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When I used to think about time management, Past Me assumed, on some level, that the goal was to keep work in work hours and personal life in personal hours. But in reality, life is far more nuanced — and that’s where the powerful dynamic of flexibility and accountability comes in.
In this episode, I share how hearing Jeanelle Teves’ (click here for her Instagram profile) statements about how high flexibilty comes with high accountability put to words something I’d been learning was the real goal for many women when it comes to time management. Over the years, I’ve realized that what many professional women actually want is flexibility in their schedules to fit in real life into their work hours – workouts, doctor’s appointments, family needs – while still being highly accountable to the work they’ve agreed to do.
We’ll talk about:
- How my definition of successful time management shifted from “free up nights and weekends” to creating a system that flexes with different life phases.
- Why flexibility matters more than rigid schedules.
- How to distinguish between healthy flexibility and an unsustainable workload that can’t be solved by accountability alone.
- Why learning a system over a schedule empowers you to evolve your approach as your life changes.
This is a reminder that flexibility in time management isn’t about working all the time — it’s about designing your days and weeks to reflect your real life, while still being accountable to doing excellent work.
If you want to start seeing your capacity vs. workload in a more objective way, check out my free 5-day program at kellynolan.com/refresh.
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. Alright, so today I wanna talk about a concept, maybe a framework that I have found really illuminating and a good touch point to have over the years. And I wanted to share with you, and I’ve heard of this concept from Janelle Tevis. And Janelle’s quote is something along the lines of, the flip side of high flexibility is high accountability and that you need to do what you said you were gonna do and.
This doesn’t apply to all professions. I completely [00:01:00] understand that there are a lot of professions out there that there’s not a lot of flexibility about when you do the work, but for many people listening there is, there’s a flexibility about when you do the work. You could work in the evenings, you could work on the weekend, you could work during work hours.
For the most part, the work just has to get done at some point. And even if that’s not your job. My guess is that there’s just some level of applicability to this, to even the inflexible jobs as well. So I wanna back up for a second just to give context of why I think this is an important thing to talk about and why I love it.
And that is that when I first started teaching time management way back in, I believe it was 2018, that it kind of came to me that this is what I was gonna do. I really thought. That solid time management, like time management, done well and done well in a way that people wanted, meant that evenings and weekends were completely freed up of work.
And in my head, that [00:02:00] was kind of almost like a bright line rule or understanding for myself at least. And something I talked about in marketing is that we wanted to free up your nights and weekends from work and that that was part and parcel of what successful time management was. There are other parts as well, like less mental load and.
Having a reasonable workload and all sorts of things, but that was part of it, is like we should free up the non-work hours from work. And I’ll just note that a lot of that came from, you know, I did not myself had kids yet, so I didn’t understand kind of the flexibility needed with that. Or even for people who don’t have kids like caretaking other people or other sorts of things in their lives.
And this was also pre pandemic when I think that that was kind of. Kind of like the general approach was, you know, when you’re at work, you work and when you’re at home you try and be present and you try not to marry the two. And in some ways I remember also getting questions from clients early in those days.
Like I remember there’d be like, I don’t wanna do personal [00:03:00] things during work hours. When should I do them? And there was almost this need to clarify, we have to do personal things during work hours. And I feel like that is a lesson needed thing to talk about now ’cause people understand it. But I think that that is like kind of came with the evolution that I wanna talk about here is that it wasn’t until my first group program, and this was like height of the pandemic, like April, may of 2020.
I remember one of my clients who’s a partner in a big law firm and she said, you know, I know we’re trying to free up our evenings from work, but my kids are home right now and I have a nanny, but you know, the kids are actually in the house with me. And I actually would like to take a bit of a longer lunch or hang out with them a little bit in the afternoon and then log back on in the evenings.
That’s actually what I would like this to look like, and I’m realizing that, and so I’m gonna start structuring my calendar in that way. And it was really illuminating to me in terms of what people wanted, [00:04:00] what people wanted. Their time management system and approach to give them was less about the concrete, like work stays at work and home life is at home.
And more about, well, what would I like out of this? And let me be creative on what fits me and my life and my life phase right now and my circumstances. And it was the first time that I just started seeing more than corralling work to work hours and personal life. To personal hours, which still has value.
