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Oftentimes, planning gets categorized as less valuable than the work we should be doing. So if you’ve been skipping your planning session because you don’t think you can bill for it, or if you don’t bill for your time but find your planning session keeps getting quietly dismissed, I want to push back. Let’s discuss the three reasons protecting time to plan is worth it, no matter how your hours are tracked.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Episode 8 (what the Clean Slate planning session is)
- Episode 73 (Kelly’s time management journey)
- Join the 10-week Bright Method program here: https://kellynolan.com/bright
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 3-Day Time Management Program: Get three 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] Hey, hey, and welcome back. All right. I have had multiple conversations over the years with women who I’ve worked with that go something along the lines of, “I’m struggling to do my planning session” — I call it the clean slate session — “because I need to bill my time during work hours.” And it’s always a little startling for me because I’m thinking, “But you can bill your time for the clean slate session.”
At least, you know, not maybe not every minute of it, certainly, but a lot of it. You know, whatever you’re doing on a planning front for a particular client for work, things like that, you absolutely can be billing for that. [00:01:00]
And I know not everybody bills time, so this doesn’t sound relevant to everybody, but what I want you to hear is for me, what I hear in that is planning is not valuable enough for me to bill. And that’s not just people who bill who think that. A lot of us feel like planning is not as valuable as the work I should be doing. There’s a bit of an equation of planning is administrative.
We dismiss it, we undervalue it. Again, we put it below doing. And it’s such an, uh, at least American culture thing of, you know, do, do, do. The value is in output. The value is in a product at the end of something. And so when we do things, it feels more satisfying and aligned with that because we send something off.
We have that output. We see the progress. Where planning often doesn’t have a clean output that we package up and send off, and so we dismiss its value. [00:02:00]
And so I wanna talk about the planning session today. I have a whole episode — episode eight — on what the planning session is, so know that that’s a good companion one with this one. But I do wanna talk about it today because the dismissing of planning is a very understandable thing to do given our culture, but one that makes you miss out on the benefits of this method — of my method, but any time management method. I think any time management method benefits in a critical way from consistent planning sessions.
And if you’re not doing it, if you’re not motivated to do it because you don’t see the value in it, then you’re missing out. And I wanna try and reframe some of this today so that you really see the value of doing this.
So before we get into that, I wanna talk about something I forgot to talk about in my time management journey episode, which I’ll link in the show notes. And it’s a little rich because I’m like, we dismiss the value of planning, and I forgot to address where the planning session came from in my own time management journey because I dismissed it. [00:03:00]
So we’re not alone here.
So the thing that I completely blanked on from that episode is where the routine weekly clean slate session came from.
Up until my second firm in San Diego, I had been doing planning to some degree. It was a little bit on a whim. It was definitely when, you know, work lightened up and I just had the time. If I had a slower afternoon, I would do a planning session. That meant that I was doing one — I don’t even remember, but probably every four to six weeks.
I always found value in it when I was doing it, but then life would happen and I just wouldn’t do it until life slowed down a little bit again.
Then when I started practicing in San Diego, one of the partners I worked for — she probably… I probably did, like, I don’t know, a quarter or a third of my cases were with her. She had associates working on matters for her fill out a chart that she sent you. It was like a template chart, every Friday, that laid out, you know, row per matter, and there was a bit of a, you know, I think there was some detail about the cases and then a status update of what was going on that week, if anything, and then next steps — like next critical deadlines to be aware of, next action steps we needed to take, anything like that. [00:04:00]
And in the beginning, I kind of rolled my eyes at it. I was like, “This feels micromanage-y,” which maybe is a separate issue, but honestly it was great, so I’ll forgive it. It was the first time every single week I had to look up from the doing and take stock of at least the matters that I was on for her, and really understand what did happen this past week and what needs to happen next and, you know, what should I calendar and all that kind of stuff.
And I started very quickly seeing the value of it, seeing the value of, you know, not just doing what I had been doing, but doing it every single week. Even for matters that I was like, “Nothing happened this week,” that’s almost more worth it sometimes because you haven’t been thinking about a matter and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, we do have that deadline coming up soon, and let me, like, think ahead about what I should get the ball rolling on now.” [00:05:00]
And over time in San Diego, I started doing it for all of my matters. And so every week I was sitting down, looking up, looking out at what was going on, getting a lay of the land, and then really feeling the benefit the following week of less “Oh, crap” moments, seeing a deadline coming up sooner than I thought, really understanding where things lay and having a game plan for them and seeing how they all interacted — and all the things that I talk about, you know, loving as part of the Clean Slate and the Bright Method.
