start having phone alerts, necessarily, help me do these things. And it didn’t happen very often. But obviously when it did, it could be pretty big. So that just is a memory that stuck with me that I don’t remember taking any action based off of it. But I just remember kind of being haunted by it and still.
After college and before law school, I worked in Colorado in a mountain town, and I worked for the Aspen Institute, and I waited tables. The Institute was the first place I remember being pushed into Outlook for work and struggling to use a paper planner because so much of my work was happening in Outlook Calendar and just how we would communicate certain things and set meetings and all of that was happening in the calendar, and things were moving them there, that it made it feel pretty quickly just inefficient to be using a paper planer. Again, I don’t remember taking a whole lot of action other than kind of leaning into Outlook and letting go of a paper planner for a while, but that was just about a year and change of work, and then when I went back to law school, I very much learned back into the paper planner world because it had served me most of my life into getting me where I was.
I do recall Google Calendar being more on the scene then. That was, like, ‘08, ‘09. I remember G-Mail and G-Chat and all that kind of stuff, but I still don’t think I was leaning too hard into Google Calendar at that point. I didn’t really use it very much. All that being said, I do still remember feeling relatively on top of it in law school. I was using my paper planner, feeling pretty good. It was still serving me really well. Life felt great. For the most part, it felt like I could manage everything from there. I don’t even have very strong memories of managing it because it was just so natural to me at that point of managing my life in that paper planner. That quickly shifted when I actually started practicing law.
I Started Using Outlook When I Started Practicing Law – 6:37
Looking back, I mean, as I’m saying this it’s realizing that in the same way that the Institute had pushed me to Outlook, obviously practicing law also pushed me into Outlook. It kind of made the tool that had gotten me pretty far (that paper planner) inefficient and not useful anymore, which was hard because that was the main system I had used, a paper planner. It really wasn’t — I couldn’t figure out a way. I know there are attorneys listening to this who have figured out a way to do it. I could not figure out a way to make a paper planner work for me when so much was happening in Outlook. It just felt like enough was in there and enough would move a little bit that putting it all in a paper planner felt inefficient, felt like wasted time in that all the information was in my calendar already online. And so, to be writing it down on paper just wasn’t helping me do the actual work. I felt like I should be using my time better in that way. And also then things would shift, so just even the point of putting it on paper was kind of undermined in that way.
That was when I really felt overwhelmed. I think it was a combination of, as I said, the tool that I used to rely on being somewhat made redundant, and then also juggling multiple cases for many different partners so that no one other than me understood (and even I didn’t understand) my overall workload. I didn’t understand how all the deadlines on all the different cases interacted with each other and just in general, even managing smaller projects within cases or outside of cases, like non-billable-type projects. Senior associates would hand off non-billable projects to me. There were a lot of moving pieces that no one other than me had oversight on, and that was just a whole different dynamic. I didn’t have, again, a great way to manage that, and then suddenly I had a lot of bosses, and no one knew what was going on.
That said, I didn’t fully appreciate that no one knew what was going on other than me. I kind of kept thinking, “Man, I’m feeling underwater. But if I couldn’t do everything they’re asking me to do, then they wouldn’t ask me to do it.” Where in reality now I understand, and later I understood this too, that that’s not true. People are gonna ask you just to make their own life easier in a very understandable way, in the way that we all do. They’re going to ask more and more of you, and they don’t know what’s on your plate. Even if you only have one boss. They don’t know everything they’ve given to you and how it stacks up and all that. But at that time, I did not understand that. I didn’t appreciate that. I kind of was like — you know, I’d been a student forever and people had managed my workload for me in a sense, and so, to be in an environment where no one was managing my workload, I still kind of assumed someone was. [Laughs] And it took me a while to be like, “Oh, no? Okay. This is up to me now.”
