3 Tips for When You're Exhausted But Your Calendar Looks Fine

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Episodes mentioned:

About general energy > Episode 9
About mistakes people understandably make time blocking > Episode 22

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 what we’re gonna talk about is what do you do if you are exhausted, even when your calendar looks fine. So it’s pretty confusing because you’re like, my calendar looks like it should be fine, but I’m really exhausted and I know I was busy all day, but I can’t even remember what I did.

And I just feel like I didn’t get enough done, and it’s not a great feeling. So I wanna talk about three really, like low lift, easier ways to start. Solving that issue, [00:01:00] explaining that issue and solving it so that you can start getting a taste of a life that doesn’t feel like that. And I thought it’d be helpful to put these into a guide.

So I’m gonna put a link to grab the guide in the show notes so you can grab it right under wherever you’re listening in the show notes. And just know that some of the things that I’m gonna talk about in this episode and in the guide are gonna be things that you might have heard me talk about before, but.

A huge part of this is implementation. Knowing something is of course useful, but implementing it is only when you’re gonna get the results, which I tend to do. I’ll like listen to something. I’m like, well, I know that, but I’m not doing it. So if you are similar, use this episode as an opportunity to actually apply this stuff so you start getting the benefits of it.

That is a huge part of what we do inside the Bright Method. 10 week program. Yes, I teach you more strategies than you learn here, but in addition, I help you really implement with detail, with clarity [00:02:00] of what to do, all that kind of stuff. Implementation is key. And so even if you hear me talk about things today that you’re like, yeah, I know that.

Are you implementing? And you won’t get the results until you do. So make sure you do. And if you’re not gonna do it right now, fair, remind yourself to do it. Put it. Calendar it for later. Implement some of these things for real. Okay? Again, we are addressing how to deal with it if you are exhausted at the end of every day, or just generally in life right now.

But your calendar looks fine and we are gonna set aside the fact that the world is on fire. And I also am not gonna dig into kind of energy things, which are more, well, I mean, there’s a bit of overlap as there always is, but episode nine also talks about the year of ease. So. Just know that obviously we cannot solve all worldly exhaustion right now with a couple little tips, but we also can’t wait for the world to calm down to feel some relief.

And so I’m gonna try and help us get [00:03:00] there with some practical tips that will help give you some of that clarity and peace of mind, and less exhaustion and more reasonable workload and all of that today. So tip number one is, and it, it’s more like explanation number one, and then will, it’ll lead us into the tip is your calendar doesn’t contain everything you’re doing, so your calendar looks fine and that’s why you get confused when you look at it and you’re like, why do I feel so tired?

My calendar looked like it was doable. It, it doesn’t look that crowded, like what’s going on? But it doesn’t contain everything you have going on. And some symptoms of this are, you have long to-do lists that live elsewhere. You have post-it notes with things written on ’em that live elsewhere. You have meeting notes and notebooks with action items that live elsewhere.

Your email inbox is a whole other to-do list created for you by other people. Not my saying somebody else’s, but a good one. Your action item, like when you look at your calendar and you see whitespace, your brain knows it’s not, oh, I have nothing to do, [00:04:00] instead of like hunt and pecks out to go find all those to-dos other places.

And that’s a big reason because obviously if you’re looking at your calendar and you’re like, it’s fine, but a lot of stuff isn’t in there that explains why your calendar’s confusing you in a sense and. What we can do instead is make things visual so that we see, hey, are my expectations of what I wanna do today across all the places where the to-dos live, including my head, are they reasonable?

Are they doable? Can I at least see them so I can appreciate all I’m doing and understand why I am doing this? And then, you know, maybe make adjustments. I talk a lot on this podcast about mornings, so I’m not going to do that. That’s a usual example I talk about when we talk about like the invisible to-dos, and so I want to pick a more concrete one that I’ve heard really great feedback on from people who maybe haven’t been doing this, but we’ll start to after they listen to me talk about it here.[00:05:00]

And so I want to cover it today, and it is calendaring out any commuting and I mean commuting, like driving, walking, any travel time. However you’re traveling, train all that calendar out any commuting time to and from meetings and appointments, not just your commute to and from work, which I would love that for to be in there too.