That was my first taste of doing it every single week in that way, and that’s what really created the Clean Slate in the more formal way that it is now of the cadence of it.
But my own initial reaction was an eye roll at having to do that. And I heard other attorneys eye roll at hearing about, like, this partner requiring associates to do that for her cases. It’s such an easy… We just dismiss planning as a culture. And I think it harms us. [00:06:00] And I don’t mean like, you know, deeply harms us, but I do think it harms our ability to look up, to prioritize, to do all of that in a way that does harm our peace of mind, our stress reduction, you know, leads to scrambles, all of that.
I think that if you have been craving feeling on track, it’s important to realize that you have to carve out and protect time to look up and lay down the track to get there. And I’ll note that I saw the value back then. I have only seen the value grow to me over the years. Back then, I didn’t have kids.
I mean, I think we had just bought our house, but hadn’t understood, like, full house ownership. You know, life looks a lot more complicated now even than from back then. And the slowing down once a week, looking up, gathering, reconciling work and life — all of that has become more important over time, not less. [00:07:00]
And the consistency piece matters so much because, you know, life changes so rapidly, and I know for a lot of clients I work with even more rapidly than, you know, my own life. And that backlog can build up quickly, and it’s just remarkable how fast it can. And so by doing it once a week — and, you know, aim for 70, 80% of the weeks, so I’m not a perfectionist here on this.
But aiming for 70, 80% of the weeks to do this, you will be shocked at how it moves the needle on how you feel, not just when you finish a session, which feels really great, but for the following week and two as well.
And what I find fascinating is that every client I have who does the clean slate consistently swears by it, including myself, and yet almost every single one of us — me included — has had a hard time motivating for it, and sometimes still does. Again, I think it’s that culture of dismissing planning. We find it hard to slow down.
Planning feels like slowing down. We value that do, do, doing. We value production. [00:08:00] And again, it just doesn’t have that immediate output that doing things does, so it doesn’t feel as satisfying, and it might not be as fully respected in culture as the accomplishments. But it’s such a great example of, you know, urgent doing taking priority over the important.
So three things I wanna talk about in terms of its value. One is planning is where prioritization happens. I think a lot of us think we struggle with prioritization. And yes, there is value in, like, learning how to prioritize, but there is equal value in protecting time to do it. Prioritization doesn’t just happen. You know, it requires getting an understanding of capacity, of workload, about, you know, if there’s a mismatch between them, what to do about it.
It’s understanding what is the highest priority right now and what projects serve it, what needs to be let go, all that kind of stuff. It really requires thought, and often that happens during a planning session. [00:09:00]
And so I just want to say that if you struggle with prioritization, very understandable. But it’s also worth asking if you’re giving yourself the time to think through all those things in order to make the decisions required as part of prioritization. Or, you know, if you can’t make those decisions on your own, to figure out what you’re going to present to the powers that be to get those decisions made.
You need time for that, and that is a planning session. That is part of the value that comes out of a planning session. Point two is it saves you from work you maybe never should have done.
There’s this quote I heard from Amos Tversky — I’m probably totally butchering his name. He says, “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” And I think he meant something else.
But when I heard that, a light bulb went off for me because people aren’t willing to, quote unquote, “waste the hours required for planning,” they can waste years of their life. [00:10:00] And now that sounds dramatic, and maybe it is, but when you do a planning session, as I mentioned before, you’re prioritizing, and part of prioritizing is eliminating, punting, getting rid of things to give yourself and your team time and energy for those high priority things.
It’s where you set your direction and figure out where you’re going. Without it, it’s very easy to be busy. It’s very easy for everybody to be busy, but you can end up somewhere you had no intention of going, you know, whether we’re talking projects, whether we’re talking, you know, your career, whether we’re talking life.
And that’s what I heard when I heard that quote — you can waste years by not being able to waste hours. And by not giving time to the planning session, you risk spending a lot of time, you know, weeks, hours, years perhaps, moving in directions you don’t intend, just because you’re living in more reaction mode because you’re not having the time protected to be intentional and prioritize. [00:11:00]
It’s very understandable. But it’s also true, and I really want to help people understand the value of planning. That’s when the prioritization happens. That’s when the direction setting happens to make sure that all that hard work you’re gonna do over the next two weeks is actually getting you closer to where you wanna be at work, at home, all the different things.