So that was a big thing that I remember feeling. Also, I remember enjoying my work but wishing I could do less of it and also wishing that it just didn’t dominate my brain in the way that it did. I have a vivid memory of being out, it was Met Bar at the time, in Boston on Newbury — I think it’s something else now — being with a friend in the basement area of the bar and listening to her and being super into her story, and then it was like a work thought came in, and suddenly I remember being like, “Pretend you’re still listening. Act like you’re listening.” But my brain was gone. It was thinking about work. It was stressed out about work. “Did I do that thing?” I can’t even remember the work thing it was, but I just remember this moment of just act like you’re being there but your brain’s over there, and that memory, it happened enough, and it was so representative of how I felt that I just remember being like, “This cannot be the way adulthood is supposed to feel! I just reject that this is how it’s supposed to be.”
And so, I started trying to figure it out. Nothing really worked, and candidly, I didn’t have a ton of time to dig into a ton of different resources, but I remember people throwing things out like, “Just batch!” or even like, “Plan!” or “Leave work at work and do home stuff at home,” and just all these things that I can’t remember all the little things now, but they sounded so simple. We were like, “Yeah, okay, that makes sense.” And then I would try and go do it and live it out, and I wouldn’t be able to, and I felt even worse about myself. It was just such a strange time because kind of looking back beyond this time, I had been relatively organized, again, not on the things front, lots of change in my life in a good way, but I had been pretty organized. I was somewhat on top of it in life for most of my life. So to be, what, 24-ish, I guess — I don’t remember how old I was — practicing law, it was a very new feeling to feel like, “There are a lot of moving pieces. I don’t have a great system to manage this. The system that I used to use and rely on so heavily to the point that I don’t even remember using it all that well, it was so natural to me at that point, so part of how I manage things, that doesn’t work anymore, and as a result, I can’t even focus on my friends in the very limited time that I’m with friends.” And I remember just being like, “What is going on?” and looking for help but also having very little time to find that help, and then when I did it just didn’t feel like it was clicking.
So this is a story I’ve shared many times before, but basically, there was a day in my Boston law office, and I remember it. I had this great little office on a pretty quiet floor. I had rows of legal pads, one for each case. So there were constantly — I should say one for each of the big matters I was on. So it was, like, three to five legal pads that I would write all these to-do lists out on for every case, and I would carry them to all my meetings about those matters. And I was sitting there with those. I had Post-It Notes all over my office kind of like a swamp by my phone where I would jot down notes as phone calls came in. I would have Post-It Notes stuck all over. I used to write things on my hand all the time to not forget to do those things. And then you’re in your email inbox, which is a whole other to-do list that has been created for you by other people, which is not my saying. But such a great saying is that our email inboxes are to-do lists created for you by other people.
And I was emailing this guy, it was opposing counsel, and I needed to hear back at a certain period of time. I think we needed to move for an extension. We needed to move by that day. I needed to hear back from him, and I needed to follow up with him if I didn’t hear back from him by a certain period of time. I needed to give him a call. So I remember thinking, “I am going to send him this email and completely forget to follow up with him later,” because I could look around my desk and see all the other things I needed to do. And I still don’t know what made me do it, but at that point I was BCC-ing myself and then filing all the emails, and I was BCC-ing myself at that point on any email I sent for work because then I didn’t have to go through my “sent” emails. I just had everything come into my email inbox, and I could sort it into the folders from there.
So I took the BCC-ed email I’d sent him and then in Outlook if you are on at least the desktop app, if you take an email in your inbox and drag it to that little calendar icon in the bottom left corner that you would click on to go to your calendar, if you drag it and let it go on that, it creates a calendar event. I retitled it, “If no word, follow up with this guy,” and I saved it for, let’s say, two hours later, if we needed to move within, like, three hours. And it was just this weird moment of, “Oh! I don’t have to rely on my brain? My system will tell me when to do it? I can really immerse myself in everything else I need to do and not rely on my brain on being that alarm clock.”
