Answering 3 Questions: Isn't Calendaring Like This Overwhelming?

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I recently got three questions that share common thread: isn’t calendaring like we do in the Bright Method overwhelming? Summarized in my words:

Is time-blocking your personal life overwhelming?
Doesn’t this lead to a daily long list of too many alerts?
Doesn’t having to move too many boxes when time blocks hit get old?

Let’s dig into each.

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 Ian. Welcome back. Alright, so today we’re gonna talk about three questions that I got from three different women, but all kind of tie into the question of, I get that there might be benefits and putting a lot in the calendar, but I also have concerns about how overwhelming or time consuming that is gonna get.

So I’m gonna address each in turn, because they’re each unique, but they all have that same thread running through them. Now the first question was, and then I’m just gonna read her message, [00:01:00] she said, do you think this plan is right for everyone? New follower, and I love this for my workday, but it gets overwhelming to me for personal things, to have my calendar so packed.

It’s a great question or multiple questions and I just wanna address ’em. First of all, as I’ve said, and I hope is very clear, I don’t think the bright method is right for everyone in that I don’t go around thinking if you run your time a different way, then you’re doing it wrong. That is certainly not the case.

I do not think like everyone in the world should be using the Bright Method. It is just a system that was game changing for me. And over time I figured out game changing for other people and so I like putting it out there for people who are attracted to it. If it’s not for you or there are elements that are not for you, then that’s completely fine.

The one thing I will say, if you were attracted to a lot of it, but not some parts, I do encourage you to still try those parts and not rule them out [00:02:00] unilaterally, just because sometimes those parts are the game changing. Magic like gives. The system momentum, like you need all the parts in some ways to have the system fully work for you, but you definitely can still get benefits even if you don’t use the whole thing.

So that’s just a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to challenge that. That’s something I work on in my own life. I’m very much sometimes like, no, that’s not gonna work for me. And I’m like, well, why don’t we try it? Kelly and I have been wrong in that department before, and so I just encourage that for everyone.

But going back to what I was saying, no, I don’t think that the bright method is quote unquote right for everyone. I don’t think everyone should be using it. And truly, if you have a different system that works for you, keep going. I think sometimes we shiny object like think, well this could be fun to try something new, but if what you’re doing is working, stick with it.

Now back to this question though. She’s saying, I love this for my workday, like it’s working in my workday, but I don’t wanna do it in my personal [00:03:00] life because. Having it so packed. I don’t like that idea, which is very fair. I think that it be feels overwhelming in the personal life context, specifically for two different reasons.

And one might apply to you and one might not. Both might apply or neither first many women I work with initially find calendaring, the personal side of things, overwhelming. In the beginning because we’re so used to carrying it all in our heads, and we are used to, because of that dismissing to a degree, the work that we’re doing, what’s going on, how full it is.

When we carry so much in our head and it’s invisible, we’re not clear on how long things take and we’re really not clear on how much it all stacks. A great exercise. Even if you’re like, I don’t think I’m gonna do this. Just try calendaring out all the invisible things that you do each morning and each evening for a week.

And what I want you to see is even if you’re like, I don’t [00:04:00] wanna do this going forward, I would love for you to see that. Just really have your brain absorb, this is hours of my day, hours and hours of my week, and. Both, I shouldn’t dismiss that work, and I should understand that it takes over time that I thought I had to give to other things, and that might explain some things that have been going on.

When you see that, when you do that, when you lay out, you know, when you basically bright method your personal life, it is overwhelming to see how much we’re doing on that personal front and how many hours it stacks up into every day or a week because it’s overwhelming. Also to realize I don’t have the time I thought I had to give to other things, and that’s a hard thing to confront.

I mean, it’s a little bit panicky to realize that. I think it’s very clarifying. Like it shows you what’s going on. It explains why we’re overwhelmed. And then from there I hope we also take action on it and can make changes and adjustments to help with that overwhelm. But I [00:05:00] don’t discount that, even though it’s clarifying.