Planning sessions are often where the nos come out of. That’s often where I’m like, “I don’t have time to do this project. I need to say no to this idea that I have. I need to not take on speaking engagements.” Those types of light bulb moments often happen in planning sessions because again, that’s when I’m slowing down to think about capacity, all sorts of things.
Similarly, I had a client — an attorney — who said, “I thought I could take on a new project and then I did a clean slate session, and I realized, ‘Oh, I absolutely don’t have time to take on this project,’” [00:12:00] and bowed out of it, and it saved her sanity going into a vacation, and then the vacation itself, and then re-entry after it.
It’s by slowing down to do this planning where we figure out what we have to say yes and no to. And when we don’t, it’s so easy to keep things on your plate, to keep saying yes because you don’t have the clarity about your capacity and your workload and the priorities and all of that.
And the third point is it also makes you better at your job.
The planning session is where you lay out the game plan to accomplish deadlines. And obviously that goes into, you know, work product that’s better and excellent.
And I’ll note on that, I had a client — uh, another attorney. I would actually say, like, 50% of my clients are in corporate and only, like, 25% attorneys or less. But the example that comes to mind is she said, “The first brief I submitted following Kelly’s program was a game changer. Feeling good about getting it not only submitted well within time, but also knowing it was a quality product because I wasn’t rushing at the last minute and panicking that I missed something, was a relief I honestly have never felt before while practicing law. [00:13:00]
I was so calm, and it helped my arguments in the hearing too because I had been so organized in writing. I won, by the way.” And I share that because when you lay out that game plan, that’s the planning session. That’s when you do that type of work, and it improves work quality. In addition, and just as critically, it improves your relationship with clients, with bosses, with all the, you know, stakeholders in your life.
Before I really got into planning, I would reach out to clients and say, you know, “We have this brief due. I need your responses by this… You know, I need a response from you in 24 hours about this brief,” or, “I need, you know, discovery responses or signatures,” or something like that. And I remember having a client be like, “I’m at a conference.
Like, I can’t do this right now.” And because it was the first time they were hearing about that and I had not been as clear about planning and what I needed from them, that hurts my relationship with that client. [00:14:00] You know, no client wants to feel like you’re scrambling and choking them up. You know, there’s that saying, like, “A lack of planning on your part is not an emergency on mine”? Well, it was an emergency on that client’s part, and it was because of a lack of planning from me. And planning sessions are incredible at helping you discover those conflicts ahead of time. To be like, “My plan is to get you this on this date.
I’m gonna need a response in 24 hours.” And they can say, “Oh, I’m actually at a conference on that day.” And I can say, “Great. I’ll get it to you two days earlier. Would that work?” Saves the relationship, helps them feel like I’m way more on top of it, because I am, and so much more.
And that doesn’t happen unless you take the time to protect time to think through all of this stuff, which we do in planning sessions.
So I hope this helps you see the value in planning. There are really big ripple effects that come out of this that justify the, quote unquote, “slowing down to do it.” [00:15:00] Which brings me back to where I started in that planning is billable because it is valuable, because it gives value to your organization, your clients, your patients, whoever they are.
And I’ll note as a random side note, if you need help with, like, conveying the value in billing descriptions and all of that, totally get that. I think that’s often an area where even when we see the value, we might diminish the value by kind of watering down the billing description of what we were doing during that time.
And if you need help there, I’ve actually found AI to be helpful here. For one client, I believe she was an accountant, and I went into Claude — she was like, “What would I even write for a description?” And it’s hard because I’m not an accountant, so I don’t always know what that would look like.
So I said to Claude something like, “You know, you’re a partner at a major accounting firm, and you send out bills to clients. You’ve been doing this for 30 years. You know what conveys value to a client. [00:16:00] This is the type of work I’m doing that I would like to bill for. Give me five descriptions of what that work would be.” Having AI help you with industry-specific things and being able to share these are five types of things I’m doing during planning sessions can help tailor those descriptions into descriptions you can feel accurately portray the value that you’re bringing by doing this type of work.
Bigger takeaway is whatever system you are using — the Bright Method or something else — make sure planning is part of it and make sure it’s happening consistently. Again, aiming 70, 80% of the time, but consistently. You will feel a massive difference.
And as always, if you want my help setting up the foundation of a system that can help the clean slate run more smoothly, help you know what to do with all the inputs, back out projects, have the agenda for the clean slate, all that kind of stuff, enrollment is open for my 10-week program. [00:17:00] I would love to work with you.
You can find out more at kellynolan.com/bright. Let me know how the planning goes regardless, and thank you for 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.