But anytime you have a doctor’s appointment, anytime you have a vet appointment, anytime you have a hair appointment, anytime you’re doing a site visit, going to see a client, anything. Meeting a friend for coffee, meeting a client, colleague, anyone for coffee. Calendar out your drive time there and your drive time home.

And I like to build and wiggle room for the drive time home in case things run over. And so to make this really concrete, and this is in the guide, so if you want to grab the guide, just grab it in the link in the show notes below. Look at the next two weeks in your calendar and for any [00:06:00] meetings or appointments that need any travel.

Even honestly walking from your office to somewhere else, like anything calendar time to get there. You know, if you have, let’s say an appointment from one to 2:00 PM somewhere that you have to drive to, you’ve never been there before. You don’t know what parking’s like. You don’t know how to get to the, you.

Right. Doctor’s office, all that kind of stuff. Let’s say it’s from one to 2:00 PM I would calendar, drive and park from 1230 to one if it takes 20 minutes to drive there. So you look it up, you’re like, okay, it’s a 20 minute drive. I like doing that thing in Google Maps where you can say like, arrive at this time, and I would arrive at like five to 10 minutes depending on what you want before the event.

And then it’ll give you like a traffic estimate and that will help you know when you should leave. Also factor in if it takes you five minutes to get from your office to the parking garage into the car out, that kind of stuff factor that in too. So how long is it gonna take you to drive and park? I think of it as that way [00:07:00] and Park helps me remember the little steps that like I arrive and I don’t teleport into the office building.

I’m like, I need to get there. And so. If it was 20 minute drive, I would leave half an hour before. Just gives me, you know, I’m not stressed if I hit traffic a little bit. It doesn’t matter if I don’t know exactly where to park. It gives me some extra time to find the right place, that kind of stuff. And then I would do drive back from, let’s say, two to 2 45.

So a 45 minute window. Again, the drive hopefully takes about 20 minutes back, but. Some appointments run over a lot of them. And again, if you get some bonus time and you’re going back to work, you can always sit down and process some email before your next meeting. But it’s so much less stressful to be driving back for a meeting that you have some wiggle room time for.

And honestly, it’s just nice to come back and not jump straight into a meeting. So that’s just how I would run it. You can find your own rhythm with this, but more to the point. As a client said, she’s like, I [00:08:00] can’t teleport. I’ve discovered, and it’s like, yeah, that is the superpower. I too wish I had, but we don’t.

And, but I totally relate. I really, really want that superpower, but we don’t. And so this is a great way to try and help us understand how to build in the time for moving there. I will also say if you’re going somewhere with kids or if you are slow to get outta the house for whatever reason, factor all of that in, embrace the reality of it, factor it in.

And your life will feel less grandly because you’re actually factoring in the time you need to get to places. It’s really important to calendar this stuff partly ’cause you know, as I said, it helps you know what you’re doing, when to leave, all that kind of stuff. And it also really helps you see whether it fits with everything else going on that day.

And that’s really important. I’ve had a client who really balked at this. She was like, you want me to calendar my drives? And I was like, yeah, let’s take an example. Like what’s something you have coming up? And she later that week, had a vet appointment and I was like, how [00:09:00] long does it take you to get there?

And she was like, about 40 minutes. I was like, okay, let’s calendar that all in. That’s like an hour and a half of her day. She hadn’t been factoring that in, and it makes sense that then you look at your calendar and you’re like, why am I so exhausted where you are discounting an hour and a half that you spent in the car that day.

I will also say the nice thing with commuting is it for certain things, not all commutes, like a walk to 15 minutes to a different campus like Abu different building on your campus isn’t gonna do it maybe. But for a long drive you could schedule a phone call, you could schedule a call to a friend. You know, you can kind of think proactively like, Hey, I’m gonna have this window here.