And that is really what got me interested in, “Let me use this tool that could bring together the tasks, the reminders, all the things I need to do with my time into one place so that it alerts me to do the things, I can see how they interact. I could look at my calendar and see, “Okay, in two hours when I need to email this guy, I’ll be at my desk because I’m not gonna be in a meeting, and I can do that then.” If I couldn’t, I could have dragged it up before a meeting to do it earlier. You can start seeing how all these things interact in a calendar, and that was the first time that I felt there was something in me that was like, “Yep, this is how this could work for me,” because it’s a nice balance of flexibility and getting mental load out of your head and just seeing it visually, seeing how it comes together, and again, having that calendar, whether it’s your computer or a phone tap you on the shoulder when you need to do it. Which, if you remember my story from standing up that professor in college, that was a pain point for me. Even in the system I had loved in a paper planner, that was something I had not solved on how to get my planner to actually help me follow through on the plans that I wanted to do. In this system, using Outlook in this way at work was a really great click moment for me, of, “Okay, if we build on this, there’s some potential here. I can see this working for me in my life in a realistic way.”
And so, I started doing that. I started doing that at work a lot. I leaned in very heavily on that system at work. I started using it. Also, another benefit I saw pretty quickly was just the upped communication that we could have. Obviously, we had been, you know, within my teams at work, sharing deadlines and things like that on Outlook Calendar and that kind of stuff, but I really upped it by putting in internal deadlines. So I would say, “I’m gonna get you this draft brief on this day, and I need to response on this day,” and I would calendar those dates as full-day events, and I would write, “Kelly to get (let’s call her) Jane (the partner I used to work for a lot) this thing,” and at the very front I would write, “INTERNAL DEADLINE,” and then I would list out what I was doing. So there would be a full-day event — I didn’t explain this very well. I would do, “ABC case: INTERNAL DEADLINE – Kelly to get Jane draft brief.” And then a couple days later, “ABC case: INTERNAL DEADLINE – Jane to get Kelly revisions to the brief,” things like that, so that it really started upping our communication, not just on deadlines, but on the actual flow of how are we gonna meet that deadline, like the game plan to do it.
I would also say that around this time I started really also getting comfortable with my rhythm of still using paper to write notes, to do meeting notes, to write to-do lists, things like that, and then using this system to actually bring those plans to life. So that was a really great thing that I don’t think I thought about intentionally, but when I started relying on my digital calendar, I didn’t feel this pressure to suddenly go fully digital on everything. I don’t write notes anymore. I don’t write to-do lists anymore. It was more like let me get it all out of my head in a paper and pen format because that’s how my brain processes, and then I would bridge into my calendar. So I started building those types of things into the system as well. But just to clarify, it really was happening all at work.
Calendaring Conflicts Between my Work Life and Personal Life – 18:10
I did start using it in my personal life to the extent that work typically conflicted with personal life. So I did start using it with pickups and drop offs for dry cleaning. I have a very vivid memory of sitting in a law office of a male partner I worked for, and I’ve shared this before, you might have heard me, but he was giving me some crap about my sweater that I was wearing being dirty. I remember it having some sort of stain on the arm. It wasn’t big, but it was there, and it was noticeable. And I remember him being like, “Is your sweater dirty?” And I just flushed, first of all. I was so embarrassed in the moment, and he was joking. It was all in good humor. But as I started to explain something, I think I was gonna try to throw it back at him like, “I’ve been working really late nights because of all this stuff that we are trying to do. I haven’t been able to make it to the dry cleaners.” It was a weird moment of, “You would not even understand what I’m talking about,” because he was married. His wife did not work outside the house. She, I’m sure, had a much more difficult life managing their three kids and all this kind of stuff, but in the moment I was like, “You have no idea why I wouldn’t have dry cleaned clothes at home because you don’t have to manage that. My guess is you haven’t done dry cleaning, laundry, or pick up in years.”
And that’s also what started clicking here of, man, a lot of the things I had tried, and a lot of the time management and productivity advice out there at the time, this was like 2010-ish maybe — no, 2013-ish, 14-ish actually. A lot of the time management advice out there was by white men who, likely, had similar support at home, and it is kind of rich now when I look around. I know men can juggle a lot too and things like that, but I think that especially when kids enter the picture, it’s almost humorous to get time management advice from men when they have a lot of luxury to focus and have a lot more freedom than a lot of women do. And I should say that it shouldn’t be that way, obviously. I think you know me well enough to know that I’m not defending that. But it’s often the case that they have a lot more freedom to focus because women are carrying a lot of that mental load, primary caregivers, all that kind of stuff.
