Making Back-to-School Less Scramble-y & Enjoying the Rest of Summer

To listen to Apple, click here; to listen on Spotify, click here.

Click here to get the free back-to-school guide!

Note: The Bright Method is not just for moms, and I try to have most episodes of this podcast apply to everyone – regardless of whether they have kids. But sometimes, the time management challenges associated with kids need to be addressed, so this is one of those episodes. If you are kid-free, feel free to skip this one and tune back in for the next!

Back-to-school season is coming—whether your kids are starting in early August or later (and feel free to save this one for later if you’re not ready to think about it yet).

In this episode, I’ll walk you through how to make the transition into the school year less stressful, less scramble-y, and more calm. Plus, it’ll help you get back to enjoying the rest of your summer knowing you’re on top of the upcoming back-to-school season.

Whether you’re already feeling the low hum of logistical stress about supply lists, new routines, haircuts, and first-day emotions—or you’re someone who doesn’t think about it and then ends up scrambling later—this episode will help.

I walk through:

Why calendaring back-to-school tasks now will help you actually enjoy the rest of your summer more
Why it’s worth starting with a blank sheet of paper before diving into the guide
The benefit of calendaring out emotions around transitions (with a powerful story from a client about how it helped her stay calm during a kindergartner meltdown)
What to do if you already feel like you’ve “missed the boat” on something like a haircut (hint: how to make sure it doesn’t happen again next year)
A super practical tip from a fellow mom on what to do if a behavior or concern is bothering you now (but may resolve itself soon)
How to use your calendar to help you have important conversations with your kids—and remember to actually follow through

All of this is a small peek into how the Bright Method works: making the invisible visible, creating clarity through realistic planning, and helping you enjoy the now without dropping the ball later.

→ Grab the free back-to-school calendar guide I mention in this episode: https://kellynolan.com/back-to-school → Try the free five-day program (Reset & Refresh): https://kellynolan.com/refresh → Explore the full Bright Method program or join the waitlist for September enrollment: https://kellynolan.com/the-bright-method-time-management-course-with-kelly-nolan

Below is a transcript of the episode. Enjoy!

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 we’re gonna talk about back to school logistics, and you might be thinking, what, this is the middle of my summer, and it very well might be for you, but for many schools around the country, schools actually starting pretty soon. I know that Atlanta schools, I believe, start around August 1st.

So I’m publishing this a little earlier. My kids don’t start till the end of August, but. For the people that start in early August, we’re gonna do this now for them, and for those of you who have some time, [00:01:00] feel free to start doing this now, especially if you’ve started kind of getting a little like.

You’re starting to think about back to school. It makes you not feel so great. If you wanna do this now, this really might help you enjoy the rest of your summer in the ways that we’re gonna talk about. But if that’s not you and you’re really enjoying summer and you don’t wanna think about this yet, totally fair as well.

Just calendar out when you wanna come back to it and work through the guide that I’m gonna talk about. Which leads me to there is a guide. There is a guide of all the things that you might want to calendar now to help your back to school be a lot less stressful, a lot less scrambly, and more calm and clear and good For everyone that said, listen to this podcast episode.

I am not going line by line through that guide. Instead, I wanna highlight some things that I think are worth talking about. So listen to this episode and then go check out the guide. It is linked in the show notes. So I’m first gonna go through the goal of why we’re even doing this. Next, I’m gonna quickly go through the process [00:02:00] and then I’m gonna hit, I think it’s like four or five just kinda miscellaneous things that are called out in the guide that I just wanna talk about a little bit more.

So the purpose of all of this is not to plan for the sake of planning or over-engineer things or anything like that. It is to address the fact that back to school periods of time have a crazy amount of mental load and life logistics and invisible labor that. Goes into it, and because of that, I think it’s really worth kind of my whole theory about time management is let’s bring all of it to light, let’s make it all visible, and then let’s assign a time to each task so that we’re clear on when are we gonna do it, how long is it gonna take, and does it fit with everything else?