Is there something I wanna do with it? Do I just wanna sit in silence? That can be great too, but also if you’re trying to find time to call friends or things like that, it’s a great opportunity to like spot those ahead of time so that you don’t think, oh, I should have called that friend on that drive later.

Okay. Bringing us to tip number two and just kind of zooming out again for a second. The thing we’re trying to [00:10:00] solve is I am exhausted at the end of the day. I’m almost a little bit confused why my calendar looked good, and I just don’t know what’s going on. And zooming out even farther, I want you to think about doing this across everything, like all the things that you do with your time, the things you keep in your head, the things you keep in all the other places.

If they all were streamlined into your calendar, how much more clarity you would have around what was going on in your life, what was going on today versus tomorrow versus down the road. How much better you’d be able to actually understand your capacity and your workload and how they interact, how much lighter your mental load would be, and so much more.

So I just wanna flag that for you, that that is a big part of the bright method is making everything visual so that when you look at your calendar, you do have a good sense of where your day is going, where your time is going, how you’re gonna feel, what making sure plans are [00:11:00] realistic, how they all interacted, all that kind of stuff.

In a way that I hope you get a taste of by calendaring those commuting times. Okay. Turning to tip number two, and as a reminder, we’re talking about when your calendar looks okay, but you feel exhausted at the end of the day. What do you do about it? And. One of the explanations here and then leading to a strategy is you are calendaring deadlines, which is wonderful in how we’re often taught to do it, but you are not calendaring.

All the work it takes to meet that deadline and that work typically is a lot of time. Like it can, you know, especially in a work context, can be hours and hours of time. So I think a lot of us think about this in the work context and rightfully so because. There’s so many work projects and they all have to be backed out and all this kind of stuff, and I teach a six step process to do that in the work context, but also the personal context because a lot of this stuff happens in our personal life too.

[00:12:00] So for this tip to make it more concrete, bring it to life a little bit more for you, I am gonna focus on the personal side of things, and I wanna give you a small example of like a social event. And what I want you to do is look ahead. For any social event coming up, not even when you’re hosting, like when you’re going to, and just think about all the moving little logistical pieces that come from that event that we usually manage in our head.

And sometimes we’re like, oh yeah, that party’s tomorrow. What? You know, I need to find the app or whatever you’re gonna bring that kind of stuff. We wanna lighten your load from that and spell it out. So that one, it’s visual like we’ve talked about, and we lighten the mental load, but also when it relates to this exhaustion, we can think about, well, what are all the moving pieces I need to do for this?

Do I wanna do them ahead of time so I have more breathing space so that day isn’t too scrambly or whatever it might be? And it gives you the peace of mind that you have that game [00:13:00] plan, and you don’t have to constantly be thinking about it in your head. So, for example, for a social event, you might think about showering and getting ready for the event.

When are you gonna do that? You could think about are you bringing food or beverages or hostess gift, anything like that, including planning. You know, what are you gonna bring? When are you gonna shop for it? When are you doing any prep work involved? That part I really like, ’cause I’m jumping ahead, but obviously I’m gonna jump to the part where you calendar all these things out and sometimes we have grand plans in our head, like, I’m gonna make these apps and bring them to this party and it’s gonna be wonderful.

But then when you calendar it out, you’re like, oh, I am with kids all day Saturday at different sporting events and there is no way I’m gonna be home for an hour to make these apps. So maybe the night before or the afternoon before on Friday afternoon, I should pick up some really great cold apps and have them ready in the fridge, and then I’ll just bring those to the party.

But [00:14:00] seeing that. A lot of the point is like actually making visual what we do to have our calendars reflect what’s going on in our lives, but we also then get this benefit of seeing how it all interacts with everything else in a way that we don’t typically, when we’re just keeping those types of things in our heads.

So I just gotta, I let myself get ahead there. But let’s go back to what we might do for a social event is driving to and from the event, we just covered that a bit, but thinking about that, how am I getting to this? Am I gonna line up like a Lyft or an Uber? When do I wanna check for their availability?

