Hi there! Hopefully this is the last episode with bad sound quality. (Reminder: I’m in a rental and had to switch up my sound set-up in the move – and apparently did not do well). I tried to fix it once I realized it (we’ll see how I did next episode), but I’d already recorded this one.
Today, we’ll talk three sets of summer tips:
- First, around workload in the summer and intentional slowing down where you want to;
- Second, around summer travel; and
- Third, for working parents, some tips around logistics.
For more resources on these topics, check out:
- Article: A Step-By-Step System for Checking Out of Work to Take a Vacation
- Instagram post re 11 practical tips you can do now to make Future You’s trip more enjoyable
- Article: For Working Parents: Things to Calendar Now to Make the Summer Transition Smoother
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To learn more about and join the waitlist for the Bright Method 8-week program, click here: https://kellynolan.com/the-bright-method-time-management-course-with-kelly-nolan.
Full Transcript
Ep 58. The Summer Episode
[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 to what I’m going to think of as The Summer Episode. [Laughs] What this is is now we are all fully in summer mode. Whether you have kids or not, June just feels like summer. If you do have kids, most schools are out by now. And so, it really is like all of us settling into summer mode.
So today I want to talk about three (obviously related because of summer but otherwise somewhat different) points. The first two are for anyone, and then the last one is if you’re a working parent of school-aged kids. So your kids aren’t in daycare anymore, you get more of that school-year thing so you’re in that very new rhythm mode in summer because kids are in camps or with a nanny or things like that, but it’s different than the school year. So the first two points go for anybody. If you don’t have kids and you want to skip the last point, go for it. I am gonna do a little bit of housekeeping on the front end of that so that for those without kids who want to jump after the first two points, go for it.
The Bright Method Program Fall Enrollment – 1:27
What I wanted to just point out before is that my fall program opens up for enrollment on August 1st, and it kicks off on September 26th and runs through mid-November wrapping up right before Thanksgiving, so you’ll go into the holidays with a lot more clarity and a clear system to get you through the holidays and then kick off the next year in a great spot. I bring it up now because you can join the waitlist and learn a lot more about it before enrollment opens if you’d like to so you’re ready to rock on August first. Because spots are limited, I have no idea how quickly they’ll go, but if you want to consider it and maybe sign up to make sure you get one of those limited spots, you might want to check it out beforehand. It’s at www.kellynolan.com/bright.
The other reason I want to bring it up is I do have people get reimbursed for going through the program from their employer, whether it’s in full or in part, and if you want to explore that, if you go to that website I just mentioned, www.kellynolan.com/bright, there is a link to a PDF that you can give to your employer. And this year what I did is I also broke it out for — there are specific PDFs for people in corporate, people in the legal profession, people in the medical profession, and then there’s still that general one that anyone can use. So I just wanted to flag that because sometimes we get those wheels turning a little bit before you need the actual finances behind it. And so, I just wanted to raise that for you now, and that’s the end of the housekeeping. So let’s turn to the fun summer stuff and dig into that.
#1: Intentionally Reduce Your Workload For Summer – 2:56
So the first point, easier said than done, is around workload, and I just want to raise it because, at least when I was practicing, obviously summer hit and I didn’t always get the ease of summer, but I did feel like, on the whole, a lot of times summer is a period that things slow down a little bit, even by virtue of people. Even if you don’t have kids, other people have kids. Kids are at home. People have a little bit less time than they normally do, and the motivation is also lessened by you want to go out and enjoy the beautiful weather and do fun stuff. Even if I didn’t pick up on it as the summer progressed, necessarily, I always felt it on the other end when there was that fall ramp up where everyone’s focused again and getting back into it. I was like, “Oh, yeah, that summer was lighter. I wish I had really kind of soaked that in a little bit more.”
