Slow-Rolling Tasks & Shiny Object Syndrome Bosses (or Selves)

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Ever keep rolling the same task week after week? You see it on your list or flagged in your inbox, and every time you look at it, you feel that little wave of guilt. In this episode, I share how slow-rolling tasks—sometimes unintentionally, sometimes on purpose—can actually work in your favor.

I share a story from my early law career that taught me how some tasks lose relevance over time and how checking in before tackling them can save hours of unnecessary work. We also talk about how “slow-rolling” helps when you work for a shiny-object boss—or when you’re your own. Instead of reacting to every new idea, give it breathing space. Let excitement cool, check your calendar, and make more grounded decisions about priorities.

This episode is about using slow-rolling as a time management strategy to:

Reassess stale tasks before spending time on them, and
Protect focus from shiny-object overload

When you use slow-rolling strategically, you reduce stress, reclaim focus, and make smarter choices about where your time goes.

Below is a transcript of the episode. Enjoy!

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 we’re gonna talk about slow rolling, doing tasks, whether that’s intentional or not. So let’s talk about this a bit today.

Now, what comes to mind? For me, kind of where this started was one time, this is really early on in my practice. I remember I was using long to-do lists for everything and I would have these legal pads and have long to-do lists per case. So I had like one case, it would be one legal [00:01:00] pad, full page, maybe two pages of to-dos for that case. And then I’d have a separate legal pad and like full pages of to-dos for that. And then I’m pretty sure I had like one legal pad for the smaller cases and kind of miscellaneous.

And I don’t think there was a cadence at which I did this, but occasionally I would tear ’em all out and start fresh because. Enough had been done that it made sense to like kind of start fresh with the next to-do list. And there were certain things, I’m sure we can all relate to this, that would be rolled over again and again and again.

And there was one case in particular. I’m thinking about that. I think there were like two or three tasks at the very end of the to-dos. Related to these things that I really, I just kept not doing them. I also remember them being in my email inbox, like I’d keep rolling. Like they’d just sit there at the end of the email inbox with like their red little flags of like, do this.

But I never did them. And candidly, part of it came down to the fact that I just was like, I don’t really see the relevance. To this case, like, and I had so much other stuff [00:02:00] to do that I very much saw the relevance and importance and priority for those things that my time when I was triaging and prioritizing, those couple little things just kept getting punted and punted and this went on for months.

And every time I saw them I would just kind of like, ugh. But again, I like had plenty of other stuff to do. So it’s not just, I mean, you get the point. We’ve all been there and thankfully. Work slowed down enough that I was like, okay, I’m gonna finally do these things that I’ve been punting for months and months and months.

I think I just happened to be in the partner’s office that had given me these things to do and I kind of confessed. I was like, look, I’m finally gonna do those things that you asked me to do months ago. And he was like, what? And he had, I mean, he didn’t, he didn’t remember giving them to me. He didn’t remember asking me to do it. And he’s like, yeah, don’t do that. We don’t need to do that. And it was this really interesting like. Oh, like there are a lot of takeaways from that. I mean, we’re all human bosses and us, we all think of things that will be [00:03:00] useful to do. And maybe they are in the moment. Maybe they weren’t really in the moment, but over time they become stale or we just change our minds or whatever.

The reason. And one of the lessons that also came outta that was. Sometimes there’s power in the slow roll. And I did that all unintentionally, like, you know, I mean, I, I was over the task. I was slowly punting them, but it was like a guilt ridden. I wasn’t owning that I was punting them. I was just kinda like kept punting them and doing other things.

But you could intentionally do things like that as well and have conversations before you do them to make sure they still need to be done. And so my points today are a little, I mean, it’s a little bit like a little fuzzy in my head, but I’ll try and clarify is that one, if you are someone who has punted a lot of tasks and you have those tasks that you really relate to how I was describing them, they’ve been rolling them over, rolling them over, they’re sitting in your email inbox, wherever they are, [00:04:00] and you just kind of feel not ill, but just like, ugh, like.