And so, somebody else said this. I think it was Bailey Walden of Busy Mom Finds Time on Instagram. She said, “All these men who share time management advice, I’m really interested in hearing how their wives do it,” and I thought that was a really clever way to look at this because it’s true, and at the time, that was that lightbulb moment for me in that law office of this guy is not gonna have any idea why I haven’t been able to get to the dry cleaners, and that might explain why some of the time management advice I had tried in the past wasn’t addressing my issues because that whole work when you’re at work and be present when you’re at home is great if you don’t have to do a lot of the mental load, small life, the personal logistics that require business hours, that you can’t do that when you’re at home. If you think you can do that, someone else is probably doing that work for you. And so, that was a big lightbulb moment for me and a big reason why I continue to enjoy working with women and supporting women because I think that has been a real gap in this advice up until recent years of how do you be a working woman and manage the personal life and the professional life from the context and vantage point of someone who is also doing those things.
So in addition to that lightbulb moment, things like that, like starting to really get more intentional and aware of the conflicts between my work life and my personal life had me start calendaring, I believe in my Outlook account, some of that personal stuff that I needed to do like, “Hey, leave at this time today so you can pick up the dry cleaning on the way home.” Things like that were really useful to start plotting out in my work calendar so that work me at 2:00 pm could see that coming up at 5:00, 5:30 and be able to leave in time and manage work in a way that would allow me to leave at that time.
Shared Calendar with my Now Husband – 22:30
So I did start kind of unloading some of the mental load personal life stuff in, but I don’t think that that really took off until I met my now husband. So I met my now husband. He took off years before — more years than I did. So we were the same year from college. We didn’t know each other, but we graduated the same year from college. He took off four years before med school. So when we met, I was already out. I was practicing three years by then in law, and he was in his third year of medical school. So he was in that period where they’re in rotations and things like that, and pretty quickly we got serious and also I’m sure he got sick of me being like, “When are you working again? When are you working again?” and trying to figure that out. And because of that, I’m pretty sure it was actually him that was the one that was like, “Let’s actually have a shared calendar.”
And so, he created a shared calendar for us that I’m pretty sure it was his idea, and it kind of blew my mind where I was like, “Oh, this is cool!” And we started sharing just his work schedule for the most part and then also any travel that was — you know, that’s the period of life where you have weddings every weekend. And so, we started sharing travel and weddings and things like that in addition to his shifts, and that kind of pushed me. While I think I had been using my Google Calendar a little bit at that point, like a tiny, tiny, tiny bit, that pushed me into referencing Google Calendar on a daily basis. And then wanting to see that next to my Outlook so that I could see how they interacted in that way as well.
And because I was starting to use Google Calendar more on a day-to-day basis, that really started affecting how I managed the home stuff. Because then suddenly there was more home stuff to manage, or it felt like, I don’t know, maybe I couldn’t get away from it. I couldn’t run away from it in the way that I had when I was single. And so, I started using the calendar more in my personal life as well. Before, I think it had been mostly dominant at work because my life had been mostly about work at that point. And so, this is when I started really kind of getting into Google Calendar in a separate place that wasn’t Outlook and leaning into it on that front.
The Evolution of My Time Management From There – 24:44
And from there, the evolution relates less to the tools I was using and more to just phases of life, I think, and life happening. So from there, we moved to California. We got a dog. Having a dog and having to caretake something, you know, like someone in your life, adds a lot to the plate, and people are always quick to be like, “A dog is not a kid,” and I get it, but it’s a lot too. I have a lot of respect for — I completely get that having a dog or any pet that you care a lot about is a lot of caretaking, and there’s a lot that goes into that. And so, I remember relying on my calendar to start making all of that associative, logistical care for her visible in the calendar and just life things. I remember planning a wedding, and there are a lot of logistical to-dos that come with that, so that started getting added into the calendar. I left law and started my own business. I got pregnant with a kid. We had another kid.