And so, on the front end of the summer, I just want to throw out there: do you anticipate the summer being a little bit slower just from the seasonality of it, and is there anything that you want to do in light of that? And what I mean by that is if we’re going to slow down, whether we intentionally do it or not, and our industry slows down, is there part of your work that you would like to intentionally slow down just for the summer knowing that you’ll bring it back in the fall? You don’t even have to definitively decide this right now, but it’s worth just thinking about, “If I could have my realistically-ideal summer, what parts of my work would chill out a little bit?” You might not be able to get that, but it’s worth thinking about because you might be able to get part of it.
So for me, I’m just gonna give an example, and I know that my examples now are very different because I run my own business, but I still think examples help. For me, I love this podcast. I’m really glad I started it. I’ve done it now for over a year, which just blows my mind. It still feels like a new thing in my business, and it has been a year, which is super cool. For summer though, when time feels just weirder — I’m not even sure it feels tighter, but I guess I’m more of a creature of habit than I realize, even though every week looks different in my life, but lack of losing our school cadence — at the very least we have a school rhythm if the kids are healthy enough to go — losing that can throw me for a loop. And so, when I’m thinking about all the things I’m trying to juggle and some projects I would like to do over the summer, I was just ideally daydreaming about what would my ideal summer look like, and while I love the podcast, it does take up a fair amount of time each week of limited time to do work in my business.
And I was like it’s not that I want to give it up entirely for the summer. (I know some people do that, and that’s awesome.) But I do want to keep it going through the summer, but could I do it every other week? And I think I would do it, as long as it works for the teams that I work with to produce the podcast. I’d really like to do that. So that’s an example of something I’m exploring right now is just shifting, even for just June and July, going to every other week. That cuts down on half the workload that the podcast would be, and that’s something that could really give me some breathing space both so that I could do other things in my business but also potentially so I could just work less in general and get to enjoy the summer with my kids and the beautiful weather. This is why you live in Minnesota is Minnesota summers are just spectacular, and I want to be able to enjoy it. So that’s kind of partly where I’m thinking about going.
There are other parts of my business I’ve decided to keep. I’m gonna keep doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that I normally do, but this podcast is an area that would be a relatively low-risk thing to cut back on a little bit that would free up a lot of my time, and then I’ll plan out when I will bring it back at the normal weekly cadence.
For you, I’m just trying to think of when you have maybe less autonomy over your work entirely, are there some projects you want to look at now where you’re like, “This project really isn’t serving the top priority or there’s a lack of urgency that needs it to happen over the summer,” would you want to have some conversations about just really kind of putting something to sleep for a little bit over the summer and picking it back up in August or September or whenever it might be? Maybe not August. August tends to be the hardest one because a lot of people don’t have childcare so even if you don’t have kids it’s hard to get traction with people, so maybe you can just put it to bed until September or October knowing that a lot will be put to bed until September.
There might be committees that you’re on, boards that you’re on that you could have similar conversations where it’s like, “You know what? Let’s just intentionally give ourselves some breathing space in June or July or August and bring it back in the fall. Now, you do have to plan for that and know that if you do something like this, a lot might stack up in the fall. So you have to be always mindful of that, but I really think there’s some value in proactively just hitting pause on some things for the summer and looking over work, whether they’re small things or big things, small elements of what you do to being on a whole committee in your organization and just being like, “We’re not gonna do this for a couple of months. We’re gonna take a couple months off, then we’ll bring it back,” could be really powerful and get you more breathing space in an intentional way instead of just kind of like inadvertently dropping balls throughout the summer.
#2: Summer Travel – 8:20
The second point of this is travel. Now, some people travel a lot in the summer. Some people don’t. I personally tend to — and this is something I’m still trying to figure out is childcare in the summer. I now have realized there’s this no man’s land of childcare in the beginning of the summer, right when school lets out for a couple weeks, and then also at the end of the summer. A lot of the camps go away, and I think probably because college kids have to go back to school, and there are a couple weeks where we really don’t have camp coverage. And while I’m going to try and bridge those in different ways with sitters and things like that, at the same time, if I’m gonna travel, it’s a lot easier for me to travel when I’m not giving up childcare, and easily accessible childcare. And then when I go on a trip, I’m with my kids. I’m doing it somewhere else, but it’s not like I’m giving up actual childcare I had in place back at home for this trip.