I’m not saying like I’m not knocking that entirely. The line there and the drive to keep them apart became more like softly blurred to me in a good way. That the need for flexibility and the desire for flexibility was a big part of this. Even if it kind of muddied up those waters a little bit, that was okay for some people, not all people, but some people to have that.
And that really started informing me of less around. Trying to help [00:05:00] people across the board, free up their nights and weekends and more to find the pattern of work that worked for them. It really comes back to me that what I teach is not a schedule. Like, it’s not a, you know, you should have nights free and you should wake up at this time and you should do this.
It’s not a schedule that I teach, it’s a system and people get to take the system where they wanna go. And that really helped me understand people might wanna use this system in a different way than I had envisioned, and in a way that they now knew because I hadn’t hit that life phase yet. But they could take the system and then their life experience and what they wanted right then and change it and mold it to what they wanted.
Then I heard Janelle’s quote, and if you’re not familiar with Janelle, she is an executive at Bugaboo. She has an Instagram account that is really phenomenal where she shares mostly career advice. And it’s such great advice. And this was part of it, is she was saying, as I said, that the flip side of high of flexibility is high accountability, and you’ve got to do [00:06:00] what you said you were gonna do if you want that flexibility.
And I’m paraphrasing here, but when I heard that, it just was that click for me of. Actually what people want is really like high flexibility, more so than corralling work to work and personal to personal. We really want flexibility and to get it and keep it. Janelle’s point is we also still have to be highly accountable to what we say we will do at work.
And what’s important here just to point out, is that the takeaway here is not work all the time, including nights and weekends at all. It’s more like if you want flexibility in your life so that you can incorporate other parts of your life during work hours on workdays, that kind of stuff. We still have the accountability to make sure we’re getting that work done, whether it’s in the remaining work hours or in other pockets of time when we wouldn’t normally work.
I’d also note here that a lot of this does also come down to having a reasonable [00:07:00] workload, which is a different conversation to a degree. I just wanna throw that out there, that even if you worked all the time, if you couldn’t get your work done, much less get it done within work hours, even if those work hours are a little bit flexible, that’s a different conversation.
So I just wanna throw that out there too, that. When we talk about accountability, to me it’s not accountability to do all the work thrown at you, but it is accountability to do the work you agree to do and that is reasonable well and on time. So I just wanted to throw that out there. I have found since like with that in mind and that like kind of realistic context for it, I just find that dynamic of high flexibility with high accountability or flexibility and accountability in general, just so useful.
It helps me sometimes when I am kinda working at weird hours and almost a little bit judging myself for that. Candidly, sometimes I do things on the time management front. I’m like, I teach this stuff. If someone saw [00:08:00] me doing this, what would they think of me? Which is silly, but just crosses my mind and I’m just sharing that and I really had that last week and reminding myself.
Of this is really powerful. It’s really powerful to kind of just have the awareness of the hand in hand that flexibility and accountability have. So as I mentioned last week, I had a combination of both figuring out something new and it being more than I expected with doing a lot of personal things during the week.
For example, last week I worked out at Orangetheory. I do it once a week. I did that during the week during work hours. For me, I have to do things like that during work hours ’cause of my husband’s schedule and other people can do ’em at different times. But for me, if I’m gonna do a class, it has to be during childcare hours, which are my work hours.
I also had a doctor’s appointment. Same has to happen during work hours. Out of that came a need for a follow-up doctor’s appointment that I wanted to do quickly. And so the first availability was the next day an hour away. So [00:09:00] spent an hour work hours driving, did the appointment, and then an hour driving home.
I had a home maintenance guy here for a bit, which wasn’t a full block of time for me, but was partly, you know, kind of making peppering up my day and also had to leave the house early and therefore cut off work hours to take a kid to an appointment at some part. So they’re not all necessarily even fun things, but they are things that are not strictly work and they’re happening during work hours, and they’re happening during time that I plan on working and getting work done.
And then as I mentioned, the workload was higher than I thought because I’m still figuring out the new format at this program. And I had kind of thought that I could take myself out of a component of the program and I realized. I don’t want to, I wanna stay really involved in something. And so it was just, was much more time consuming than I had anticipated.