There just are all these life shifts that happen, and even if you’ve experienced different shifts than those, I think we all get that as we are adults and life gets more complicated, especially in our personal life, you need to get more and more out of your head and actually use a system to help you manage it all. There’s just too much to manage all in our heads, and for me that tipping point happened far earlier than it does for a lot of people, and I’ll just say that I like to think that I was an early bloomer in this department. All it took for me was having my first — I’d worked a lot since I was about 14 or 15. I’ve had a lot of jobs but not as many office jobs. And it took my first real big, adult office job to push me into this territory.
But whatever it is, at a certain point there’s a tipping point, and whether it’s a new promotion and how that balances with the rest of your life or things like that, something happens. A kid, another kid, a new job, moving, whatever it is that can tip us into that, “Yeah, I need a new system,” place. Or you might not even realize you need a new system and it’s just like, “This doesn’t feel like it used to feel like,” and I would just recommend that it’s nothing to do with you. You just need a new system that can keep up with your life.
So that’s really it! It’s nothing big and fancy. I will say what’s tricky about it is that it was a slow-build evolution. And so, that’s something I’m constantly balancing with trying to get people up and running with this system is that it’s a lot to take on even in an eight-week period. It’s a lot to take on, and I got the benefit of building it slowly over time and really molding it to myself and my life, and it can be a lot to just be like, “Okay, this is what we’re doing. Here it is,” in eight weeks, and so, I’m always mindful of that and trying to balance that it can be overwhelming in and of itself to have a whole system laid out in front of you but just because it can feel like a lot, it’s still worth playing through because of the benefits on the other side.
And I’ll also note that it’s gonna keep evolving. As my kids get older and get involved in more activities and have their own things, as my parents get older, as my relationship and my friendships morph, as I have more time and energy for those things, as my own business evolves, I mean, all of it requires changing and adapting, and I really enjoy adapting a system and figuring out, “Okay, this isn’t working anymore. How do I shift so that the system now can meet me where I would like to be?” And that’s really fun. That’s really fun for me. It’s a maybe quieter but deeper fun than bopping around between shiny new apps and planners and things like that, which I totally get. I very much am tempted to do those things too. But I’ve really enjoyed taking this one system and continuing to mold it and morph it to my own life. It’s a very fulfilling and effective way to go about this and nerdily fun too. So that’s been fun, and I look forward to seeing how it’ll continue to evolve with me as well!
Join The Bright Method Program – 28:49
Okay! And then turning to your own time management journey, if you would like The Bright Method to be part of your next chapter of your time management journey, just know that enrollment for my next program that runs from January through March of 2025, which is gonna take me a while to get used to saying, opens this Friday, November 1st at 10:00 am Central. Just know that I am, after this program, going to be shifting a bit the format of how I teach. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I’m gonna be moving it away — it’ll still be the same videos, same content, all of that, but shifting it away from running it just twice a year in a group program and more having enrollment available more of the year, not all of the year, but more of the year, so that people can more jump in when it works for them. I don’t want to make people wait for when it works best for me as much.
And so, I’m going to be opening enrollment more on a rolling basis. Again, same method, same video lessons. there are gonna be calls. There’s still email support. There’s still gonna be the community dynamic of it. It will just be a little bit less relegated to certain times of year. So it’ll be a really fun new shift that I’m excited to allow people to learn The Bright Method when it works best for them. But if you really like the idea of going through the program with the same group of women the whole time, this will likely be the last time I run the program like that, so be sure to jump in if you are interested!
But I’m really excited to offer it for going forward, as I said, at times when people really want it and when it works for them and not telling them they have to wait six months or eight months to jump in. So it’ll be a fun next chapter in The Bright Method journey. And regardless of whether you jump in or not, thank you for being here. Thanks for listening to my kind of meandering, not super specific but hopefully somewhat interesting time management journey, and here’s to the next chapters for all of us as this continues to evolve!
All right, I’ll see you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