So I tend to travel at the beginning of the summer and the end of the summer and again soak in the summer at home. It can be a quiet or lazier summer when we’re at home for most of the bulk of the summer. But whatever your schedule might be, if you are going to travel, it’s worth thinking about some of this now to help make those trips more fun and memorable and less stressful for you.
So in the show notes I’m actually going to link to an article that I wrote that’s very in depth because I crowdsourced it and got a lot of information from other people on how to really check out of work for the summer, and I’m also gonna link to an Instagram post that’s a little bit more about all the logistics around travel. But I wanted to highlight three of the tips today on this podcast and then, as I said, I’ll put some of the links in the show notes to those things if you want to dig into them in more detail. But my favorite things around travel and checking out of work in particular are these.
Travel Tip #1: Block Day Last Business Day Before and First Business Day After Trip – 10:10
So the first is blocking at least the last day of work that you have, the last business day before you take a trip and then the first business day back after you take a trip, block those from meetings. You can still work. That’s not what I mean. It’s just giving you the breathing space to not have to be trying to wrap up everything with five hours of meetings on your plate. You know, before you go on a trip, it really helps you wrap things up, it helps you send off emails for people who need to be in the know on certain things. It helps you, as I said, close those loops so that you can leave for vacation knowing things are in decent shape before you go. And then on the other end, coming back to a day where you don’t have meetings to really ease back into email, kind of get status updates on things, just get your bearings before you jump back into all those meetings and things like that.
What I really love about having that day where you can really dig into email before the meetings hit and all that kind of stuff is that it also gives you the peace of mind when you’re on vacation knowing you’ll have that. It’s a lot easier to say, “I’ll deal with this when I get back,” when you know you’ll have time to deal with it when you get back versus knowing if you’re gonna walk right back into a fire, it can be really hard to be like, “I’m gonna let all these 20 really important emails go, and I’ll deal with them then,” because you kind of worry that future you won’t have time to deal with them then, so you feel that pressure to deal with them when you’re on vacation.
So blocking a day, or even half a day, but preferably a day that you can get back in, dig through email, get status updates from team members and just really kind of settle and reacclimate back into it before things get going again. That can be really huge. And so, what I encourage you to do from a practical standpoint is look for each vacation that you have on the books, and the last workday before and the first workday back, block those from meetings now. If you can move meetings that are already scheduled on those days around, great. But the more you can minimize meetings on those two days, future you will be very, very thankful to current you if you do that.
Travel Tip #2: The Murphy’s Law Memo – 12:16
The second point in travel tips is the Murphy’s Law Memo. Now, this is a document that I highly recommend, I would say, if you’re gonna miss more than three business days. If you’re gonna miss just a business day or two for vacation, I wouldn’t worry about putting together a document like this, but if you’re gonna miss a solid amount of work and you just really want the peace of mind, this is a document or an email that I’d really recommend. It doesn’t have to — I’m gonna talk about this, and this is gonna sound like overkill to you, and it might be. But, you know, listen to yourself. You don’t have to do what I say. What I want you to think about is, in short, The Murphy’s Law Memo is the memo that you will send with all the information that people would need to cover for you, that if you send it, by Murphy’s Law, no one will need it. But if you don’t send it, people will need it, and you will kick yourself for not having put it together.
What I want you to think about this is broad strokes. It’s your main active projects, matters, however you organize your work, the main active things that are going on and the most pertinent information in relation to each. So using my litigation example from my past litigation days, what this would mean is every active matter I was on I would have the case name, what court it was in, the case number, who else on our team was on it, who opposing counsel was, and contact information for them. And then I would have a brief overview of maybe two sentences of what the case was about if no one else really knew what the matter was about. If some other, you know, teammates really knew what it was, I’m not gonna summarize the case for people. And then I would go through what is currently happening and what’s next on the docket in terms of what’s next coming up.
