Coming out of January and February, months when lots of curveballs hit, it’s hard to motivate to plan after likely weeks of plans getting derailed. Let’s talk about that frustration – AND why it’s still worth planning (even when those plans later get derailed).
Ep. 8 gives you a high-level overview of my weekly planning session if you’re curious.
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 5-Day Time Management Program Get five 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:
Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] 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.
Hey. Hey. All right, so when I’m recording this, it is February and I think this is gonna come out after February, but still, we all have recently experienced the curve balls that are January and February, and so I wanna talk about that today. Now that we’re coming up for air, hopefully, hopefully cross our fingers is.
Why is planning still useful when all the curve balls hit and we’ve all had ’em, whether you have kids and it’s germs and school closures, or you don’t have kids and [00:01:00] there’s still so many germs and whether anomalies that throw off travel and all that kind of stuff. We all have these curve balls that can derail an afternoon or an entire week.
And when those things happen, it can be really. Hard to motivate, to keep planning because you’re like, well, what is the point? It’s all getting, it’s all getting derailed anyway, so what is the point here? And I think that that is all completely, completely fair. At the same time, I wholeheartedly believe that yes, planning is still worth it even if you’re plans get completely derailed.
And there are two main reasons for this first reason. It is easier to arrange work and your personal life if you already had it planned. When you plan and I dig into my planning session in episode eight, I’ll also highlight that in the show notes, but you can check out episode eight if you’re like, what have you been talking about?
Planning. Like I really am a big believer in a weekly planning session. I’m a big believer [00:02:00] in an agenda driven planning session so you know what to do and also when you’re done. And so that’s really what I’m talking about here when I talk about planning. Part of that process is you take your overall workload and like picture me gesticulating with my whole arms, like your overall workload is massive.
You take all of that and you bring it down to a week’s worth of plans. I really like planning the next two weeks, so it’s really the next two weeks that is a much smaller bucket of things that you’re gonna do in the next two weeks. It’s still a lot of stuff. It is much smaller than your overall workload.
Not only is it a smaller amount, but you’ve already gone through the really time consuming, brain consuming process of figuring out the priorities and what makes it into the next two weeks and what doesn’t, and what makes it into high energy windows and what doesn’t like you Just kind of prioritize that massive workload into [00:03:00] the next two weeks of plans.
This is all really important because when a curve ball hits, yes, it is absolutely frustrating to see all of those plans get derailed. All of those carefully well thought out plans get derailed, but rearranging. Whatever you think it’s gonna be. If you’re like, I got a sick kid, I can see this being four days, or the weather’s forecasted to be bad for the next four days or something, a big work curve ball happen and it’s gonna derail the rest of my week or two days from now.
You are looking at a much smaller, clear workload of what you’re rearranging compared to the massive one, because when you don’t plan. You just have to really think about the alternative here. When you don’t plan, you are essentially looking at your entire workload and trying to triage and prioritize that versus if you had planned a much smaller pot of things.
And when your brain is whirling in a curve [00:04:00] ball, which it does, and like life feels like it’s whirling, having that more manageable, doable. Clarity included amount of work that you’re rearranging is really, really valuable, especially if you don’t have a lot of time to kinda rearrange. Like if you have a really sick kid at home, you can’t sit at your computer for an hour right away and like rearrange all your plans and send out all the emails and all that kind of stuff, and also prioritize and figure out what you should be doing in the first place and how it’s all gonna work.
Instead, you have, let’s say it’s like a two day thing you’re looking at, you look at the next two days, you see what you were gonna do, you move things out. That might have to domino effect some deadlines and you have to ask for extensions. But the smaller and more clarity included amount of work is easier to handle.
In a much more doable way. You understand already you go into the curve ball and the curve ball, rearranging already understanding the deadlines, already, understanding the issues at play, [00:05:00] already, understanding what you are going to do, and that gives you more clarity of, as I said, to know what extensions you might need to ask for now to know what meetings to move, to know what to delegate to others, and to have the clarity around what you’re delegating and hopefully what you’ll be able to pick up when again, it’s all so, so valuable.
And I just wanna nudge you and remind you of that in those moments where you’re like, what is the point of all this planning is, I truly believe it would be a lot more uncomfortable if you hadn’t done the planning when you were managing that curve ball. And I think that it helps you triage and move things and process and adapt.