It is overwhelming to me. It is worth playing through that overwhelm, that discomfort, that like weird confrontation moment because. All the calendar is doing is showing you what’s already going on in real life. The calendar is just making visual what’s actually already happening, and so that overwhelming calendar is often that sign like the red flag for us, that we’re planning on doing too many things, and then we can take that information and scale back more effectively.

Share a load with a partner if you have one. Delegate, eliminate, and so on. I talk about that a bit in the episode on dealing with your current reality before building an aspiration. That’s a different topic, but we get at this of like, we need to understand the reality because then we can see it. It’s also out of our heads, so we’re not carrying it anymore.

We see it more visually and our brain is more freed up to be [00:06:00] like, okay, let’s get creative here. This isn’t working. What do we do about that? And we’re problem solving the right thing. Instead of just being like, well, it must be me, so let me work harder and have more discipline, and all that kind of stuff.

Like we start seeing, no, I’m just trying to do two hours of things in one hour every morning. And so how do I adjust that plan to make the workload fit the capacity? And so for me personally, going to this question, like really digging into the question of wouldn’t it be overwhelming to have my calendar so packed for me if I wanna do anything personal, professional?

I do want it in my calendar so I can get it outta my head, see how my planned thing interacts with all the other planned things I have on my calendar. Personal and professional. That’s why we do both. The Bright Method is not just about one, because time is time is time, and it all has to fit together in both realms, and we’re multifaceted.

Like all the realms and rules in our lives, they all have to fit together and we have to see how [00:07:00] they all stack up workload wise and so on. For me, again, this does not mean everybody has to do this, but the benefits are that almost it’s gonna get packed. It’s gonna get overwhelming because when we play through that, that’s where we get adjustments to not just change what our calendar looks like, but change what our real life feels like.

And that’s where I think that awareness, even though it leads to overwhelm, is also so powerful because it leads to change. And I just believe that. Living in ignorance around this stuff is not bliss. It explains a lot. The second reason I think it can be overwhelming is that some women believe that to do it right, to do the bright method, right, to do calendaring right, they then have to live that plan perfectly and rigidly.

I’m just here to remind you, you do not the goal, the goal is not [00:08:00] to lay it out in your calendar and effectively carve it in stone and like you must live out that plan. Exactly. The role of the calendar is, as I’ve said, really just to get it outta your head, like get it all outta your head and into a place tied to time that shows you everything you’re trying to do to help you understand is this realistic.

Is this plan realistic and it’s outta my head and I don’t have to like hold onto it with a death grip in my brain and for fear of forgetting it and then a curve ball hits and like rearrange it and hold onto with a death grip again. And that’s really the role of it, is get it all out of our head, see if it’s realistic, have someplace we can reference and so on.

The rigidity element of it, unless there’s an actual reason that something has to happen at a certain time, I’m very flexible with my calendar. If I roll up on something and it’s in my calendar and I just don’t feel like doing it, whether it’s my energy, whether it’s [00:09:00] schedule change, whether my interest in something has changed, as long as that thing can move, then I move it.

And what’s funny and like counterintuitive about this, because it’s a system that seems so rigid because we’re calendaring everything, when I started doing this. Because I treat it flexibly. I’m just as spontaneous as I used to be. But I actually enjoy any moment of spontaneity more. And the reason for that is, is before I would be like, I don’t feel like doing that thing I thought I was gonna do right now, so I’m not gonna do it.

And then I would be, you know, whether I wanted to take a nap or relax or go on a walk or do something else, like something else was calling to me. No matter what I was doing, I was always a little like anxious, uneasy of like. Well, can that thing I was supposed to be doing get done? Like is it gonna get done?

Am I making the wrong decision right now by doing this? All of those thought processes would go through my head. Where [00:10:00] now if I come up to something in my calendar and I’m like, I don’t wanna do this. If I can move it to a different time that works, maybe move something else into that space or not and see, okay, I actually can do that later today, tomorrow, later this week.

I will have time for it. It’s fine. Like it’s not gonna. Prejudice, anything that’s a lot more freeing ’cause then I can just let it go. It’s more of a neutral thing. Like I just find a new home for it and now I’m playing out a different game plan, but it’s still a game plan that I know is realistic and that I can rely on in my calendar that lets me actually soak in whatever I’m trying to do.

