"Brain thinks I need an hour chunk to start. Such a loss."

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On Instagram, someone shared that their biggest work time management painpoint was this: “Hard time focusing during short periods. Brain thinks I need an hour chunk to start. Such a loss.” I very much get this feeling. Let’s talk about three things that might help.

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, and welcome back. Alright. So recently in an effort to make sure that whatever content I’m putting out there in whatever form that it’s relevant to people. I asked on Instagram, what are people’s biggest work, and then also personal and home life pain points. And on the work front, someone wrote in and said, hard time focusing during short periods, brain thinks I need an hour chunk to start such a loss.

I totally get that feeling and so I wanna talk about [00:01:00] that today. Really, I think we can all relate to that, where you crave an hour or hours on end to get that like real work done, and you just kind of think, if I just could have this period of time, then I could dig into all of this stuff and you’re just not getting it for whatever reason.

We don’t even have to go into the reasons you’re not getting it. And there are some things we could try to do to get you, you know, that hour or multiple hours or hour and a half, whatever you’re aiming for. There are things we could do to try and get them, but let’s just assume for the sake of today that you can’t, you’re just your work environment.

Again, whatever reason. It just doesn’t allow you to get that. And so you just end up with these kind of windows of time, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, but never really a full hour. And so let’s talk about that today, like what to do when that’s your life. And you only have those smaller windows and your brain just kind of thinks, I can’t really do, can’t really do this kind of stuff.

Like I can’t dig into a whole lot of useful, so [00:02:00] I’ll just do something else. And that’s something else could be anything. It could be wandering around and talking to colleagues. It could be scrolling on Instagram, it could be going online somewhere and shopping, whatever it is. Like your brain just assumes I can’t do much with this, so let’s just do something else and not even try to get to the things that we might wanna do.

So three things come to mind. The first is, I think it’s worth showing and just paying attention to, like intentionally trying to show your brain that it’s wrong and really shifting the narrative on what it needs to do productive things. And my guess is you’re already doing this. I don’t think that you’re already doing things, I mean, in smaller windows of time than an hour.

And I totally get that on the work front. It can feel different, but still. I think we all can just, even if it’s just in our personal life that we see ourselves doing this, like just really paying attention to that and showing our brain that we can do things in little windows of [00:03:00] time and we don’t need full hours to do anything.

I bring this up, even though it sounds kind of silly, is I do think our brains kind of get caught in narratives. I think that we just kind of think. A certain way and then when we actually like look up and think about it, which sometimes we don’t do, it’s kinda like, wait, that’s not actually true. And we can really help ourselves by just kind of re grooving in our brain.

The narrative that we have about that thing. Like an example for me is that for a long period of time, the kind of undercurrent in my brain around motherhood. Not all the time, but like there was a very strong narrative in my head of motherhood is really hard, and that was very valid and based on a lot of evidence in my life, like.

It is hard. It was hard. And at a certain point there was a almost a moment where I was like, I think actually we’re in a good phase right now, and I’m kind of still in my head. Living the narrative of motherhood is really hard, [00:04:00] and maybe at least for this chapter of my motherhood, it’s actually not as hard as it used to be, and it’s much more enjoyable, and I think that.

There was value in that, of that realization of being like, huh, that narrative which was true for a period of time no longer applies. And if I just look up and look around and kind of redefine in my mind what motherhood is in this chapter, it doesn’t have to be that hard. And it just kind of does require like just self-awareness and being a little intentional and like almost talking yourself a little bit to retrain your brain about it.

And so I think. It’s worth challenging yourself on that here. You know, the comment was, brain thinks I need an hour chunk to start and I think that there are probably a lot of examples you can point to where you get a lot done in less than an hour and it’s just kind of just training your brain to pick up on that.

I think it, it’s easier for me to think of examples at home without knowing what industry this person or you listening are in. But I think at home there are a lot of examples, like if you put on [00:05:00] a 20 minute timer and don’t listen to any music or audio books or anything, you’re just like 20 minute timer.