Not only will that help reduce your mental load and reduce your stress, it truly, I believe, will help you enjoy the rest of your summer. To me, it comes down a lot of like just taking a step back, remove the back to school Part of this, a [00:03:00] lot of us struggle to really enjoy our downtime and our breaks and times like summer and things like that because we want to enjoy them.

We put ourselves like our bodies physically in a place where we’re enjoying downtime or things like that, but our brain is kind of stressed out. Our brain is uneasy that we know we have a lot to do, and if. We are not sure sitting here right now that it can all get done and definitely not sure if we can take a break, whether it’ll still all get done.

And what I believe is the game changer is by letting our brain understand, yes, it can all get done at a future time. Not only that, but your system will tell you when it’s times. You don’t have to remember all the things That clarity gives a lot of peace of mind, allows our brain to relax and allows us to actually enjoy that downtime.

In short, if we can show our brain that the things that we’re worried about can happen later and that you won’t forget, then it can relax. And that’s what we [00:04:00] do in the Bright Method across all personal and professional things. And that’s what we’re gonna do today with the back to school stuff. Because whether it’s now or some point in the future, we start thinking about.

The back to school stuff and a little bit worrying about it, and we’re trying to enjoy summer, but we’re a little bit worrying about the back to school and doing this process really helps you kind of set those things down into the future. Know your system will remind you to do ’em and get back to really enjoying summer with the ability to truly do so.

Or you might be someone different who you don’t think about it and it doesn’t stress you out, but then you end up scrambling a lot when it’s time. And this will also allow that. This will also allow you to maybe think about it earlier than you would’ve for an hour or two right now. But then you lay out this game plan that tells the future you maybe earlier than you might naturally think to do something.

Hey, it’s time to do that thing so we’re not scrambling to do it, which is a huge help as well. Alright, so keep that goal in mind. Especially as you dig into the list, [00:05:00] understand that there’s a lot of stuff on there. I mean, when you see how much goes into back to school or how much could you do not have to do everything on there, not everything is gonna be relevant to you, but it’s still, I think it’s three pages of things to do.

And even if you don’t do all of them, it’s probably one to two pages of stuff that. We tend to just manage in our head candidly, and so if we can make it visible, put it in the calendar, it helps us plan. It also could help us delegate out or share the load with someone at home. So just being aware of that too, with the heads up and the time to assign things out.

Then less might end up on your plate as well. So there’s a lot of benefit of tackling this earlier and making it all visual and getting it out of our head and reducing that mental load and maybe even the load in general. And so in terms of what the process looks like, in short it is think about all the things you need to do and then calendar them.

And that sounds easier than it is, which is the case for all things time management. Uh, but we’re gonna walk you through it so that [00:06:00] hopefully it doesn’t take too, too long, it’s not too, too painful, and we don’t forget the things that are really important. The guide kind of walks you through the steps.

Again, I’m not gonna read out the guide to you, so don’t worry about that. I do wanna throw out some things. I want to let you know why I have you, before you get to the list of things to do, get out a blank piece of paper if you want. I mean, you could just skip to the list if you want, but if you want, I think it’s really worthwhile.

Just sit down with a blank piece of paper first and just brain dump all the things that you can think of that you need to do. And the reason for that is. You know, this stuff on the list I think is really, really valuable. But you might have some kind of anomaly thing going on with your kids that year that sometimes when you turn to a list first, you almost close off the creative part of your brain that might think of the things that are more personal to you.

So I think it’s really important to start with a blank piece of paper if you have the time to do it, and just kind of jot whatever comes to mind down so you could think through, like each of your kids think through what grades [00:07:00] they’re gonna be in. Think through maybe what subjects they’re gonna be in.

Think about are they moving classrooms around for the first time? Are they in afterschool activities for the first time through the school? Do they have a tricky teacher that you know of? You might not know that yet, but you know, as it comes up, is it a weird social year? All just those types of things that are really more personal to your experience.