The nap, the walk, working on something else That feels more like in my interest right now. It’s really strange that something that looks so rigid actually for me, gives me more freedom and more enjoyment in my life as I’m being spontaneous as well. So again, just to really clarify, to me, it’s not overwhelming to have so much in my calendar because I’m not holding myself to the standard of success is playing [00:11:00] this out a hundred percent.

It’s instead. The calendar’s purpose is just to hold all of this so I don’t have to, and make sure it’s realistic. And if I wanna move things around and I can, then I can. If there are times which there are that, I’m like, no, I, I actually don’t have another place this can move to and it really has to happen now, then I know to do it.

But it happens far less often then I think we think it will. And so I just share that, that then at least I know it and I do it, and then it allows me to get it done with and move forward. But again. It doesn’t happen a ton. Often I can move things around, and that’s partly because I’m scheduling things a little bit in advance so that I’m not really tight on time and have that flexibility, and that’s just the way that I like to live my life.

And so you can move those things around in this way without living rigidly, which helps with the feeling of overwhelm when you look at your calendar. It’s just a tool that’s you’re using to design the life you want. It’s not, again, carving anything into stone and holding you to it. [00:12:00] And so hopefully that helps in terms of reducing overwhelm.

When you think about calendaring things on the personal front, it will clutter up your calendar, and I teach tech strategies to help alleviate that. I help you understand what to put in there, how to adjust what, you know, all types of things. It is harder than it sounds to do this stuff and do it well and in a way that works for you.

Is written, I shouldn’t say do it. Well do it in a way that is tailored to you, that feels good to you, that we find your rhythms with it. It’s harder than it sounds just because it’s how you’re managing like everything in your life. And it, if it were easy, I think we’d all know how to do it. ’cause we’re all really smart.

So it is harder, but it is doable. And yes, it’s going to clutter up that calendar, but it’s gonna lighten up your mind. That to me is really the most important thing. Like if I have to choose a cluttered calendar, a cluttered mind, I’m going with cluttered calendar every time. I want my freedom and my brain so that I can be present with loved ones, focus on work when I really [00:13:00] wanna focus, all that kind of stuff.

And then you approach it with flexibility and without pressure. So hope that helps on that one. The next question was, and then I’m again, I’m gonna read the quote. She said, I love the idea of thinking ahead and setting reminders. And this was in relation to like a travel post that I laid out, like a travel plans, she said.

But do you feel like the reminders stack up? So every day you’re wading through a long list of little reminders? Just curious, and this is another great question because again, it is, I mean, it’s a lot, it can be a lot of reminders, a lot of phone alerts, all that kind of stuff. And what I wanna share is.

That again, the reminders are four things we are already expecting of ourselves. We are just expecting our brain to be the reminders, and now we are just making it more visual so that our phone or our computer is the reminder [00:14:00] for us and tapping us on the shoulder to do it. What’s important here is if the alerts are overwhelming, that likely means the calendar is overwhelming.

That likely means your reality and like your expectations of yourself is too much. And so I totally get the alerts. The fear of the alerts being overwhelming is fair, but what I view it as is how to solve that is not to not use the alerts, because that’s kind of almost just being like. I’ll go back to my brain remembering it, but I’m still gonna have all those alerts or expectations of those alerts from my brain going on, and instead, we have to look a little bit deeper at, well, what are the alerts for?

Are those expectations realistic? If they’re not, or even if they’re realistic, do you want them? And if not, then let’s make adjustments to the calendar so that the alerts you’re getting every day are consistent with what you need or what you want in your life. Taking this a step [00:15:00] back to that calendar, as I’ve said, like I can see how all the plans that I wanna do, again for like, let’s say a travel day.

I can see how they all stack up during times of day and adjust or eliminate based on how I see they stack up And what I feel about that. And that helps me again, before or if now if you don’t use a system like this, you have all those same expectations on yourself to do the same things. What happens is your brain either forgets or gets really clogged up remembering all the things.

You might not do them because maybe they were unrealistic to begin with. And then we blame ourselves because we don’t have the clarity of realizing, well, maybe it’s not my brain not remembering things, or that kind of stuff. It’s more like the expectations are not what I would like for my life. And so by seeing it visually.