I don’t know. You just don’t wanna do ’em. You’re, they’re stressing you out before you do them. It is worth having a conversation with whoever gave those things to you to ask if it is still worth doing them is really one of my points here. I will throw out there that for me, fortunately, the person who gave them to me was fully, I mean, most of my cases were with this partner and another partner, and so he was very aware of how much I had been doing.

He knew I wasn’t just like punting work for the sake of it, and so I didn’t have to fully explain this to him. But if it had been another partner. I would’ve highlighted the other work that I had been doing, hopefully other work for that partner so that they like personally see the benefit. But I also probably would’ve if I needed to like highlight a lot of other work that I had been doing for other people or just in general to clarify again that I’d been giving value in [00:05:00] a lot of ways I just hadn’t on these tasks.

So just throw that out there for you that I do think it is worth asking if something still needs to be done or just. Checking if it still needs to be done. And if you’re nervous about that or feel like it could go sideways, then I think it’s very worth highlighting all the things you have been doing and have been prioritizing because they are higher priorities.

And my hope for you is that when you do that, that thing has gone stale or the person has changed their mind or whatever it is, and you don’t even have to do it. And you’ve saved yourself a lot of headache can get it off your list and focus on the things that really are high priority. Now side note here is if you either are told you need to do it still or you’re like, I’m not even gonna ask ’cause I really know I need to do this, like it is really important, I need to get it done, I would put it then at a high energy window like think about your week.

Think about curve balls that hit in your week and try and find a time when your energy is good, when you’re likely to be left alone and just bang [00:06:00] it out. This might even require, and I, I think if you’re listening, you know me well enough by this point, but while I don’t advocate working a lot on the weekends from a stress reduction standpoint.

There are some situations that I do think it makes sense sometimes to work on the weekend when you won’t get interrupted, when you can just really focus on something and just bang these types of things out. So if something’s been looming over your head for like two or three months, you never get to it.

It’s really stressing you out. You know you need to do it. Then it can be really beneficial to schedule 2, 3, 4 hours that you’re gonna work this weekend and bang that task out even if you have to line up childcare if you have kids or something like that. It’s not the cleanest from like a. When I’m not at work, I don’t wanna be working and I don’t like working in my weekends perspective.

But sometimes getting those backlog things off your plate that have been causing a lot of stress can be incredibly worth it from just [00:07:00] like a stress time management perspective. I think you might just feel a lot lighter for many weeks going forward, and that to me is when it’s worth kind of deviating from the time management like rhythms that we typically want to have.

Okay. Another big takeaway I wanna throw out there is that this has helped me realize in a really nice way, the value of slow rolling, the completion of tasks when it comes to the bosses who have a bit of that like shiny object syndrome thing going on. And this is those bosses that kind of every meeting you’re in, they come up with five new ideas or even two new ideas of what they wanna do.

They’re super excited about it. They’re really amped up. You even might be a little excited about it, but you’re also overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work that comes out of these meetings all the time because you already have a full plate or even an overflowing plate. And now every time you go into a meeting with this boss, you get even more things and they’re really excited and you kind of push back, but they’re just [00:08:00] too excited or so you don’t even push back or you do and it doesn’t go anywhere.

And that’s just where you’re at. And I wanna just, I mean, this sounds. Almost like a totally different topic, and in some ways it is, but also there is value in kind of borrowing the approach that I just covered for those situations. And I will also note that you might be the shiny object person and you can also use this on yourself.

So feel free to do that as well. I very much relate to that. I don’t think I’m like full, full, full, full shiny object, but I, especially as a business owner where you can take it wherever you want. I very much. I have been in those kind of tracks, and this is a really helpful approach to take on yourself to help you not kind of keep following those tracks away from all the things that you already know and have established are important and really need to do.