Things might come up in that, that aren’t on this guide. For example, if you have maybe an anxious kid, and they are, I think it’s sixth grade, where most schools like have the kids start kind of moving between classrooms a lot. Maybe it’s earlier, I’m not there yet. Maybe they want you to go to school with them one day before school starts and just walk around and get familiar.

That’s not actually in the guide. Maybe it should be, but those are just things that as you think about your specific kids, your specific scenarios. You might think of things that aren’t on the guide that I don’t want you to miss out on by jumping straight to the guide. So [00:08:00] just wanted to explain that.

Just so you know, that’s also a big part of the Bright Method too, is I actually have a guide like this for the whole year and I give it to clients, but I don’t give it to them until I think it’s like basically until they’ve finished setting up their foundation and everything they can think about.

Because I think that’s really important. Time management’s not a paint by numbers type of thing. And while there’s a lot of value in getting lists like this one, you want to really think about your own life first. And so that’s just what I believe in, so that’s why I just throw that out there. Just wanted to explain why that blank piece of paper is potentially more important than it comes off when you first hear about it.

Next point already mentioned it. The list is a lot. Remember, you do not need to do everything, and you definitely do not need to do it now. And that’s the whole point of this, is that you’re not doing all of this now. In fact, you cannot do all of it now. You probably don’t have, well. This is coming out in mid July.

If you start school on August 1st, maybe you have the school supply [00:09:00] list, but most of us don’t. So you can’t even do it all. But you could block time for when you think it might come out, and that is really the value here, so that you can block your time and whether that’s weekend time and hold that and protect it from activities or whatever it is, you’ll just be ready when that information comes to you, you’ll have time protected to act on it.

Next point, no segue is you’re gonna see there’s a section on calendaring emotions. And I was gonna say this is for little kids, but I suspect it’s for all. ’cause candidly, I go through my own emotions with all these transitions. So I would imagine teenagers do as well to some extent. And you might think this is pretty weird to calendar emotions.

Like I have little reminders to just give my kids more slack. During these periods of time because they’re going through it. And I also will encourage you to like block your work availability for the first half hour or hour of your workday in those first two weeks of school. Just to give yourself some breathing space so that if [00:10:00] something, you know, if it takes longer to get to school or a kid misses a bus or whatever it is, as we figure out new routines and have big emotions, you are not so stressed out ’cause you have a meeting in 25 minutes.

So. Some of that might strike you as normal, other things might not, and it might feel weird. So I just wanted to share something. I have a similar guide for the end of the school year and into the summer transition, and someone, actually, a client wrote me this that I wanted to share. It was June 6th at 7:55 AM and she said my kindergartner kiddo was melting down full tantrum in tears because he didn’t wanna go to school.

My husband looked at me and asked, what is the matter with him? I knew exactly I had planned for this. The things to calendar to make the end of school year, end of school year, summer transition easier guide that Kelly shared, suggested calendaring kid, emotionally fragile reminders for big feelings at the end of the school year and start of summer.

Prior to using the Bright Method, I never would’ve calendared feelings, but I know [00:11:00] I have a sensitive kid and he needs extra support during big transitions. So this made sense to me. I calendared, give e extra time, end of school year emotions from seven to seven 30 every day for the two weeks before and two weeks after the last day of school.

The first five weeks, the reminder popped up were no problem, but on day six, just 25 minutes after it was anticipated, the first meltdown occurred. I was prepared. I was in the right head space. I’d carved out time to be fully present and patient with him. I could tell that instead of feeling rushed or dismissed, my child felt seen, supported, and loved.

Today, the Bright Method helped me be the kind of mom I wanna be. The system helped me show up prepared and present with meaningful support for my little guy, and I really believe that the ability to do that will pay dividends in the quality of our relationship for decades to come. I get a little choked up reading that just because I know that feeling and it means a lot to me that people are feeling that.

And so I wanted to share this with you because. It might feel weird. I mean, it is [00:12:00] kind of weird to calendar emotions and things like that, but that’s why we do it. ’cause there is a real practical impact of it. And I just wanted to give you the nudge. If you have felt skeptical to try it out, it certainly can’t hurt.