So maybe in the next month, what are some major deadlines? Where do things stand? Is there anything that could go on fire when I’m gone that I can foresee right now? And just literally probably two or three bullet points for each matter if it was relevant. What this does is it’s honestly more — I think it shows, yes, you’re committed to your cases and you’re leaving things in good shape and all that kind of stuff. It also is more just here to give you peace of mind. So if you do not need this to have peace of mind to enjoy your vacation, more power to you.
But for me, there was an element of I won’t even say guilt but maybe some hesitation about vacations and being able to truly enjoy them and just worrying about some of my cases, that if I put together a Murphy’s Law Memo, even a quick and dirty one, didn’t take a ton of ton of time. It does take time, but it wasn’t this polished, beautiful memo. It would be like a memo or a document or an email that would have a lot of typos, probably, bullet points. It was more just that the main strokes were there, that if an emergency happened, I didn’t have to stop my vacation to give them the case number and tell them where to find things. It was really designed to give me the peace of mind that I could leave, and people would be in decent enough shape if something exploded, and if they called me because they didn’t read the memo, I could direct them to the memo or the email, and they would have that information at their fingertips. So it gave me peace of mind and also reduced any need for me to get involved when I was on vacation.
I can’t think of a great example of how this is saving me on vacation, but the ones that come to mind are — well, I would also do these when I left a law firm, and particularly at my second firm I left and I got my two to three reach-outs after I left asking about certain matters, and I could direct them to the memo. So I didn’t have to remember everything, because I don’t trust my brain for anything to remember that kind of stuff, but I had a way to easily direct them to where that information would be, and that was really invaluable and, again, awesome for my own peace of mind.
So I just throw that out there for you that, from a practical standpoint, what I would think about is if it’s a shorter trip, maybe just a week ahead of time, start drafting this document. What are all my active matters? What’s the identifying information about them? Who on the team would know about them? What are the upcoming deadlines that a client or somebody else might raise, and what can they say about that? “This deadline’s coming up. Yep, Kelly’s aware of it. This is what she’s working on, and these are the next steps, and it’s handled.” It just gives people the information they might need if a client or someone external asks about a project versus, “I don’t know. Let me get in touch with Kelly.” If it’s a longer trip, you just might want to start with it a little bit earlier. Again, the idea of this is quick and dirty.
I would plot out time that you’re going to do this, including the afternoon before you leave and maybe two days before you leave so that you’re not scrambling to do it right at the end. You also don’t want to do it too early because things change. So you don’t want to put all this effort into summarizing the next steps on something and then those steps happen and then you have to redo those next steps. But it really is a very handy thing to do, again, more so to give you peace of mind more than anything else.
Travel Tip #3: Plot Out The Personal Side of Preparing to Travel – 17:27
The last point under travel tips that I wanted to raise is a little bit more on the personal side of things, but I do find that the tension between — I think if we all could just do our jobs we’d be fine and if we could all just do our personal life we’d be fine, it’s just the tension between the two that gets tricky. So even though I’m talking about checking out of work, I also want to bring in the personal here that I would plot out when are you going to pack? And in light of that, when are you going to do laundry for these trips?
You just might start seeing, “Ooh, okay. This is gonna be a little tighter than I realized, and oh, I’m packing for three kids, and so, this is gonna take me a couple hours. So when am I gonna do that? When am I gonna do the laundry? Do I want to work from home on a day that I would normally go into the office so that I could at least get the laundry going and pack, perhaps, when the kids are in school or at camp or with a nanny, or do I need to line up more childcare so I can do that and then maybe work more in the evenings?” Whatever it might be, it’s very helpful to see, “Okay, this is how the personal things are gonna interact. Maybe I need to bring some of these into my workday and what does that mean?”