Like in a much shorter period of time with a lot more clarity so you can get back to dealing with the curve ball with less unease about what’s happening to change. I’m not saying no unease, but definitely less unease than if you were like, I don’t even have time to triage my whole workload right now, much less, but I don’t even have the clarity of what I’m supposed to move, and that becomes a whole lot more stressful.
Okay, so [00:06:00] 0.1 is even though it’s frustrating. Planning ahead of time. It does make it easier to rearrange work in life when a curve ball hits and you’re rearranging those clear, manageable plans versus the whole workload and just kind of freaking out about that. Point two is because you planned, you do tend to, or at least I do.
Pick up a little bit on more on the pain of the lost plans. Again, I think it does make it easier if you’ve planned, but there is a level of frustration and almost pain about not being able to do the lost plans. Now, some people might interpret that as, I’d rather live in denial and not experience that pain because actually it was less painful before I planned.
And what I would encourage you to do instead is. Lean into the pain in so far as it helps your brain motivate to come up with ways that it’s gonna avoid the pain next time to the extent it can. What I mean by this is I really [00:07:00] do get that, you know, especially if you’ve never planned before and then you start planning, it can be very frustrating when those plans get derailed.
There are a lot of ways plans can get derailed. Maybe you underestimated, maybe you didn’t plan all the things you had on your plate, so you didn’t account for everything. So the plans you did put in weren’t realistic ’cause you didn’t have that capacity. You had to do other things as well. There are a lot of reasons plans can get derailed.
In this episode, we’re talking about like the curve balls, and so I’m just gonna focus on that. But when the curve balls hit, it can be really frustrating and painful to have those plans get derailed, as I said, and it does make total sense, it is not fun. I’m not like, Ooh, yay, plans that are derailed. It is really, really frustrating and I will note that usually when my plans get derailed, at least with a loss of childcare, it’s a good red flag for me.
If. I’m more tired than I realized or don’t have the emotional bandwidth based on how I react. You know, if I start tearing up, I’m like, okay, this is a sign of I need more sleep. So I’m not saying I’m like, can handle [00:08:00] these things like without any sort of emotional reaction, but I believe. The awareness.
There’s something about calendaring and planning that helps you have more awareness around when these things come up, of what the real issue is. Not just, I’m sad and it’s consuming me, but like what is the real problem here? It’s the derailed plans and when we can have that awareness and intentionality, I just think our brains start moving towards how do we solve this in the future?
How do I avoid this pain in the future? That’s where I think the fun and the creativity can come in. So for an example, we are all leaving January and February behind us. And if they were painful for you on any of these curve ball fronts, I just want you to think about that and also think about have they also been kind of painful in the last few years?
And if January and February tend to be painful for you, ’cause of germs, ’cause of weather, ’cause of whatever it might be, what does that mean for [00:09:00] us? You could put out there that maybe we plan on lighter January and Februarys going forward. And that can be hard because I know that coming outta the holidays, everybody’s like, let’s deal with it in January.
Let’s deal with it in January. And there’s a good note here of like, catch yourself when you’re doing that and don’t plan on everything for January, because January is like so many curve balls. And so I think that’s just really important to keep in mind is plan lighter. So what does this mean practically?
Maybe you calendar things. Every day you plan Thursdays, Fridays, whenever it is in your calendar in November and December and January every single week, repeating reminder, keep January and February late. That could be an option for you. You could even get more detailed on that. Avoid deadlines in January or February.
You could also even do this in your social life, like remind yourself to plan just one to two social activities a weekend in January or February just to like give yourself. I mean, kind of like the time to rest and [00:10:00] sleep and stay healthy, but also just the breathing space that things might get derailed.
There’s no right or wrong here. I mean, you can do this in your work life, your personal life, both. It’s just getting the wheels turning on, okay, these months are actually really hard for me. Consistently. I need to plan on a more lighter workload during these months. I wanna plan on a lighter social load during these months, whatever it might be.
And how do I actually. Bring that to life for me. I would go to my calendar so that it reminds future me to do that. Getting really practical here. I might calendar something on November 1st that repeats annually, that says calendar out. You know, weekly reminders to keep a light January and February or also block the next two months of weekends for two hours every day so that I don’t overpack my schedule, whatever it might be.