It might feel a little weird, but it’s not gonna hurt and you might really appreciate the fact that you did it. Okay. Moving on to the next point. If you miss the boat on something this year, so again, pretend you’re in Atlanta, you’re getting this mid-July, one of the things on there is calendaring, back to school haircuts.

And you might be like, yeah, I really wish I had done that before. Right now, everything’s booked for the next two weeks. I can’t do it before school. Don’t beat yourself up. That is our normal response. And what I want you to think, as with any time we mess up in life, is just thinking, okay, how do I avoid this going forward?

And how I would avoid it going forward is go back. Six weeks from now, let’s say, and calendar when you wish you had scheduled the back to school haircut and calendar it and write back to [00:13:00] school haircut and repeat it annually. Like schedule back to school, haircut, repeat it annually, and you are set going forward.

And that’s the really game changing part of this is, as we discussed in the guide, all of this, not all of it, a lot of it you could calendar annually. So you could put in this front end, work on the front end and then reap this for years to come. And so just really keep that in mind as you go through this guide.

If there’s stuff in there that you’re like, man, I wish I’d done that. Or even if you’re listening to this and it’s October and you’re like, that was a disaster. What just happened? Then take this stuff and calendar it for next year. Or know that I’ll probably come out with it again next year, next summer.

But just really always think, how do I avoid this going forward? And just use that more like neutral, proactive energy than beating ourselves up for things we can’t change. Okay. Another tip, no segue is advice that is actually not in the guide, but that a more experienced mom shared with me many years ago that has really stuck with me.

That popped into mind just right now, and that is that [00:14:00] if something is troubling you about your kid, I. Like a behavioral thing or even other things, which I’ll give an example of in a second. Consider calendaring. Two weeks from now is the time she said, and I’ve adopted, and it basically, you just calendar is X, Y, Z still an issue?

If so, do this and list out your ideas of what you would do. Often she said, and I have found to be true also, is the issue resolves itself and so here’s another example. My oldest daughter is going into second grade. When she was a new kindergartner, we put her on the bus to go to school, and I was very stressed out about that because she was tiny and there were big kids on the bus, and so there was a lot of stress around it, and we did all the things that made me feel better and that I knew she had two other kindergartners on the bus.

We introduced her to the bus driver, who I love, like all this kind of stuff that was there, but it was still really stressful. At my school, you have 30 days to change your, [00:15:00] like how you’re gonna get to school set up, including the bus. And so every day I was a little bit like, because that door was open, I was stressing out about should we be doing this?

We’re doing this in large part to save me time in the morning from driving her to school and back. And I felt a little bit of guilt around that, especially ’cause she was so little and she’s on this bus with this bigger kid and yada yada, yada. And every day for the first, like let’s say three or four days, I was really stressed out about it.

Like almost all day long. Like to a weird degree, to a surprising degree. And then I remembered that advice and I remembered the fact that we had 30 days to figure it out and I didn’t need to figure it out like that day. And so I thought, okay, in two weeks from now, that’s midway through the 30 days. Let me just reevaluate.

And until then, I don’t make any decisions. I just get to observe and see how it goes. So I calendared out. I think it was those two weeks. I think I also calendared out the deadline. I think I calendared out five days before it and the day before it just to like give myself a lot of backstop measures of when I had to make that decision.[00:16:00]

And then I try to let it go and it really, really helped. I wouldn’t say, you know, it’s not like I never thought about it again, but I just kind of. Just channel that energy into more like observation, like how did it go this morning? Noticing that it actually went well some of the mornings, and by the time that two week reminder came up to think about it, it was really clear that it was a totally great decision for our family.

And so I actually just went through and deleted the rest of them. That’s kind of the point is that some of these things resolve before we have to decide, and I think sometimes our brains ruminate about the issue because we kind of think we’re gonna forget to manage it, which makes sense because often we do forget about the things that we’re just trying to keep in our brain, and so we ruminate on it.

