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When I went to a curriculum presentation at my 2nd grader’s school, I didn’t expect for a podcast episode to come out if it. But here we go!
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 and welcome back. Alright, so this is kind of random, but I went to a curriculum presentation at my second grader school and we were learning all about fluency and spelling and grammar and then also in math. And the whole talk was fascinating and I loved, I mean, it’s. If they have this at your kid’s school.
I don’t know why I went the first time, but I was like fascinated by it. Like what they’re teaching the kids, how they’re teaching the kids. Our school’s very like research informed in terms [00:01:00] of how they teach the kids and so it’s, I don’t know, the nerd in me just loves hearing about it and it’s also really practical, at least in our school.
’cause it like helps me understand the approach and like how to support that approach at home and not kind of contradict it. Or at least like. Go against it in any way. And I mean, one of the things was fascinating, like the first one I went to was about homework and the studies, like the research shows that I think it was before fourth grade or fifth grade, somewhere in there, there’s really no correlation between.
Doing homework and academic achievement. There are some theories about like, it helps with things like time management or things, you know, things like that. But in terms of academic achievement, there’s not a whole lot of correlation. And if anything, also it can actually be counterproductive like under fourth or fifth grade.
If homework is harped on and there are tears, it can actually hurt. A kid’s academic achievement, whether that’s through their motivation and enjoyment of learning and things like that, [00:02:00] just found it fascinating. And this one, again, was about fluency and two things stuck out that I wanted to share here.
And I was gonna say one of them wasn’t even related to time management that I just found it interesting and wanted to share. But the more I thought about it, it was, which is no surprise, because everything comes back to time. So it, and it’s all kind of tied to time management, so. I just wanted to share two unrelated points from this talk I went to, but both are interesting and both are individually related to time management.
So first up is about math, and the head of the elementary school was giving this talk and she was explaining about. How fluency is really about smoothness and less effort, but not speed, which is often a point of confusion. Like a lot of people think it’s about speed. And as part of that point, she shared that speed based timed [00:03:00] math tests like, I don’t know, I think we did like minute math ones when I was growing up.
They resulted for some kids, not all kids, but some. Their working memory to kind of shut off for them to freeze or go blank and to do poorly on those types of tests. And it resulted in them thinking they were bad at math, which was not necessarily true because they could still be good at math if the stress of the time pressure was not applied.
And in particular, she mentioned high achieving girls are often. One’s whose working memory shuts off in those timed test situations. And as I listened to that, I honestly felt like raising my hand and like kind of threw teary eyes being like, thank you. Because I vividly remember classrooms like looking up and around me during those tests and just feeling stressed and blank and just confused and at a loss.
And it really [00:04:00] defined how I viewed myself in math. Like it’s funny that later success in math didn’t really shift that base narrative I had in my head of like, I am not good at this. It’s sad. I’m glad that the approach is shifting, but it is also fascinating, like setting aside my personal. Experience with it.
I just think it’s fascinating that that has been shown to be true for some kids. Again, I’m not saying all kids, I know some kids thrive in it, but for some kids, and I can really relate to those kids and see it, it like shuts my working memory off. And that was a point that I just found interesting. I was gonna share, but the more I think about it in the time management context, I think it just comes back to knowing yourself.
There are some people who, again, thrive in environments where things come down to the wire and are timed and things like that. But there are others of us, like, you know, speaking as myself who don’t, and I think that time management is incredibly personal, as I’ve talked about. And part of the [00:05:00] approach is.
Learning what kind of camp you fall in or where along a spectrum, I’m sure there is, you fall on and just embracing the reality of how your brain works. That said, my only caveat here is if you tend to leave things to the last minute, because you tend to think I only work well under pressure. Then I would consider listening to a podcast episode I’ve mentioned before by Kara Lowenthal about procrastination.
It is so good and it challenges that belief for people who think that, you know, I kind of procrastinate because I do better under pressure, so let me wait until I’m under pressure and then I’ll perform. Well. She really challenges that internal dialogue in a way that I think is really interesting and also research back.
So I will link that in the show notes and I encourage you to check it out. So I just wanted to share that first point. ’cause I just thought it was interesting turning to the second reason, like the second point I wanted to talk about. This is the real reason I thought [00:06:00] about this episode. So let me explain this situation first.
