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In this episode of The Bright Method Podcast, Kelly Nolan riffs on a question from a friend: why does it always take so long to get out of the house in the morning, and what do you actually do about it? She walks through three things – embracing how long getting out the door actually takes (it’s probably 15–20 minutes, minimum), calendaring that reality instead of your aspiration so the scramble-y feeling has somewhere to go, and the one firm rule to hold in your head as you’re moving through your morning. It sounds almost too simple. But if you regularly leave the house feeling behind before your day has even started, this episode is for you.
Related episodes to check out:
- Episode 111 (time management is really about stress management, not efficiency)
- Episode 25 (calendaring your current reality, not your aspiration)
- Episode 71 (how to do things faster)
- Episode 32 (capturing to-dos in a realistic way)
- Episode 112 (includes discussion of running late)
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Join the waitlist for the 10-week Bright Method program here: https://kellynolan.com/bright-method-waitlist
- Crowdsourced Morning Tips from Working Women
Links you might enjoy:
- 🌿 Free 3-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. •
- ✨ 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.
Full Transcript:
Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey, and welcome back. [00:00:00] All right. Today, I’m doing one a little bit on the fly. I just got off the phone with a friend who was like, “Hey, I need your advice. It takes me so long to get out of the house. And like, what do I do about that?”
And it’s such a great question, ‘cause I think we all go through periods of time where you’re like, “Why? Why does it take me so long to get out of the house? What do I do about it? It throws me behind. I leave scrambled. I’m driving in a way that I don’t want to be,” all that kind of stuff.
And I’ll do another episode about, you know, what to do if you are running late. [00:01:00] But for now, I just wanna talk about how long it takes to get out of the house. And this can apply whether you are, you know, without kids, with kids. Obviously, kids can make it take a lot longer. But even just alone, like, even when I’m alone and I don’t have kids, sometimes I’m like, “Man, it’s taking me a long time to get out of here.”
So I wanna talk about that. I wanna talk about three things that I think about when I hear people talk about, particularly in the morning, trying to get out of the house, and why does it take so long? The first is really just embracing the fact that it does take you that long. Instead of trying to think, “How do I do this faster? How do I get out of the house faster?” Really just kind of embrace, it just takes me a while to get out of the house. How long does it tend to take me to get out of the house? My guess is it takes about 15 minutes from the moment that you’re like, “I gotta start moving,” to, “I’m in the car backing out,” or however you leave the house.
It takes about 15 minutes or longer. You know, if you have kids, definitely longer. I’m just talking as, like, a single person [00:02:00] even without the kids. Trying to get out of the house, it can take 15 minutes. If you have kids, it’s probably a solid 20 minutes, 20 to 25 minutes. Because as we all know, you have kids and it’s like, “Who needs to go to the potty? Let’s get shoes on. Let’s get shoes on 15 more times,” all that kind of stuff. It just takes a long time. And instead of rushing it and living in denial that it takes so long and just wishing that it took less time, what would change if your approach was, “I’m just gonna embrace that it takes me this long”?
And while that might not be the answer you want, ‘cause I mean, I think that we all are like, “I wish it took us less time,” it is the reality. And when you embrace the reality of how much time things take, then you can actually plan and account for that in your plans that day. And that has a domino effect on, you know, how rushed you feel when you leave the house, how rushed you feel when you’re doing the driving, how you show up at your next thing.
It’s a much more calm place to [00:03:00] be to just be like, “It takes me, you know, 15 to 20 minutes to get out of the house,” plan for that accordingly, start moving towards the door, you know, 15 or 20 minutes before you actually have to leave. The whole experience is more calming. I have an episode about this, about how great time management, at least for many of us, is not about efficiency necessarily.
It is about stress management and, like, how it feels through that whole process. And this is such a great example of that. You know, just embracing something takes a period of time and planning for it accordingly, and then being able to just move through it a lot less scrambly in feeling, like the scrambly, stressed-out feeling, and instead move through it calmly and like, “Yeah, it’s taking me a while, but I’ve accounted for it and I’m fine in terms of, you know, what I have on tap next.”
I asked once on Instagram, what is the most useful thing you have learned from me? And someone said that it [00:04:00] does not, in fact, take me zero minutes to get out the door. It’s about this, and it’s about everything, right? Like, it’s about the realization that things, especially these invisible things like leaving, getting out the door, all the little things we do in that process, actually take up a lot of time. And when we don’t account for them, we spend our time scrambling, and when we do, we can come at them all from a more empowered place and a more calm place that, again, has ripple effects and domino effects on everything else that day.