I know some people really like taking off almost an additional day on each side or on one of the sides of the trip. So bringing that in relation to one of the top tips that I raised in this travel section is, if you could, and this is a little bit of an ideal dreamboat situation, so take it to the extent you can, leave it if it’s not relevant to you. But in an ideal world, what I think some people would do is, let’s say it’s like t-minus two days before you go on this trip. That t-minus two days, you would work but not take meetings. T-minus one day, you wouldn’t work at all and just pack and get ready. T-plus a day (the first day back) you would not work at all and just unpack, do laundry, settle back in, get groceries, all that good stuff, and then the next day you would go to work but not have meetings and just do email.
So that might be the ideal situation that you might not be able to do, but if you can at least plot out the personal so you can see how it relates, you’ll start seeing how you might want to play with this stuff. The more you pay attention to it, the more intentional you might get around how you like to travel. Some people really like — maybe you used to travel until the very end of the trip of a vacation. You would travel and get back Sunday night, where you might decide now in this stage of life you’re like, “I really want to come back Saturday night so I have all of Sunday to settle back in, and then Monday I’ll block from meetings and just do email, and then Tuesday will be like my normal workday back.” So you can kind of play with this and get creative.
So, as I said, in this travel section I went over the day before and the day after work, as we just wrapped up with as well, the Murphy’s Law Memo, and then plotting out the personal so that you can start protecting time for it and seeing how it relates to your work. As I mentioned though, I’ll put at least one article (I think there might be two articles) and then a post with tips in the show notes so that you can reference the tips I mentioned but also more in detail if you would like about summer travel you have coming up.
Okay, so the first point was reducing workload intentionally to the extent you can just to acknowledge summer slowness and really thinking about, “What work would I like to slow down on intentionally to give myself more breathing space this summer?” Point two was about travel and travel tips, and I went through those top three tips of taking time off, The Murphy’s Law Memo, and plotting the personal out in your calendar, but the articles will be there to give you more detail.
#3: Block Time to Go Through Your Entire Summer in Your Calendar – 20:58
And the third point is, for those working parents. Now, this feels potentially a little late to do this, but candidly I find that the May wrap-up really prevents us from planning ahead for the summer in a way that we might otherwise because May is just a little bit crazy on the end-of-school type stuff. So if you are like me, you might be turning to this a little bit later than you would ideally want to, but it just is what it is. The reality of it is it’s really tricky to plan for summer when our time is so wrapped up in the end-of-school-year type stuff. That said, if you’re like, “Man, I really wish I had done some of this earlier,” calendar it out for next year. Calendar out for, let’s say, May 20th to do what I’m gonna talk about now, to give yourself more of the clarity and peace of mind and less stress and all that kind of stuff we’re gonna talk about at an earlier time.
So just know I really, truly believe anytime anything bugs you, instead of beating yourself up, just say, “When should I do this next time?” and then calendar it out and save yourself that hassle.
So what I want you to think about now is protecting about an hour or two of time to really go through, a little bit tediously, your entire summer in your calendar. There are gonna be a couple things I want to highlight for you to just check out and look though, and my goal for this is for you to have a little bit more clarity on what’s happening this summer, how it’s gonna come together, and also just issue spot conflicts now and start planning things out so that you have a realistic game plan. So let’s talk about what this means.
The first thing I would love for you to do is go through each week of your summer and calendar out pickups and drop-offs because they tend to be different than the school year. For example, my daughter takes the bus in the school year, and that’s not an option for the camps that she’s in. So I have to drive her, which means I’m gonna be in the car a lot more than I normally am in the summer than I am versus the school year. And so, it’s really important for me to go through and think, “Okay, when it’s just me who’s available for pickups and drop-offs, this is how I’m gonna run it.” I literally will sit down with a piece of paper and Google Map out, “I’m gonna go from here to here to here, and at point A when I pick up my youngest, it’s gonna take me roughly this amount of time. Then we’re gonna get here, and it’s gonna take me roughly this amount of time. Then we need to drive home.” And I really think about it in a lot of detail and then plot out that larger block window that encompasses all the different stops and all the time that I need at all the different stops to do the actual drop-off, and I do that on the reverse too.
