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Ever say yes to something—like a board role, a volunteer opportunity, or a work project—only to find yourself totally overrun with email, meetings, travel, and curveballs that just keep on coming?
Today, I’m talking about how something called the “Diderot Effect” can help us understand time management challenges like this. Originally coined in the consumerism space, the Diderot Effect refers to the domino effect that can happen when one new purchase leads to another and another—like a new dressing gown triggering a living room makeover or a new iPhone triggering all the accessories.
When it comes to time, we do something similar. We say yes to one thing—and suddenly find ourselves buried in the cascade of responsibilities that come with it. In short, it’s the Diderot Effect of time management. And in this episode, I share how you can use this idea to:
- More realistically estimate the true time cost of a new commitment
- Say yes with eyes wide open—and with more informed consent
- Own your decision (and ride the curveballs more steadily)
- And as a corollary, reduce the curveballs in your life
Plus, I touch on the distinction between maker and manager roles, why I think a lot of this comes back to workload, and a great place to start if your days are full of firefighting. It’s a short episode—but I think it packs a punch.
Resources mentioned:
- Listen to Episode 23 for more on the maker vs. manager distinction
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. Today is probably gonna be a short one, and I say that ’cause if you’re getting into the car and gonna drive, you might wanna line up the next one that you’re gonna listen to too. But I think it’s a good one. I think it packs a punch and so we’re just gonna go for it. Now, some of you might be familiar with what’s called, and I might say this wrong, but the Deroy effect, and what it is, is it comes from like way back in 1769, a philosopher named Dennis Deroy shared about how he got a new dressing gown.
As a gift, and that [00:01:00] dressing gown over time led to him buying more and more things because once he had this beautiful new, fancy dressing gown, his old possessions didn’t seem so great, or he needed other things to go with some of his new things. And so it just led to this slope, like slippery slope of him buying more and more and more things.
And over time, this drove him into debt. It became known as the roit effect, and we talk about it today in terms of just consumerism and the same type of thing that basically once you get one new thing, it can lead to a domino effect of buying more and more things to go with the new thing or something looks shabby in comparison to that new corner of the living room, that kind of stuff.
Other examples that come to mind are, you know, you get a new iPhone and then you need a new phone case, and you need a car phone charger because they changed the charging thing again. Or you need a new bedside charging station ’cause of the same thing, or you buy. If you have been brave enough to dive into trendy jeans these days.
You buy new jeans and then [00:02:00] now you need new shoes. That still completely elude me and that’s why I stick with my skinny jeans for the most part because I can’t figure it out. But you know what I mean. It’s like you buy one thing and suddenly you need all the things to complete the outfit, or you get a new computer and now you like quote unquote, need a new keyboard and a new mouse and a new mouse pad because now you have this new setup and you want everything else to compliment it.
’cause it’s exciting and like those things all happen. There’s no judgment. We all do ’em. It’s very human nature and that’s why. People pointed out and have named it the Deroy Effect. And while this isn’t a perfect analogy, I think something similar happens when it comes to how we manage our time. Because we often say yes to one new work project and we say yes, envisioning the scope of it, and that’s the one thing we thought we were acquiring.
We get the idea even in our personal life. It’s not just work in our personal life or our work life. We get asked to take on a new project at work to be, join a new committee, to [00:03:00] join a board in a volunteer capacity, to be a room parent, all these types of things. We think we even do our due diligence. We learn about it, we understand what it is, and we kind of buy that one thing that we’re agreeing to.
And so we say yes and then come all of the project meetings, all of the project travel, all of the project email, the people on the team who expand the scope. The curve balls that just come with every project. I mean, every project contains curve balls. It’s like the unforeseen circumstances and the work that you need to do to deal with them, the mistakes and the effort needed to fix them, like all that kind of stuff.
Every project in personal and work life comes with the work we foresee. IE, the one thing that we quote unquote bought and the stuff that we did not fully appreciate was coming along the way. Those are all the other things that inevitably follow and which take up more and more of our time. It’s in [00:04:00] short the data, right?
Effect of time management. And so what do we do with this knowledge? Like if we can fully appreciate that there is some sort of data, right? Effect with time management. What I recommend doing, and I’m sure there’s more, but what I can see today is when evaluating new projects or other options that are coming your way, think about the OID effect.
You are not just saying yes to the foreseeable work. And that’s often the work they describe when they’re telling you about the role. And even they, like all of us underestimate, so also overestimate. But even then you’re also saying yes to the other trappings that follow the meetings, the travel, the email, the curve balls and more.
That realization, I hope, helps you protect your time. So its use matches the reality that you crave. In other words, when you’re evaluating saying yes or no, you overestimate based on what they’re saying, but you also continue thinking about what other things could [00:05:00] come up. What’s the travel? What are the projects?