We can spot ahead of time. Where is there too much? Where are things too tight? Where do we wanna spread things out or eliminate or [00:16:00] delegate or all that kind of stuff? Adjust. And then we get to live with the alerts that we actually want, that our brain is not carrying, but in a less overwhelming way. And then again, I’m kind of repeating that first point, so I won’t go into it a lot.

But for the alerts, I do want to keep, they can clutter up my calendar again, tech strategies and all that, but they can. And if I want to do those things still and that’s what I want, like for that, or it’s what I need for that fa like period of time in my day, then again, I would rather have my calendar carry that load for me and remind me than my brain.

Then my brain is free to focus on other things, think about things more deeply, be creative, and have those alerts still helping me know what to do when. ’cause my brain is not an alarm clock and it’s pretty bad at that. And that’s okay. My brain is smart and I’d rather it be freed up to think about other things than remember it this time to do that thing.

There are so many other ways to get there than [00:17:00] asking our brains to do something that it’s typically not strong yet, and so, you know, let other things carry that load. The last question that came up that I thought was also really great is someone said, and I’m gonna read it again, I’m sure you answered this question somewhere, so apologies for the basic question, but how do you deal with an unexpected curve ball throwing off your plans?

Are you manually having to move every single calendar, invite back an hour, for example, and then she gave that emoji with the spirally eyes, which I love. That’s been the thing holding me back from this. It seems amazing, but also like so much manual tweaking given my experience of GCal interface. Do you have a post or a podcast episode about the basic mechanics of scooting things around and not having every other thing need to move to, and this is a really great question.

Do I wish that Google Calendar outlook calendar, apple Calendar, you could like. Highlight multiple events at once and drag them altogether? Yes, I would love [00:18:00] that does not, at least not yet. I have actually, I keep looking for Chrome extensions that it would at least do that for a Google calendar. And I do need to look again.

Maybe there is something awesome now, but last time I looked there was not, so it’s not perfect. And yes, there is a lot of manual dragging and dropping as things go on. What I wanna say is for the typical week we do factor in curve balls into plans so that there is at least somewhere for those dislodged plans to land.

So there’s that element that I just wanna throw out there that that’s important because if you’re dragging and dropping but you have nowhere of to drag and drop into, that is its own problem. And so that know that we address that. But yes, there is a fair amount, like when a curve ball hits and plans are rearranged, there’s a fair amount of like drag and drop.

And you know, there are mechanics you can do that. Like I will click drop and then use keys to hit return on my keyboard so it’s faster. Another context this comes up in is [00:19:00] like if you plan a vacation and you have all these like personal things laid out in your calendar, or even work things laid out in your calendar that are not relevant because you’re gonna be on vacation or traveling for work or things like that, there’s a fair amount of deleting too.

And so that, you know, I like just. Clicking the event with my mouse, hitting delete with my keyboard, and then hitting return. So it’s just that event I’m deleting and not like a whole series. So there are like little keyboard tweaks and things like that. You could probably also create shortcuts on a keyboard to do this depending on the platform.

So yes, there are mechanical things that happen manually, but what I wanna share is that the alternative is like that’s also still happening. In your head to some degree, like you’re having to think through, am I doing that today? No, I’m not doing that today. Okay. What’s that doing? And all we’re doing is kind of getting that clear in the calendar instead of you ruminating about it in your head.

I will also note that it takes not that long, like when you sit down to [00:20:00] rearrange plans, it can take like three minutes to move things for a small curve ball. If it’s a bigger curve ball, like someone’s sick in your house for five days, obviously that’s a bigger endeavor, but it would’ve been anyway. Yeah.

There’s that. What’s also tricky here is often, not all the time, again, I wish I could like highlight four things and just drag them all down an hour. But often things don’t work that way. It’s not like you always have, you know, you can move the whole day down. Often when curve balls hit, you’re like, this thing’s gonna have to happen tomorrow.

This thing can happen later today. This thing’s gonna happen in three days. So there is like a manual movement that has to happen, but it makes sense to me. Because there’s a nuance in that. Like when you’re looking at things, you’re like, okay, I just lost two hours of my workday. I’m gonna have to reprioritize the things I was gonna do the rest of the day.