Now, what I also do is do it as if my husband was home to help with it, and I will also plot those out in my calendar on a repeating basis, and this is the beauty of a digital calendar. And then as I can tell if he’s going to be available, I go through and delete the irrelevant entries. But it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of front-end work, but the benefit is so worth it to have the clarity later, as future me actually lives this out, of, “Okay, this is when I need to leave,” and not have to calculate it every single day for the first two weeks as I try and figure it out. It also gives me the clarity of even if I’m unsure if my husband can do something, I’ll just keep the longer block of time in my calendar so that I plan more realistically. Because what I want to avoid happening is that I’m like, “Yeah, I think I can get it all done by this time,” so then I plot a meeting for then or even 15 minutes later, and then I realize, “Oh, no, that’s way too tight of time. I’m gonna be driving still during that period of time.” I would rather just avoid that mess and protect more time for the commute than I need and then get that bonus time if I find it, if I end up stumbling upon it, versus thinking it’ll be like, “Oh, it’ll be fine. I’ll squeeze it in,” and then I cannot squeeze it in.
The next thing I want to point out is that for some weeks, at least for me, there are just lighter childcare weeks. That just is what it is. Some people, if you have a nanny, you might not experience this, but for me, we have a lot of camps for a lot of the weeks but there are a fair number of weeks without any camps going on, and as I said, I’m gonna try and fill those in a little bit and maybe get some family support, split time with my husband, all that kind of stuff. But what I have found is it’s a lot easier to get weekend support.
So if this is an option for you, what you might want to play with is, let’s say for those weird weeks, splitting the day with your partner if you have one or getting family help or getting a couple hours of a sitter in the afternoon if you can get one, but then embracing, you know, “Hey, I’m gonna work more on the weekends, but I’m gonna do more fun summertime activities with my kids during those weeks. I’ll just have to leave work early at two o’clock, but I don’t even need to take PTO or things like that if I’m gonna work the weekend and make up those hours,” if PTO is something that you have to deal with.
That probably can’t work for everyone, but it’s just the time of flexibility, and so, I figured I’d throw it out there that childcare on weekends is so much easier at least for me to get, so I embrace that during some of these summers and will do more fun activities during the week and will split time and just kind of do that bartering thing and get time from partners but then really embrace more childcare on the weeks.
You have to be careful here. I do think having a couple days of truly being off the clock are just really important. But it’s all about flexibility when it comes to kids. And so, for a couple weeks we might try and play with that a little bit. So check that out. Potentially plot out things and see if you can line up childcare now to help future you with those.
Another thing to look for is the small windows where additional childcare could help. So this is, for me at least, those examples of, “I have a little kid who I’m gonna do a swim class with. But she’s two-and-a-half, so I have to be in the water with her. I was looking at the calendar, and I was like, “What am I gonna do with my six-year-old when I’m in the water with the two-year-old?” It’s just tricky to balance these in some ways. I think my husband will be home and can take one kid, which is great. But some weeks he’s not, and I can already see that on the calendar. So that’s me reaching out to my mom to see if she can be at the pool to help or keep a kid at her house to help. If setting up a playdate with another friend, then maybe swapping that down the road.
You can get creative, especially when they’re shorter windows of when you need help. But planning all of that out now saves me a lot of stress each week when I’m trying to figure out what to do during that period of time, and it helps me enjoy that swim class with my two-year-old. I get to really embrace that versus trying to have an eye on my six-year-old at the same pool all the time at the same time.