What are the email, what are the meetings? All that kind of stuff to help you ask more questions. But then also maybe just expand the scope from what you kind of can see right now into more of an amorphous, like, I don’t know what it’s gonna be, but I know there’s gonna be more. How does all of that fit in?
And you know me, I would plot it out in my calendar and see how it plays with everything else. But even if you don’t use your calendar in the way that I do. Really trying to get clarity around what would the full scope of this, even with the unforeseen stuff, what would that do to my calendar if I say yes or no?
In addition, let’s say you still say yes. You’re like, this is worth it. Even with making a more informed decision. This is what I wanna say yes to. It also helps you own it more when those curve balls hit. ’cause when the curve balls hit, you are not as surprised. You’re not scrambling, you’re not confused, you’re not left feeling like you signed up for some sort of bait and switch.
You have more ownership on the decision. You can be more steady, less. I don’t know. For [00:06:00] me, sometimes I take that kind of stuff personally, so there’s like less personal affront if I just anticipate it more and can know that I’m saying yes to those things. There’s just a lot more ownership around my decision in the long run, like as it plays out, I can still feel like I owned my decision because I had more informed consent behind it.
In short, this approach helps you say yes with your eyes at least wider open, so that you can own that decision and the results that follow, and that makes a world of difference. In addition, I think there’s a bit of a corollary here is that if you spend your days right now, just forget the decision making on whether to say yes or no to things like take your current reality.
If you are spending, particularly at work, a lot of your days in firefighting mode, dealing with curve balls, one option kinda apart from this is that you’re a manager and that is where you need to be. That’s where your role is to bring your judgment to all of this [00:07:00] moving. The world that is work and keep the trains moving forward with your, like, by applying your judgment and you spend most of your day in reactive mode because of that.
If that’s you, we need to push more of your maker work to others, and I’m not gonna go into all of that right now. If you’re interested in the manager maker distinction, if you haven’t listened to episode 23, I would definitely recommend it. It’s not my idea. It’s a concept that I find absolutely fascinating and most people do as well.
So highly recommend you check that out if you haven’t. But going back to today’s focus is if you spend your days in firefighting mode, dealing with all those curve balls. There are things we can do to help people reduce curve balls in terms of strategizing to minimize them. But for purposes of today, another option and an option is if there’s no one else to push work to, is that you have to take on less projects.
And I know that sounds so infuriatingly simple, and it sounds so much [00:08:00] more simple than it is, but I really just wanna echo that here as the corollary to this is if every project we say yes to comes with curve balls. Then the less projects you have, the less curve balls you have. And so if you’re spending all your hours of your day dealing with curve balls, then obviously, but also hard to execute and sometimes hard to really appreciate.
If you take on less projects, then hours of your day spent on curve balls are going to slowly. Get less and less. And a great place to start there is you can look for the project that contains the most curve balls that derails your life so much and see if you could eliminate that or extend out the deadline or all sorts of things to alleviate that element of your job.
I know that was not the most practical one, but I think it’s really worth flagging, is that I often think of. For me, what so often it comes down to is capacity, workload, capacity, workload. And one of the biggest things is our capacity often can’t shift to too much. Like there are things we can do [00:09:00] to, you know, just get clear on the capacity and plan for it and be more intentional with it and try to expand it to some degree.
But a lot of it comes down to workload. If your workload is Dom, you know, every workload is made up of, again, the foreseeable projects that come with the unforeseeable things. And if most of your day is spent dealing with the unforeseeable things and not getting to the actual scope of the project you envisioned, then we need to reduce the number of projects to reduce the amount of unforeseeable work on your plate.
So more of your capacity can be spent dealing with the foreseeable more important work, not just the firefighting work. Okay. I hope that helps. I know that it’s a little bit high level, but hopefully it’s practical enough that it can help you really understand that just as Deroy buys one thing and it leads to this domino effect of other things, taking his money and pushing him into debt.
You too can say yes to one thing and the domino effects of unforeseeable [00:10:00] thing happen and that pushes you into overcommitment. And what we really wanna help is gain more awareness around that so that we have it in mind, both when we are saying yes or no to new things, but also problem solving our current overcommitment, if that’s happening to you right now, and try to alleviate it in that way.
I hope that helps. I would love to know what you think. I just think it’s a really interesting concept and I would love to hear what you think on it. Shoot me an email or a DM if you’d like. Also, before you go, my next program kicks off on September 10th, 2025. If you wanna get a PDF to share with your employer to see if they’d cover it in whole or in part, or if you just wanna learn more about the program, go to kelly nolan.com/bright.
I’ll put the link in the show notes too, and then also jump on the wait list while you’re there, there’s a section at the very top where you drop your name and your email and you join the wait list that gives you the option to block your calendar for the enrollment times, some of the call times. Also, learn about the limited scholarships I offer and so much more.[00:11:00]
So again, check out Kelly nolan.com/bright. Most 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.