And so the workload was bigger than I had expected, and I had a lot of my work hours devoted to personal things. [00:10:00] Fun and not fun, but important, you know, health related things. And so as a result, I ended up shifting work into evenings. A lot of the evenings I worked a little bit and then Friday night and Saturday morning I worked quite a bit and I just felt a little weird just personally like judging myself doing that.
’cause I was like, here I am teaching time management and not at home on a Friday night doing work and on a Saturday morning doing work. But I also had to like catch myself and be like, well you took advantage in a great way. In a way I want to be able to do of a lot of flexibility in your schedule. And you did a lot of things that ate up a lot of your limited.
Work hours to do that. And the accountability here is I hold myself to a high standard and I wanna show up for clients really well. And I wanna do that with excellence and that requires time. And if I am not gonna use some of my work hours to do that. I have to use different hours to do that. And it was only the thought [00:11:00] about, am I doing this right?
That bothered me. Like actually sitting there on a Friday night doing that work did not bug me. It was more like the thought of judgment of others or myself doing it. And it was a good reminder of, Hey, you have that flexibility and this is the accountability time. And so I wanted to share that with you because I think that a lot of people also structure their days.
Similarly, like they have to or want to do personal things during work hours. And then they also are okay with working at other times that are, you know, maybe less traditional times to do it, but in a way that works for them and allows their overall life to feel how they want it to feel. With that flexibility, and again, I just wanna emphasize that, I think the problem here were.
I guess going back to what I just said, my life feels the way I want it to feel, even if it doesn’t look like work and work hours and personal life and personal hours. The tricky part that I would [00:12:00] say is where the red flag should go up is when life doesn’t feel the way you want it to feel when work is taking up mostly all the work hours and bleeding into the rest of life and just kind of dominating everything that might then make life not feel the way you want it to.
And that’s a different thing. And something I’m, I work on with clients a lot and it’s just different than what I’m talking about here. So I just wanna emphasize that I’m all for. Your workload being reasonable, your workload being doable within roughly work hours, and you being able to mold your life to be the way you want it to be logistically and schedule-wise, but also overall how it feels and even taking a step back from what we’re talking about.
It’s just been a great lesson for me over time to realize that. Solid time management. Time management. That is what we want it to be like that life feels the way you want it to be by using this system. It [00:13:00] can look schedule-wise, very different across different people and across different life phases, you know, and.
How I wanted my schedule to be as a 25-year-old attorney looks very different than how I want it to be as a 40-year-old mom of two who also loves her job, and that’s okay. It shifts and it evolves, and I’m sure it will shift in two years from now, four years from now, six years from now. It’s gonna look different.
And that’s why to me, there’s such value in learning a system over a schedule and then also embracing this. Flexibility, accountability, dynamic to help you own how you’re choosing to use your time. All right, so I hope that that was hopefully valuable in some way. It really learning that from Janelle has been just such a light bulb moment for me.
It put to words what I had sensed that clients actually wanted over time and what I really wanted over time, and I just think that it’s useful to [00:14:00] have these frameworks and everything put into words in a way so that we can use it and own it with our own time, and I hope that it helps you as well. I’ll note again that a big part of this though is ensuring, you know, a big part of being accountable and delivering great work product and doing what you say you’re going to do really comes down to also your workload being reasonable and doable.
And you know, as I said, if you can’t do it all within work hours, even if those work hours shift, then that’s a bigger issue than what we’re talking about. And that’s something I work on a lot with clients. And I just wanna say, I totally get, it’s not a fun place to be and it’s really hard to figure out.
And so if you want to just start getting a taste at how I go at that and address it, and just really more so. Get an understanding of what is your actual capacity and what is your workload in a more objective way, and how do they interact and how do we talk about that? You can check out my free five day program.
[00:15:00] It’s called The Reset and Refresh, and it’s at kelly nolan.com/refresh. More importantly, I hope that this was a little bit of a light bulb moment for you too. All credit goes to Janelle and the wonderful clients I have worked with over the years who teach me as much as I teach them and really help me understand.
What people are really looking for and then how I can apply that to my own life. And just thank you for being here. Thank you for continuing to teach me while I hopefully teach you some good stuff too. And I will 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.