And then that calendar alert goes off each year for you around the time you would wanna do that. And at that point, future, you can do the calendaring for that next season in a way that makes sense that unfortunately we [00:11:00] can’t like calendar plan weeks late for. You know, what is that 12 weeks in a row?
And then repeat that series annually, but you could kind of tie that in for future you and give her a heads up to do that kind of stuff. A different approach on this might be that you decide to block a whole extra day of work from work meetings and plans every week in January and February, maybe every Wednesday or every Thursday, you just block the entire day out.
Now for this coming. January or February so that you have built in the flex time to absorb the inevitable curve balls. Now, just to be clear here, you’re still working during this time. You’re not taking days off or anything like that, but it is reminding future you not to book too many meetings, not to plan on too many things because it’s gonna be a curve ball time.
We know it. And again, if you get bonus time, awesome. But let’s plan on kind of like, just help us. Plan for like kind of a worst case scenario [00:12:00] and then reap bonus time if we can. We all know one day a week is not sufficient when a big curve ball hits, but if you consistently have one curve ball a week, then hopefully it helps you absorb a little bit better.
Along these lines, and this is a totally personal call, I’m just sharing the kind of random ways that you can think about this stuff and then use your calendar to help you is if germs have rocked you, which they have for me in past years. Is there something you wanna do differently next year to help keep you healthy during this time?
You could really protect more sleep and calendar reminders to yourself to really protect sleep during these certain months. You could. Not drink alcohol during certain months since that can really help with immunity and all that kind of stuff. Again, you could use your calendar to remind you to do that.
A big one for me is like taking supplements, like I’m not a doctor. Use your own judgment. I just take certain supplements every single day. I take four pills of ’em. I use this product called like beekeepers [00:13:00] on my kids and spray their mouths and just try to keep them healthy. Like I’m not a doctor. I’m not saying you don’t have to do what I do, but.
I have really leaned in to a lot of supplements in my desperation to avoid germs. And just thinking about that stuff, if you’re like, I need to make a change and I’m gonna try and incorporate some of this stuff, again, it could be sleep, it could be no drinking, it could be all these sort of things.
Doesn’t have to be supplements. But if you do, then reminding you again, future you to start doing that each year. ’cause maybe you don’t wanna do it all year round, but from like November through March, you do. And so that’s the time that you could like remind, future you to start incorporating that and then calendar it each and every day so that you do all in all, what I want you to hear is when the curve balls hit.
Planning is still worth it ’cause of the reasons we talked about and also the almost heightened awareness around derailed plans. While painful can be really useful, like that, pain can be useful if it drives us to make changes to avoid it next year or the next time [00:14:00] around. If you know it’s a certain curve ball that comes at a different frequency, but really think about that.
Look, not all this is in my control. I cannot avoid all germs. I wish I could, all this kind of stuff, but what are the things that I could do to avoid the germs or reduce the curve balls if we’re talking about something else? And also if the curve balls are gonna hit, how do I build in the cushion to absorb those curve balls in a better way if I know they’re coming?
The way I think about this is essentially, let’s even say you use the bright method in that you’re like calendaring and time blocking everything that’s on your plate, and you lay out these beautiful, but very full eight, 10 hour workdays, whatever you work every single day, all of January and February.
That is awesome. And yet it’s still unrealistic because you know, curve balls are coming and so how do you build in. Cushion into those plans so that on [00:15:00] average over time you have more breathing space when those curve balls inevitably hit. And that’s the kind of stuff that in today’s episode, I hope, gives you some ideas on how to do that, because those curve balls can be painful no matter what we do.
I mean, they’re gonna have a level of pain no matter what. I do believe that we can do things to just kinda up our chances of avoiding them or making them less painful when they strike. And as always, obviously since you’re here, I love using my calendar to help bring those ideas and like thoughts and concepts I have of what I would like to do next time to life in a more practical way and remind future me to do that.
And so I hope that Scott, your wheels turning as well. And if you have any other ideas, I am all ears selfishly from like a person who has deals with curveball’s perspective. And then obviously ’cause I love nerding out on this stuff as well. All right. That’s it for this one. Thank you for being here. If you wanna write a review, awesome.
If you wanna share with a friend, wonderful. And more [00:16:00] importantly, thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
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 5-Day Time Management Program Get five 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.