The second point is a very much related point, but I just wanna emphasize it here. I have a whole episode on how we need to calendar our current reality, not our aspiration. And so you can demand that you get out the door in five minutes. You could calendar five minutes of getting out the door, or nothing, probably.
If you’re down to five minutes, you probably don’t even calendar it. And every single day you can move through that demanding that it take you five minutes or zero minutes, and it takes you actually 15 to 20 to [00:05:00] 25 minutes like we’ve talked about. And one of them is gonna actually help you manage your time well, and one of them is gonna leave you in, like, a scrambled frenzy mess as we just talked about.
And I just wanna emphasize that here: calendar your reality. Calendar how long things are actually taking you, not your aspiration. And the reason for that is then you see how all of these, like, realistically calendared things interact.
And as I talk about in that “calendar your current reality, not your aspiration” episode — I really recommend that one, I think it’s really good — you then start making changes that don’t just look good in a calendar, but feel good in real life in light of that data. So you might look at this and be like, “Ugh, I do not have 20 minutes to get out the door every day when I’m looking at that in my calendar.”
It’s like, that would be great, but I don’t have that time right now.
And so what do we want to do about that? [00:06:00] That’s where I would look at more like, well, one, could we free up the time to do that? Could we free up 20 minutes of time? Are there other things you’re doing in your morning that we could move to a different time or eliminate or shorten up in order to do that?
And by shorten up, I don’t just mean wishfully shorten up. I mean, if you’re doing, let’s say, a 45-minute workout, what if you did a 20-minute workout and recovered some time from that, that would give you the breathing space later in your morning? And as I’ve always said, you can get your tush handed to you in 15 to 20 minutes in a workout, so don’t, you know, think that you can’t.
But that’s one option. If you’re like, “Okay, realistically, I need 20 minutes to get out the door. How am I gonna recover some other time in my day to do that?” you can look for that. And again, when all this is calendared, you’re seeing your world of what you’re trying to do in the mornings and how they all interact.
If you can’t — you’re like, “Well, there’s nowhere else to take 20 minutes from” — then how do we whittle down the 20 minutes it takes you to get out the door in a actually realistic way? So not just, [00:07:00] let me just expect this of myself, but what am I doing during that 20 minutes? Am I packing up bags? Am I packing up lunches? Am I packing up snacks, waters? Am I deciding what shoes to wear? Am I finding my keys? What’s going on in those 20 minutes? And what could I do, like, the night before or that afternoon before to actually take some of the things that I’m doing in those 20 minutes, peel them off, put them the night before, and then calendar that so that maybe that’s the better time for it — and then I’m in reality helping myself whittle down that 20 minutes.
So again, what that could look like is packing up lunches the night before, packing up your whole bag. I wouldn’t do this if you park your car on a street, but if your car is in a garage, could you pack up the car so that it’s all ready to go for the next morning?
Actually getting clear on what you can take off your morning’s plate and do the night before can just be so beneficial to actually shorten [00:08:00] up the amount of time — in a real way, in a substantive way — that it takes for you to get out the door, than just, like, wishfully thinking you can do it faster. And along those notes, I will just say that I have another episode on how do I do things faster that I’ll also put in the show notes. It’s really good on this front. I just think a lot of us are always like, “How do I do this faster?”
And in reality, you’re really smart. You’re doing things as fast as you can for the most part. The game-changing piece of this is just embracing how long things actually take, and then using that as data to decide when am I gonna do things, what’s realistic, how can I peel parts off or make things less frequent or, you know, tighten the scope, or all these types of things to make it more doable.
Maybe I have to eliminate more. Maybe I shouldn’t say yes to this type of thing. All of those decisions are more clear when you’re more clear and realistic about what your reality actually is. And so this is a small example about getting out the door, but I just think it has [00:09:00] such great ripple effects across so many things.
So to recap so far: instead of, you know, berating yourself for not getting out the door faster, just acknowledge maybe this is just how long it takes to get out the door. It’s more of a neutral fact. I need to plan for it. I need to plan for current reality and not aspiration. It does not, in fact, take me zero minutes to get out the door.
It takes me X number of minutes to typically get out the door. And so I’m just going to plan for it and work it into my plans. And then if I need to adjust, then I’m having more real, substantive, you know, analysis of my schedule versus just, like, wishing everything took faster. And I’ll also throw out there, as I mentioned, that doing this, it’s not the most fun thing in the world to do, but it sure beats just living day to day scrambling and just wishing that you got things faster.