When do I wanna call one, do I wanna schedule one ahead of time? When should I do that? Let me calendar that reminder to do that. That can be really nice. Like on date nights if I’m going out with my husband and we both wanna have a drink and not drive. I’ll calendar like 10:00 AM on the day of the event.

You know, line up an Uber for tonight at this time. And it’s really nice ’cause then it’s just there. You might be able to do it way in advance and I could do it, but sometimes it’s nice to do it day of [00:15:00] particularly, you know, if plans change ’cause of a sick kid or things like that. You know, you don’t wanna like have to cancel your plans ’cause of a sick kid.

And then also have the Uber showed up and be like, yep, yep. Would’ve loved to go, but we’re not going, um, just salt in the wound. So I like to do it day of calendar it out to remind you and that’s great. One thing I also love doing for these types of things is thinking through when you last saw the people you’ll see there, what you talked about, what’s been going on in their lives, things like that.

I think those are the types of things that we feel weird being so intentional about. And. So we kinda almost like expect ourselves to naturally know that and just know to do that. But like we don’t, let’s say it’s a Saturday night event like. You could have, as I said, been with kids all day. You could have been, I don’t know, doing a little bit of work in the morning.

You could have been out shopping, you could have been helping a family member. You could have been with friends. Like you are distracted. Your life is full. You’re not gonna be like, [00:16:00] okay, I need to think of through all the different people I’m gonna see tonight. Just remind yourself to do It probably takes 10 minutes, maybe five minutes, but it can be really, really helpful.

And then you spend the whole time. Showing interest, showing real friendship and not on the back foot of like, oh yeah, I forgot that was going on in your life right now. So that’s another thing I like to think about. And any after events, like if you wanna send a quick thank you text or a longer note later, scheduling that out now is really nice.

As I’ve talked about previously, I am someone who like leave an event, leave a meeting, leave anything, and I’m like on to the next thing. And I completely forget about anything that came out that other meeting. And so calendaring that on the front end can be very helpful for me to be like, oh yeah, that’s the kind of thing I wanna do.

And as I said before. Just jot down or think through all the things you wanna do for that upcoming social event and calendar them all out. The point of this, and the way that this helps with exhaustion [00:17:00] is that you are not just calendaring the deadline or the big event. You are calendaring all the work or logistical steps that go into accomplishing something well, or the way you want to show up and.

By doing that, we get a good gauge of what our actual capacity or what the actual workload is in relationship to our capacity, and we can manage it. So as I said, if you were like, I’m gonna do all these things, and you calendar out when you plan to, but you see conflicts with other things, you can spread things out, you can move things around and you can manage things so that you’re not.

Riding yourself too hard at certain periods of time or scrambling and causing stress, which leads to exhaustion, and you’re just getting that better sense of what your workload is, separate from social events. What can be huge here too, is that you might think you have a reasonable amount of work on your plate, and this is a larger conversation, what I’m about to say.

This is hard to do, very time consuming, [00:18:00] harder than it feels like it should be. And this is a lot of what we do inside the Bright Method program. What I want you to hear is you might think you have a reasonable amount of work on your plate if you are, for the most part, calendaring deadlines. And then the work that goes into those deadlines is either kind of this amorphous cloud of tasks in your head, or you have a list that lives somewhere else, but you don’t have clarity of when you take all the tasks that go with all the projects, and if you had to lay them out in your calendar.

You don’t know if they would fit. And often I have a clients who are like, it’s not gonna fit. And then we can problem solve that and make adjustments on the workload to help bring the workload in line with being reasonable. But candidly, I don’t think we can know it without doing that. There’s just no way to.

I don’t know. My brain doesn’t work that way where I can like clearly be like, yep, yep. [00:19:00] If I just see deadlines, if I just have a project list, I know what’s doable because it’s not like a number thing. I think sometimes people are like, well, if you have one thing or if you have three things to do today, that’s doable, but that’s not.