Here we go and clean your house. It is amazing what you can get done in 20 minutes, especially without listening to anything in a headphone. And I’m not saying that we should always. Do that in our 20 minute windows. I’m not advocating for like, I like kind of puttering around the house and doing it slower at night with a fun audio book in my ears.

But if you wanna show your brain that you can get a lot done in 20 minutes, there are ways to do that, including this. I also think, you know, if you have like a 20 minute window at work and this, I’m kind of jumping ahead to my next point, but I do this to myself, is. Giving yourself like, okay, I’m gonna go to the bathroom, I’m gonna get another cup of coffee, and then I’m gonna get this like one annoying task done.

And just really showing your brain, hey, if we, when we take advantage of these little pockets of windows, we actually can get a fair amount of this done. That feels really good. Even if what you’re getting done is email, like let’s say you’re just. [00:06:00] I don’t really know what to do with these 20 minute windows, but for the rest of this week, I’m gonna say when I stumble upon an awkwardly short window of time and my brain is like, you can’t do anything.

Don’t even start. I’m at least gonna bang out emails. And you just kind of see how it goes. And as I said, my guess is you’re already doing this to a degree, even if you’re not appreciating it. And so just. Be on the lookout for yourself for when you are actually already taking advantage of little pockets of time at work and what you’re doing with it.

Just again, to train your brain to look for evidence that you can do a lot in less than an hour of time. Point two a little bit alluded to it, but we’re gonna dig into it, is my guess is that one of the things going on is not that an hour, or I’m sorry, less than an hour, half an hour, 40 minutes is insufficient to do something.

It’s that it’s taking a lot of that shorter window of time [00:07:00] to figure out what to do. I think that that kinda spinning if, if every single 30 minute window you roll up on requires you to spend five minutes trying to figure out what to do next or even two minutes and like spending that energy and thought process on like, what should I do during this window?

I can completely see why. Either you get like overwhelmed or it feels like too much, or you’re just like tired by the time you decide on what to do and you just don’t end up using that window. What I encourage you to do, and you could just try this out, is sit down, pick one of the 20 minute windows and do this exercise in.

Pick five, 10 minute tasks, just like five 10 ish minute tasks. Find five 30 minute windows in your schedule and schedule one task per window and just see how that plays out. I did mention like a 10 minute task versus a 30 because I find that we are, especially if this is new to you, we’re really bad at estimating how long things take.[00:08:00]

And my guess is you’ll get like three of those done and two of them you’ll still need more time for. And that’s okay. Just calendar another, like move it to another block of time. But I think that that might. The difference of, if you can imagine approaching a 30 minute window and then looking at your to-do list and email and post-it notes and trying to figure out what to do, how that feels, versus rolling up to a 30 minute window where you have one clear 10 minute task of what to do.

There’s just a really different feeling and energy going into that window, and I would love for you to just experiment with it and see how that plays out. So. Just try that over the next week and see how that plays. The reason I thought about this is I actually had a client and one part of her like feedback and testimonial at the end of working together, after going through one of my programs, she said, I often find that I end up with several 30 minute windows throughout the day, in between meetings in the past.

I would get to [00:09:00] that window and not know how I could best use such a small amount of time. I couldn’t get big projects done, and I didn’t know which small tasks I should be doing at that time. I would feel overwhelmed and kind of write off those small windows and then end up with tons of work to do at the end of the day.

Now that I’m living in my calendar, I have a game plan for those small windows and I can knock out small but important tasks without having to spend time in the moment figuring out what to work on. It’s made me significantly more productive during the day and I’m able to wrap up work earlier with less to do at night, and I should really just, that should be the podcast is what she just said, but essentially that really gets to the heart of it.

That’s what I want you to be able to do and start playing with and scene is take. Five, 10 minute tasks, scatter them over 30 minute windows over your next week or two and just see how it goes. And then it’s something you can build on if you decide it’s the right fit for you. Another idea, and this was actually just happened as I was prepping for this podcast, is [00:10:00] a different client wrote in a comment on Instagram, on a post about just something else.

She said What she does, what’s a big win for her is scheduling low mental load tasks while I’m waiting for kid activities. Sending a thank you note, filling out school paperwork. The kid activity parking lot is my home admin time and I just think that it’s a little bit different than what we’re talking about, but very similar is it’s like kind of those just like little weird pockets of time in your day that you’re like, I can’t really do anything here.