Just trying to like hold it in our brain and make sure we don’t forget to manage it. Where if we can, again, give our brains clear indicators that we can set something down and we will come back to it and we won’t forget and we don’t have to decide something right now. It’s strange how much it helps.

It’s strange how [00:17:00] much it helps us let go, and so I just encourage you to try that as well. Whether it’s behavioral issue or anything else, just keep that in mind. Similarly, someone who has grown children told me that for her boys at least, it took them basically until Halloween to really settle into school.

And kind of every year she would get complaints from teachers about her kids were rambunctious and those kind of stuff. And she was just like. I had learned when they were little that it took them until Halloween to move from summer into school and like learning to sit for longer periods of times and things like that.

And so for her, she didn’t kind of have her own red flag go up. I mean, of course she could talk to the boys about it and things like that, but she didn’t get really concerned unless it was after Halloween and they were still kind of bouncing off the walls at school. If that’s you or if you have something similar like that again, calendaring, that stuff.

Reminding you of it so that you can kind of let it go until that point. That said, along those lines, something to [00:18:00] really think about too is calendaring out. And this kind of goes along with like the weirdness of calendaring feelings, but then also managing kid behavior type stuff is if there is something that you do wanna work on with kids, that is important.

Also calendar reminders for you to talk to them or work through that thing. So for example, back in, I think it was pre-K, so I don’t feel too, I don’t talk about my kids very much in terms of them personally, but this one feels. Very age appropriate. And a while ago, you know, we went through a period where the teachers were like, you know, when your oldest doesn’t want to do the activity we’re doing, she doesn’t very willingly come over to do that activity.

And that’s the kind of thing that I’m like, okay, I wanna talk to her about it. I need to talk to her more than once about it probably. And I am totally afraid forget to talk to her about that. So I calendared. I think it was like. On Tuesdays and Thursdays or maybe Mondays and Thursdays [00:19:00] every week, right in the morning when we’re getting ready for school.

Just a reminder, hey, we do listen to teachers as long as they’re asking you because I’m crazy. Like I caveat it with like, as long as you’re in a group and they’re asking you to do something the whole group is doing, or things like that, we do what teachers say and just make sure that we’re being like cooperative as part of like the team of the classroom.

I said those to her, you know, those two times a week and within a couple weeks the teachers were like, it’s really paying off. And more of the point is, is if there’s stuff you need to work on with your kids, like little reminders or things like that, use your calendar to remind you when it’s time to do that.

Because your brain, I mean, we got so many other things going on your brain, it’s not gonna remember, it’s okay. It’s okay if your brain doesn’t remember, but use the system outside of you to still get where you wanna go. All right. Those were my random little aside that relate to the guide, but I wanted to talk out a little bit more beyond the guide.

I hope that’s helpful. All right. That’s it. I hope you [00:20:00] see how magical this is and how it really can give you so much peace of mind. And if you like this approach, I really think you’ll love the whole Bright Method system where we do this across your entire life. Personal and professional, one-off strategies like this back to school approach are really, really fun and very effective.

But the game changing magic happens when you use the full system and do this across all of your roles in your whole life. Just so you know, enrollment for my next program opens in September. If you wanna give it a try for free before then jump into my free five day program, the reset and Refresh. You can sign up at kelly nolan.com/refresh as one woman said.

I took her free five day time management course a couple weeks ago, and it was truly life changing. I’ve read all the books, all the books on organization and time management, and in July, I reached a tipping point where I no longer felt like I was on top of things. I took her free course, and oh my gosh, did it change my rhythm?

It’s like she [00:21:00] took every book I read and put it together in one method. I’m so sold on it. So jump on in at kelly nolan.com/refresh. You can also check out the full pr*****@********an.com slash bright and jump on the wait list if you’d like to, and I hope to see you in there. Thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

Links you might enjoy:

🌿 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.

Making Back-to-School Less Scramble-y & Enjoying the Rest of Summer

Full transcript:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

A bit about me

Want to try the Bright Method for free?

TM

check out my 10-week bright method time management program

Reclaim your time from your inbox

Hello, more breathing space.

Like bite-sized time management tips?