It might not be the most time-efficient, quote unquote, you know, approach, [00:10:00] but it is the most stress-efficient and, like, calm and enjoying-life approach. And that’s really what I think most of us are going after here.
The third point and the last point I wanna make is, all that being said, it can be very helpful to have a firm rule in your head as you’re moving through your morning, and that is: you don’t squeeze anything in.
All those little ideas that come to mind about what you should do, or putting that back in a bedroom, or all those things — you don’t do those things. If you need a way to capture the things that come to mind so that you remember to do them later, but they don’t necessarily take time out of your day to do them now, I do encourage writing them down, capturing them somehow.
So for example, if you’re like, “Oh, I need to call that person,” or — usually you’re not gonna, like, interrupt leaving the house for a call. But if there’s something that’s coming to mind, like I should clean up the bathroom, or I should do this — I’m struggling to think of ideas off the top of my [00:11:00] head ‘cause I kind of am winging this podcast episode.
But you know what I mean, like, those things that sidetrack you and derail you when you’re trying to get out of the house in the morning. Make sure you have a capture method to capture those types of things. Often, I think we derail ourselves to do those things ‘cause we think, “If I don’t do them right now, I’ll forget again. So I need to do them so I don’t forget.” Where if we can give ourselves a mechanism to not forget, but still not do them and keep moving down the path we need to be moving, that can be really awesome. I have an episode on capturing to-dos. I’m indexing you out to a lot of different episodes, so I’m sorry about that. I’m not trying to. They all feel relevant to this conversation.
But just for example, I really like keeping a notebook on the kitchen island that we have, and I’ll jot down things there of, like, things I need to do. I will also use Siri on my phone to be like, “Remind me to do this.”
I don’t typically do it when it reminds me, but it’s a way that I capture the [00:12:00] thing so I don’t forget, that I can do it later. If something truly has to happen that day, before a certain time, I might set an alarm. It’s like, something has to happen before 5:00 PM today — I might set an alarm for when I know I’m gonna be home, like 4:30 or something like that, to go off and be like, “Do this thing,” so that I, you know, get that, like, real, like, do it right now type thing.
But typically, it’s not stuff that really needs to happen right now. It’s just things that need to happen, and I’m afraid that I’ll forget if I don’t do them right now. I will throw out my exception to this rule: if we really need laundry, I will be a couple minutes late to load a thing of laundry in or flip laundry.
That is one that I just find the value in that so much to get that going. So I throw that out there — that to me, laundry or dishwasher, just getting those machines running first thing, that quote from Lisa Woodruff. If I can get the machines running, dishwasher or laundry, that is something [00:13:00] that I am willing to be a little late for, to get those going, because future me will gain that benefit so much if I can get that going now.
Okay. So to recap: calendar your reality, embrace your reality. That’s a big, big theme here — embrace the reality of how long things take. Calendar them out, then you see them calendared alongside everything else. You can make real adjustments, not just wishful adjustments that don’t actually play out in reality.
Your stress will be a lot more manageable if you just do that. You can get creative then about, okay, I need 20 minutes. I don’t have 20 minutes. How do I get the 20 minutes in the morning? Or how do I peel off part of what I’m doing in that 20 minutes the night before? Things like that.
And no squeezing anything in. Having that bright-line rule in your head as you go through this will really, really help. The exception would be, in my opinion — doesn’t have to be yours — my opinion is get the machines running. Dishwasher, laundry, that part is really great.
I will throw out that I do have a crowdsourced morning tips [00:14:00] article that I will publish before this episode comes out on Substack, and so we’ll put the link to that in the show notes as well. It’s crowdsourced tips from other working women on how to get out of the house in a — like, just to make their mornings easier is really what it’s about.
And so you can check that out as well, and I’ll put that link in the show notes as well.
And as I mentioned, I will also do another episode on what to do if you’re running late. Sometimes I forget the episodes that I have done. If I have one, I’ll link it in the show notes. If I haven’t, just stay tuned and we will talk about what to do when you are running late, because we are human.
No matter how great our time management is, we will run late occasionally, and that is okay, and let’s talk about what to do when that comes up. All right. Thank you for being here. Thanks for, you know, listening to me riff on this after just getting off the phone talking to a friend about it, and appreciate you being here, and I’ll catch you in the next one.
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.