The head of the elementary school also shared about how some parents have been confused about children’s writing, coming home with a ton of spelling errors, and this is like. Kindergarten through fifth grade, and she explained that if a certain class, whatever age was working on a particular sound that they were writing out or certain words, teachers would correct those words, but they were not correct the rest of the writing.
And then she put on the screen a story written by a kindergartner, and it was really hard to read in terms of the spelling. It was truly so cute and wonderful and really well thought out, and that’s what she said is she said, this is a pretty sophisticated idea to be written out by a kindergartner. Do you think it would have been written out if we had insisted on every word being spelled correctly?[00:07:00]
And she said, we’re trying to balance helping them get their ideas out and down on paper with counterbalancing that, with wanting to teach them spelling. She said, we are reducing the cognitive load of spelling so that we don’t block their ideas. And again, I found that fascinating from a learning and education perspective and just like understanding my daughter’s homework and when it comes home and also how to like approach spelling with her in our house and basically.
Not correct or spelling because I don’t know what they’re working on any given day and I don’t wanna mess it up. And I think it makes a ton of sense. I, I like, if I’m gonna lean one way as a not teacher, I’m gonna probably lean on, let’s get these ideas out unless I know what they’re working on. So there’s like an interest in me as like a parent, but it really made me think like I drew stars all around my notes on it because it really clicked with me about time management.
As you know, [00:08:00] I am all for getting everything you’re trying to do with your time out in your calendar. Everything, everything. Everything from when you’re showering and getting ready to, when you’re researching that issue, to when you’re gonna send that more complicated email to when you’re walking a dog or overseeing homework with a kid.
Like everything, it all requires your time. It all draws from the same bank of time, and it all has to fit together to be realistic and reasonable and give you breathing space as well. And when we really break it all down, that is a lot to put in your calendar. And I teach tech strategies to make it more manageable and help you understand.
But at the end of the day, it’s a lot. It’s a lot that we’re putting in your calendar, and some people don’t like that because it clutters up the calendar a lot. But while it clutters up your calendar, it lightens up your mind. You already are doing all of those things. You are just holding that like Tetris, [00:09:00] mosaic moving mess of things because it is, I mean, there’s just so many things when you see it, you’re already holding all of those things in your head.
It’s just, just in your head. What we’re doing instead is setting it all out in a calendar, getting it out of your head, getting it out like in front of your eyeballs so you can see it, and then you can evaluate it, you can play with it, but it’s not holding your brain down. And we do that so that your ideas can flow, so that you can be more present in a moment, whether that’s at work or at home, or with friends or wherever it is.
So your more intellectual and creative part of your brain can be heard because your brain isn’t so clogged up with the logistics and the, don’t forget dues and all those types of things. Just like what the head of my daughter’s school was saying, there is so much [00:10:00] benefit to reducing cognitive load so that you can get your ideas out.
We don’t want to hamper ideas with cognitive load. Our brain’s ability to focus and work through things is limited. If a second grader has to spend mental energy on spelling every word correctly, that will take up significant amount of the child’s limited mental energy, and the brain will get distracted and tired and preoccupied and not get the idea down and out.
In a similar way, if an adult has to spend mental energy holding onto 43 life logistics that have to happen the rest of the day, and then also even more for the rest of the week, and that one project and that other project and so on, the brain will get distracted and tired and preoccupied and not be able to be strategic and creative at work and present at home and observe the awesomeness of life and so much more.
I think [00:11:00] that explanation that I got to hear that day, it just really clicked it, it articulated something that I feel it so deeply that in order to be strategic, in order to be present at home, in order to enjoy our lives, we gotta get rid of all the other stuff that our, that is just like weighing our brain down.
And so whether you use the Bright Method or something else. Produce your cognitive load as much as you can, truly, as much as you can, get it all out of there. Don’t let really anything to the extent you can weigh your brain down and certainly not any logistical thing. And if you are looking for a way to do that and you’re ready to do it, you’re like, just have to do it soon because of how game changing this is, I’m ready to teach you how to do it.
Sure. Jump in the Bright Method program. You can sign up at Kelly nolan.com/bright. I hope to see you in there. Thanks for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next [00:12:00] 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.