And again, I am not saying you need to be productive all the time, but I do think. It will benefit you to use some of those windows of time to get those things that are weighing for you done so that then when you do get to the windows of time where you wanna relax, you feel a lot better about it. ’cause there’s not like, you know, 50 little things stressing you out in the corners and you know of your to-do list.

You’ve actually accomplished a fair amount of them. And if you really embrace the bright method, have a plan for when you’re going to do the rest of them in the future [00:11:00] and can really relax. Okay, so 0.1 is just help show your brain that you can do more than in windows of time that are less than an hour.

You could start experimenting with that, or you can just notice when you’re doing it already. Point two is. Help not have to go through the decision fatigue process of picking what to do during each window. Instead, proactively sit down, pick five, 10 minute tasks and assign them to tasks like Windows and hope.

My goal is over time, you could even do a little bit more of that, but I think that’s a great place to start is picking five, 10 minute tasks and assigning them to five different 30 minute windows and seeing how that goes. The final point is a little bit of a combo of the above. In that, what I would recommend doing is breaking things down like farther than you might be.

Now, I have no psych background or anything. I don’t have any studies to back this up. [00:12:00] It’s just like my own anecdotal evidence doing what I get to do. But my guess is, is that there’s something going on in this question. It’s a little bit more about feeling overwhelmed by the bigger tasks and projects in their life, and it feels really big, and so it feels like you need at least an hour to get started on it.

And so, yes. You need longer time and there are situations where you do need longer time. I’m not like trying to say that you never do like there are, and you know, again, I, I try and work with clients on finding pockets of those times. And even an episode or two or three ago was about doing something a little more creative and like telling everybody you’re taking a day off and actually protecting the focus time.

I was talking about it in the more of the sense of strategy work, but it uses time for whatever you want it to be. So yes, there are some times where we need more time, but there are [00:13:00] sometimes that I think that if we broke things down into smaller bites, then we could get started on it in smaller pockets of window.

When we have the clarity around what are the smaller bites. I think this helps with the fact that if you don’t have big chunks of time, this is a way to move the ball forward without those big chunks of time. And it addresses that overwhelmed feeling that we were talking about that very understandably might be causing you to kind of procrastinate.

Getting started using the excuse of, I don’t have big enough windows of time. That that feels like a very rational thing to be like, well, it’s a big project. I don’t wanna, I need big time to do it. I don’t have big time, so I can’t start. Where I think that maybe you could start, it’s just gonna look a little bit differently than the like perfect way you might be envisioning.

And just to be very clear, I very much empathize with this. There’s like zero judgment and you might not even be aware of it that you’re doing it. [00:14:00] And so I just wanna point it out that if it feels like it’s you and you’re like, yeah. That’s me. Then an approach is totally fine. Just how are we gonna avoid this going forward?

Break it down, like break it down farther. What you could do is spend one of your upcoming 20 or 30 minute windows just breaking down a big project and then sprinkling two three of those smaller tasks into upcoming 20 to 30 minute windows and seeing how that goes. Now I just wanna throw out there that if this is hard for you, very fair.

This is a whole chapter in the Bright Method program. This is like a whole week’s worth of lessons where we talk about a six step process to break projects down and what that looks like and how to do it and all kinds of stuff. And I say that not to be like, join my program, even though I’d love that.

It’s more that when I was overwhelmed, it really irked me when people just threw advice out there as if it were easy. I should be able to know how to do it, all that [00:15:00] kind of stuff. And then I would go to implement and I would really struggle and I would think there was something wrong with me. And so that’s why I’m flagging this, that if you can do this and run with it, awesome.

If you need more support or you are a little bit lost on that, also totally normal. And just please don’t feel bad, just please know it’s normal. Even if you work with someone else, great. Just don’t beat yourself up for struggling with it or think there’s something wrong with you. I think a lot of this stuff is easier to talk about, like dramatically easier to talk about than it is to implement.