Okay, three more points. These are thankfully smaller. Also looking ahead at what gear you might need. So if a kid is starting, let’s say gymnastics, do they need leotards? If a kid is gonna be in soccer, what do they need for that? What size ball, shin guards, any special shoes? Do the swimsuits fit? Do you need a lunchbox? Let’s say you don’t send your kid to school with food during the school year, but you have to during the summer, do you need a lunchbox? Do you want an extra lunchbox? Do you need a cool bag for that lunchbox? All that kind of stuff is really helpful to think about now so that you can really not be in a scramble when the time comes to do that.
Again, if it’s too late, if you’ve already had that scramble, and you’re like, “This would have been nice to hear two weeks ago,” then really think about, “Okay, let me plot this out for next summer, repeat it every year at an earlier time so that I can think through this stuff and avoid it going forward,” and that’s all we can do.
The next point is reminders to empty the bags. Now, this is something that I get in the routine of doing this during the school year to some extent, and I have to freshen up the bag every morning, but I tend to deal with it in the mornings. The problem is, in the summer, half the time there’s a wet swimsuit lurking. So it’s not natural to me to really empty out their bags yet in the evenings, and so, I needed the calendar reminder so that my phone tells me, “Hey, empty the bags,” and you can do that with the kids. You can put the alert at the time when the kids need help. You could do it after the kids go to bed. I am no parenting expert. Do what you need to do but remind yourself to do it if you want to do it. And so, for me, I have reminders Monday through Friday in the evenings to empty out the bags, dry out the swimsuits, all that kind of stuff so they can go right back in the next day.
Similarly, set reminders to pack up bags, so if you wanted to put in a reminder, let’s say Sunday through Thursday night, to pack lunches and just put those in the fridge, pack up the swimsuits or maybe you have two swimsuits you just flip them each evening, whatever it might be, give yourself the reminders to pack up the stuff you might need. You also might need the reminder in the morning, even though you’re doing the bulk of the stuff in the evening to put the lunch in the bag or, “I need cold, fresh water with ice,” this is what my six-year-old drinks, and so, I need to do that in the morning and remind myself to do that.
So just thinking about, you know, it sounds silly to calendar some of this stuff I think, but when you realize how much you’re carrying in your head, and if you could just delegate that to your calendar to remind you to do it, it’s pretty great. So check it out if you would like to!
Recap – 30:12
All right, I hope this is helpful. I know it was a little bit random. Just to recap, the first point is really thinking about reducing the workload that you can and intentionally embracing the natural slow down and really thinking about what could I intentionally slow down so I can get the breathing space I’m looking for. Tip two is really all-around travel tips, and I’ll put those links in the show notes if you want more of those. Tip three is the working parent review, essentially, of the summer and really taking the time to sit down for one, one-and-a-half, two hours and going through each of the points we talked about to really just check for conflicts, make sure that things are in place that will help you get the summer that you want. Enough time to work so that you have the breathing space to enjoy the not-work time the rest of the time and all sorts of things, and just really lightening that mental load by putting a lot of the new stuff in the calendar so your brain isn’t charged with magically having to remember a whole new routine for the summer.
So I hope it helps! Summer is here. Here is to a fun and wonderful summer. Again, just to recap that housekeeping I said before, my fall program opens up for enrollment on August first. I do have quite the lengthy waitlist and limited spots, so if you are on the fence or are thinking about doing it, just really make sure that you’ve signed up for the waitlist. You can add a lot of dates to the calendar. You also, on the page, www.kellynolan.com/bright, can get the reimbursement information if you would like to share it with your employer so you can get some of that covered.
I hope you join me, and I’m here to answer any questions you may have. My email is ke***@ke********.com or you can shoot me a DM on Instagram. Regardless of if you join me or not, thank you for being here, and I hope you have a wonderful summer! I will see you in two weeks back here, and I’ll catch you in that episode. Talk to you then!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
