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A few weeks ago, someone sent me a quote on Instagram that knocked my socks off. Let’s dig into it.
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 today we’re gonna talk about something that I think is so important and I wanted to share it here in case you haven’t heard me talk about it yet. And even if you have heard me talk about it, I think repetition, it just can really hit differently in absorb in a different way when you hear it in a different, like through a different media or another time.
And so I wanted to share it here as well. What I wanna talk about is this. A few weeks ago, a woman sent me a post on Instagram and it read [00:01:00] As you plan your week ahead, remember that your capability and your capacity are two different things. And the quote was by Suzy Redding. And I’m gonna link her Instagram handle in the show notes if you wanna follow her.
Highly recommend. I certainly started to after reading this, and I just, man that quote, hit me. I just wanna say it one more time. As you plan your week ahead, remember that your capability and your capacity are two different things. And this is something that I think I have been trying to get at. I mean, I certainly focus on capacity in terms of what we can do and you know, also what we can do and enjoy life still and all this kind of stuff.
And sometimes there’s this resistant in clients that I’ve. Kind of understood but not fully understood. And I think that this distinction between capability and capacity explains a [00:02:00] lot because I think there is something going on with at least some of us, and maybe not all the time, but some of us at sometimes where we view our capacity as the same thing as our capability, and they’re not.
So often we load up our plates, we load up our capacity with versions of I can do all of this. I should be able to do all of this. I want to be able to do all of this. And on some level, we probably can, like we are capable of doing all of the things individually. You look at all the things you wanna do and you are capable of doing them all.
The hard part is that we don’t have the capacity to do it all. That’s a major key distinction and one that I am so grateful that Suzy put into words ’cause capability, you know, is having the skills and the ability to do something. And my guess is you listening have that in spades for almost anything you wanna do.[00:03:00]
Capacity recognizes that we all have limited time to do things, and often our capacity is already very full with many things that we need to or we want to do. Recognizing that you have limited capacity and cannot do all the things, is not admitting weakness, a lack of capability, that you’re not smart enough, that you can’t hack it, whatever else you think.
On some level, it’s not the same. In my opinion, it is quite the opposite. I believe that recognizing that you have a limited capacity, first of all, is just recognizing an objective fact. It is an objective fact that you have a limited capacity. Recognizing that reality makes you smarter. It makes you braver ’cause you have to make decisions based on that information.
It helps you lead more strategically because you’re making tough calls instead of living in denial of that fact. [00:04:00] It makes your life more enjoyable because you can infuse breathing space into it as part of what you want, you realistic workload that matches your capacity to be. It helps you be more present with loved ones because when you understand and embrace the limits of your capacity and strategically tailor and design your workload to match it, you know you can turn it on and off most of the time Again.
We’re realists here. Sometimes there are emergencies, but most of the time you’re able to turn it off for an evening or even a period of time if you’re gonna log back on later, knowing that it is realistic and you’ve embraced your capacity and can still knock your goals outta the park. But realistic goals given you capacity and the sooner we separate these concepts of capability and capacity and recognize the limits of our capacity.
I believe the happier and more effective and less stressed out will be. [00:05:00] I also think that this recognition and respect for limited capacity will help you demonstrate your capability to others like the people you work with, because you’ll be doing things well and on time versus. Saying yes to everything because you’re living in denial of the limits of your capacity doing work below your usual standards because you don’t have the capacity to do everything well, and you’re overloaded and you’re scrambling.
Instead, you take on a workload that more matches your capacity and therefore can do it well, and that helps you do the work well and enjoy your life more in the process. Now, I wanna throw out here that this is an area. That even just take the capacity. I really struggled to understand what my capacity was for a really long time in my first couple years practicing law.
I mean, I felt, I felt very underwater. I was pretty sure my capacity was far outstripped by the work [00:06:00] itself, but I didn’t know how to measure it and read it in a more concrete and objective way that would help me. Determine whether I needed to stop taking on more work or not. People countless times would swing by my office and be like, Hey, do you have the capacity to take this on?
Or, Hey, do you have the bandwidth to take on a new matter? Or, Hey, can you help me with this, like just thing that I need done this week? And I didn’t know, like, I mean, I didn’t know how to measure that. And so I’m sitting there and I find, especially as someone who like. Leans towards people pleasing still, and definitely did when I was younger.
If in doubt, I say, I said yes, and so that’s what I would do. I would be like, I mean, I, I’m pretty sure I’m underwater, but I don’t really know and I don’t know how to articulate it, so I’m just gonna keep saying yes and I’ll get more underwater. That’s essentially what was happening, and so I just wanna throw that out here that.
You’re like, this all sounds great, but like how do I know what my capacity [00:07:00] is? That’s not weird to me at all. I’ve been there. I’ve lived there for a very long time. I know the kind of confusion and the frustrating results that flow from that confusion. And so I just wanna point out that for me.
Understanding capacity really shifted only when I started using the Bright Method and using my calendar as a way to understand in a visual, more objective way, what is my capacity. What are all the things I’m doing with my day? How full is my capacity? In light of that, if I took something on, what would that look like?
What would that do to everything else on my plate? What would that do to my capacity? And then help. It just all helped make it more concrete in a very important way. And I’ll note that a lot of clients. Note that as being a very critical win of the Bright Method. Whether they’re talking about, Hey, this is allowing me to prioritize and have conversations more effectively, or they’re saying, I’m saying no for the first [00:08:00] time in a way that maybe has some feelings around disappointing people in a bad way, but the decision about whether to take something on.
The emotions out of it because it’s an objective fact that I look at my calendar and I see there is absolutely no way that I can fit this in. So the decision is a clear, no, I’m not trying to say it’s magical and that you like never feel guilt again, but I believe that the guilt is significantly diminished because you’re not torturing yourself with that.
Well, could I have done it? Like if I really care, could I have squeezed it in? You see in a, again, that more objective, visual way? No. There’s no space for it. And it helps remove a bulk, like a big bulk of the emotion out of these decisions in a really awesome way. And I’ll note in a way that has nothing again to do with your capabilities, your intelligence, your smarts, all of that.
It’s just a math equation essentially about in relation to your capacity in the [00:09:00] hours of your day. And that is very. Game changing for many of us, and very empowering. And so if you want a taste of that, check out the free five day program. It’s at kelly nolan.com/refresh. And for everyone, I just wanna reiterate it one more time.
As you plan your week ahead, remember that your capability and your capacity are two different things, and I love Suzy’s words on that, and I will expand on it and say. As you plan your next week, the holidays, the end of this year, and look ahead to next year, remember that you are incredibly capable and you have limited capacity.
Both are true. So as you plan, embrace the limits of your capacity so that you can plan strategically to show off the capabilities that you wanna flex and enjoy. Make strategic calls about what gets done, what will not, and what will happen later on [00:10:00] or on a smaller scale. And if you need help figuring out capacity, get it, whether it’s the Bright Method or something else, if you don’t know how to gauge your capacity, very fair.
But don’t sit there, go get support, whether it’s with me or someone else to figure that out, because that is game changing when you have that. I hope that was as fun to think about for you as it was for me, and I hope to see you in the free five day program if you need it. And 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.