Okay. That said, I think it is worth trying out. If you want, just spend one of those 20, 30, 40 minute windows breaking down something that’s been stressing you out. Like pick the thing that’s been stressing you out and try and break it down as best you can. Even just do it with pen and paper. Save it in a Word document, do an Apple note, whatever you wanna do, break it down, and then pick the first couple steps that you can see and scatter them across some upcoming windows and see how that goes.[00:16:00]

So that’s really bringing a combination of like kind of the mental shift to this, but then also that it helps with that decision fatigue. Like, you know, the in step or in 0.2 I was talking about, pick five, 10 minute tasks, maybe some of those 10 minute tasks are these things that you just broke down. And some of ’em might just be like sending an email to a client or a different department to get information.

Like that’s one of the tasks and you can get that ball rolling and that feels good.

You can do that gets balls rolling with someone else. That’s really useful to get started now because then that information or their response or all of that is back when you’re ready to keep moving forward. And I hope that helps. I think it’s just really important to understand that there are many ways to get to the end of a project.

And yes, one of them could be big chunks of window, like big windows of time, but there are ways to get there with smaller windows of time and maybe a couple big chunks [00:17:00] that you can really protect down the road. That is another way to get there too. And so. Just be suspicious of that kind of, I have that perfectionistic thought of like, well, if I can’t sit down and finish this and wrap it up with a bow right now, then why even start?

Especially when there’s so many other things I could do that I could complete, and I completely, completely get that feeling. And so I hope that this helps give you an alternative like route to take to just keep moving the ball forward. I do think that some of these really daunting things become a lot less daunting just by chipping away at it.

Just by starting. The more you start, the more you get a clarity around where you might go. You’re not maybe gonna see the full game plan on the front end, but you just get a little bit more clarity as you start. And then over time, to me, like clarity makes things a lot less daunting. Okay, so I hope that helps.

Short stretches really can be awesome. I think sometimes we think that [00:18:00] we need the bigger windows. We want the bigger windows, and sometimes then when we get them, we find that we actually get really distracted after 45 minutes or an hour. And that maybe, maybe store short stretches are a good fit for us.

And so I hope that this episode gives you some ideas of how you could, you know, really just take advantage of the smaller pockets of time that you have in a way that’s realistic and doable, and helps you really feel like you’re moving the ball forward, even if it looks different than you had previously thought was the right way, quote unquote, or the way that you really wanted to do things.

And just to reiterate, I am not saying you need to be productive during every small like window of time in your day, but if we can help you take advantage of some of them, especially those during your work hours and help you wrap up work earlier and close loops and really be able to check out at the end of the day, then that is a big win as well.

Alright, and if you are interested in learning the Ful Bright Method, know that my program opens up on September 10th, which at the rate this year is flying. We’ll be here before we know it. [00:19:00] To join the wait list, you can go to Kelly nolan.com/bright. There’s a place to like enter your name and email right at the top and do that.

You get a lot of information about the program, the pricing, the program, and the pricing info is also on the same page that all of that’s on. So if you wanna check that out before you join the wait list, please do like, just know that that’s all there. There are PDFs on that page that you can link to to see if your employer would reimburse for the cost of the program.

And just know that if you join the wait list, you can get all that information as well along with like more information also about like when scholarship applications open up and things along those lines. So jump on the wait list if you’d like, if you’re not sure. Very fair. If you wanna get a sense of the bright method and you know what it is, and also just kind of my teaching style.

If you wanna see it more visually, I know you listen to me here, but it could be different, you know, I get it. You wanna see like more of like what the course might look like on the inside and teaching style and all that kind of stuff. Just try out my free five day program. It’s called [00:20:00] The Reset and Refresh, and that is at kelly nolan.com/refresh.

And I know that a lot of people, like, there are a lot of people who take it and they’re like, I’m set, I’m good. And off they run. But it also gives you a great taste of what I’m all about, what my program’s all about, what the method is all about, to see if it’s the right fit for you for taking the full program.

All right. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I am an open book and be happy to help you and I hope to see you in one of them. And more importantly, thank you for being here and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

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“Brain thinks I need an hour chunk to start. Such a loss.”

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