I don’t have two extra hours maybe today to do it. And so when am I gonna move these things around? Sometimes, sure, you could drag things down two hours or things like that, but [00:21:00] often you can’t. And so having to move things around more one by one is to me, not a problem. And makes a lot of sense because I do have to bring my brain into it based on, okay, now that things have changed, what is the new priority among these things?

When are they gonna have to happen across all these days, in addition, on a vacation type thing? I find seeing those things still very valuable. So as I’m planning a work trip and I’m deleting all the things I normally do in my personal life, there are little things that are triggered like. My walk olive alarm, like alert.

If we’re going outta town as a family, that’s a reminder to book boarding for Olive. If my husband’s staying in town, it’s an alert to make sure that that’s on his plate for the week, the weekend that I’m gone. If I’m deleting things on vacation for like bed and bath time with my kids, then that’s a reminder of like, Hey, do we wanna get some childcare for that vacation?

Do we wanna have [00:22:00] like one night where we can go out and not have to do that type of thing? Seeing the nap times for my youngest is a reminder of like, are we gonna be trying to nap on this vacation? When’s that gonna look like? What does that do to our plans? So it’s just things like, I guess I’m not sure.

I’m doing a great job articulating this. The manual movement that has to happen to your calendar when curve balls hit or planned, vacations hit, or all this kind of stuff can be time consuming. I find that it’s not that time consuming. It’s kind of like an annoyance a little bit, but it’s not very time consuming.

It often flags issues or is required to account for the nuance. Such that I see a benefit in it. It’s one of those things like it’s kinda annoying to do, but there is benefit in doing it a lot of the time, or at least necessity due to those nuances. And it’s happening anyway. And so whether we’re doing it in the calendar, visually outside our head, seeing how it interacts with everything [00:23:00] else, or we’re just doing it in our head to a degree, then.

That to me it’s happening anyway, I’d, I would rather do it in my calendar out of my head and see how it plays with everything else. So I hope that that helps. It’s a great question. I don’t wanna sugarcoat that. Like, yes, there is, manual planning is time consuming. I think that’s also partly a struggle that we all deal with, is that we view planning as.

Administrative and optional and something that should be fast and in reality, I think that planning is really project managing our entire life. And it’s not just administrative work. You know, I think in the same way as we were dismissing like invisible tasks before, when we dismiss planning that way, of course it feels.

Awful to be in the calendar and a waste of time and all that kind of stuff, but when we view it as this is how we manage the logistics of our entire life and all [00:24:00] of our roles, it is complicated because my life is complicated, and if I can do this in a way that acknowledges the complication, but also helps me deal with it on the front end and not have to handle it the rest of the time for the most part, and have it all outside my head and all of that.

Then I think we give more respect to what it is of like project managing life, you know, in the same way that we do all of this on the work front, I think there are real benefits at doing it at home. Not to over-engineer or structure the personal life, but to actually reduce the mental load and allow us to enjoy the personal life and be more intentional about it in a way that feels good to us.

So I hope that that helped. It was kind of a theme of. Isn’t this kind of overwhelming when you do it? And to me, what it really comes down to is you’re already doing so much of this and you get to decide whether you’re doing it in your head and [00:25:00] weighing down your brain and clogging up your brain and thoughts by doing this all in your head and holding onto it there.

Or do you wanna let a tool that’s designed to manage time carry that load for you? And to me the answer is clear, but it’s totally up to you. If you’re ready to dig into this and learn the bright method, I would love to work with you so we can set this up for you in your personal and your professional life, and help you deal with all those repetitive and one-off things in a way with.

Less mental load, more clarity, a reasonable workload, and less stress. Please join me inside the program, Kelly nolan.com/bright. You can learn all about it there. Get reimbursement from your employer if you would like. There are PDFs to help you do that and never hesitate to reach out to me on email or on Instagram with any questions that you have. And I’ll catch you in the next [00:26:00] episode.

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Answering 3 Questions: Isn’t Calendaring Like This Overwhelming?

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