Some things require hours and hours and hours. Like one thing might not fit in a full day. So it don’t judge yourself if you don’t know how to gauge what’s a reasonable workload or not. I have not found a way to do it without laying all of this out, like as we do in the Bright Method. I’m sure there are other things I’m, I’m not saying that, but I don’t know of any other way and I certainly don’t think that we can intuitively know.

I think we are very bad at underestimating and things like that. I think we are very bad at again. Undervaluing our, the things that we are doing on the invisible labor side that aren’t in our calendar typically, and not understanding how limited our time is for one-off projects and tasks. There’s so many reasons that go into this, and I just don’t [00:20:00] think even if we kind of intellectually know it, we don’t absorb it to the point that we will take action on it until we see it visually and are confronted with that like objective evidence.

Okay, I could go on and on about that. Related to that tip three is relation isn’t related to this. Explanation is one reason why you might be exhausted at the end of the day is that you don’t have clarity about how you’re going to get all of your workload done over time. Because of that, you feel like you’d need to do it all now, and because of that you have these to-do lists, the post-it notes, all these types of things.

And on some level you feel like you need to do it all now and when you can’t because that’s impossible. You feel defeated. You feel defeated by these overwhelming to-do lists. Even when we get like some incredible thing off our plate, we just see the [00:21:00] overwhelming to-do list and feel defeated. So what I want you to start seeing here with this next practical tip is the benefit of moving away from list type things, whether it’s to-do list on a legal pad or to-do list in a digital task management app.

Move away from list type things, at least as the final stop. If you wanna have lists, but then you bridge them into your calendar, awesome. But if you are keeping lists, and that’s the final step you take when in in your planning is just creating lists. That’s a real problem because that list, like everything on that list looks the same.

Everything looks like it needs to be done now. There’s no distinction between things that take five minutes and five hours or five months. Like there’s no distinction between like, does a colleague need to be working for me to be doing this, or does an office need to be open? There’s so much that’s not clear in a list that can be clarified in a calendar.

It does not have to be that way, and so I wanna give you [00:22:00] just a tiny example of that because I think it can really, really help with this. I’m gonna warn you. I don’t want you getting the benefits of calendaring, this one thing and then being like, this is awesome. I’m doing it for my whole to-do list because.

My guess is your calendar does not account for a lot of things that are already going on in your life. Like the invisible to-dos we were talking about in tip one. So you might look like, and you probably look like you have like a lot of time in your calendar that’s available for your to-do list. And so if you take your entire to-do list or list across all the things and calendar them, assuming like a beautiful eight hour workday that’s totally free, that you’ll get, that’s quickly gonna lead to defeat.

So just know that. That is a lot of what we do inside the Bright Method, and I teach these strategies in order to avoid that. So I just wanna flag that because I think sometimes people get really excited by the benefits of this. And then understandably, I think time [00:23:00] blocking’s harder than it sounds, honestly.

And I have an episode about that of like mistakes I see with time blocking and how to avoid them. So I’ll link that in the show notes. I’m writing that down because I forget everything and I just wanna make sure that. I just warn you on that because I don’t want you to try it. Do it with one task, see the benefits, do it with everything, have it fail, and then be like, this would never work for me, because it really could.

It’s just there’s more strategy involved than it feels like it should. There should be, and I’m not saying that just because I wanna work with people, it’s just I feel frustrated on behalf of people who give up on time blocking too early because. It sounds simple enough, and then they struggle with it and they think that they’ll never be good at time blocking or, or that like time blocking would never work for them because they calendared something and they didn’t do it.

So time blocking won’t work for them or they calendared this and it nothing went to plan, and everything looked, took longer and they didn’t get to have the plans and it was [00:24:00] worse than if they hadn’t. Those types of things. That’s all avoidable, but. It’s complicated and it’s more complicated than it feels like it should be, and I just wanna warn people of that.

Okay, let’s get to the tip because that’s the better part. The tip is, and it sounds very simple, is I want you to calendar out a one-off task so you can see how awesome it is to get it off your to-do list. All right, so what I want you to do is look at your to-do list or your post-it notes. Or your digital task management app or an email that’s requiring like a solid amount of work or something in your head.

And I want you to look for a task like that, that deep down, you know, is not going to happen until, let’s say next Thursday or two weeks from now, or two months from now, or six months from now. But even if it’s like next Thursday, we all have those, like on your to-do list, you read it every day and you’re like, I’m just, I’m not doing that today.

Think about when you do [00:25:00] wanna do it and when you have to do it and push it out. Not as far as you can. ’cause I wanna choke you. Like if a curve ball hits and you don’t get to it that day, I don’t want you to be in trouble. But let’s say you don’t have to do something for two weeks. Maybe go to, it depends on how much time this thing’s gonna take, but like a week, week and a half from now.

Somewhere in there, and I want you to think about calendaring it for them. So whether it’s responding to like a college kid who wants to ask you about your career or scheduling a car tuneup or calling a specialist about something medical, whatever it is, we all have those things on our to-do list and we write them out and we know we’re not doing them anytime soon.

And so what I want you to do. Get out your calendar, go to when you think you will do that task and calendar the thing. Call to set up the oil change or whatever. It’s at a time that works for you. And when the people you need to talk to, if there are people you need [00:26:00] to talk to, are open. So again, maybe it’s like over your lunch break, you need to call something that requires business hours and you calendar it for them.

So for example, again, if you’re like, I’m not gonna do this till next Thursday, calendar it for next Thursday. Then I want you to delete it off your to-do list. It doesn’t need to be there anymore. Your calendar is going to remind you to do it when you need to do it, and you can let it go until then if that really stresses you out to delete it, which my job is to alleviate stress, not add to it.

So I don’t wanna be doing that. I want you to mark it calendared or with a red C or whatever will flag for you. It’s calendared and that you like do not need to see it anymore. And then I want you to really. Play it out until that time or, and see how you feel. Even right now doesn’t, you don’t have to wait to see how you feel until that time rolls around.

It’s like, how do you feel right now? Because I want you to envision a place when you could do this with all of your tasks and [00:27:00] sprinkle them over time next week, two weeks from now, three weeks from now, even later this week, and have clarity of when you’re going to do things. See how they interact. See that the workload’s reasonable.

See that you don’t need to do it right now, not have it stare you down from a to-do list for days or weeks and stress you out unnecessarily ’cause you know you’re not doing it until then. We are basically like snoozing your to-dos until it’s time to do them, and they’re not staring you down until that time.

Do you like? I don’t know. I feel the difference in my body. Like do you feel how that reduces stress and helps you feel on top of things and helps you get back to paying attention on what’s important right now? Because I do, and I think that’s what’s really fun. I hope those three tips help you just start getting, I mean, one, they’re practical and I hope you get some wins coming out of them.

And I also hope it gives you a taste of like where this could go, why this works, how this helps you start [00:28:00] creating a realistic workload and a workload spread out over time, and a workload that doesn’t have to be done right now. And how much lighter and less exhausted you might feel if that’s how you’re managing everything on your plate personally and professionally.

Like everything. I’m gonna put one more tip in the guide ’cause I kept talking. So there’s gonna be a bonus tip in the guide and. So again, grab the guide in the show notes. There’s a bonus tip in there for you, and if you are interested in learning the Bright Method, but want more of a free taste of it, because I get it, time management is very personal.

The Bright Method program is a big investment. I want you to feel like, yes, this is the right fit for me. Going in. I want you to jump into the free five day program I have. I’ll also put that link in the show notes, but it’s at kelly nolan.com/refresh. And I want to read a quote from someone that I just got and she said, I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while, so I was sort of surprised at how much I learned in the five day [00:29:00] challenge.

So I hope that’s the same for you. Check it out, kelly nolan.com/refresh and I will see you in there. Thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

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3 Tips for When You’re Exhausted But Your Calendar Looks Fine

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