So let’s talk about this. What I encourage you to do, and we’re gonna focus on the boss first, and then we can turn to like us as people, is [00:09:00] just let them, let the very excited person with all the ideas, get them out. Give them time to get it out there. Don’t really push back in those moments necessarily.

If you want to, you can say something like, this sounds like a really exciting idea. I do need to just look at it in relation to all our other work, but I totally agree that it’s a great, exciting idea. Something along those lines. Make it sound like you Then give them breathing space. Let it sit on the to-do list.

Do not start on it right away and wait. If it’s something that they think needs to be done like this week, maybe just wait 24 hours. If it’s something that can wait a little bit more, wait two days, seven days, somewhere in there, and then circle back to that person and raise the thing that they wanted to do and kind of check in on it.

I have found that often with those types of people, including myself here, there’s zero judgment. The. More time, or at least just some time that goes [00:10:00] between the initial conception of the idea to checking in. The temperature has cooled, they’re less enamored, they’re less swept up in it and more able to look at it a little bit more objectively and neutrally.

And so I think that there’s really benefit of not trying to push back in those moments, but also not following through and just doing everything they say. ’cause I think you’ll burn yourself out. ’cause they’re just too many ideas for capacity. Like the workload is too high for the capacity and the middle ground here is just be like, okay.

Or, okay, I just wanna look at our workload and see if we can make this work. But I get it. Give some time to it and then circle back and check in on do we still wanna do this? The other benefit of giving this breathing space to this, not just like the cooling down period. The breathing space here is that it gives you time to understand what else is on your plate, whether you could take this new thing on, what would like, how would it all interact, what would have to get booted for it [00:11:00] to work?

All of that kind of stuff, and. It allows you to not have all that information at the like tip of your tongue in those meetings. ’cause there’s no way, like, I mean, at least for me, I’ve never been able to be like, actually we have these three other projects and their deadlines are here. Like, my brain doesn’t know that stuff on its own.

And so by giving this cool off period, you can also go look at your calendar, understand what’s on your plate. Understand what deadlines are on your plate, understand what would have to shift to accommodate this, and be able to formulate a conversation where you say, not just, Hey, do we wanna do this anymore because.

That’s still kind of in a, a vacuum of without context where the conversation can be more like, do we still wanna do this more given that we have X, Y, and Z other high pro projects on our plate and we need to have these things done by this date. And I just wanna make sure that you want to extend those dates, if we wanna take this on or if we wanna take this on.

Do you wanna wait [00:12:00] two weeks, three weeks for us to have space to do it? You could always also, by the way, check in again in two weeks and be like, do we still wanna do this new thing? These are the other things that would have to get dislodged if we do that. So I’m just throwing this out there that what’s beautiful about giving like this pause here.

Between, as I said, the conception of the idea and like the excitement of that, and then checking in again and like slow rolling. Starting the task is that it lets that person cool down a little bit and look at things more objectively and neutrally, and it gives you the opportunity to formulate a more context rich discussion about whether you should take something on and related to that, it just helps them.

Kind of, I, I talk a lot about like the pitfalls of making decisions in a vacuum. So often we can sometimes think like, should we do this idea or not do this idea? But that’s not really the math that’s in play. It’s like, should we do this idea or [00:13:00] these other four things we plan to do today or this week, or this quarter, whatever it might be.

And so by giving the space that allows you to formulate this. You then educate them and remind them of the bigger context in play. Because as I said, some ideas might sound great in a vacuum, but once you introduced and like put them next to everything else you’re trying to do and have already established that you needed to do and want to do, then the.

Kind of excitement around it, or the need for it, or the value of it might diminish, which is great. Like it’s good to make those informed decisions. And this is a way to do that in a, I think, more realistic way when the temperature is cooler and you have that information at your fingertips. And as I said, I do this with myself also.

There are plenty of ideas that come to me that I’m like, I think I need to do that. I think that would be awesome. I really, I can get like really swept up in something. I might even like in the middle of the night, jot something down or in the shower, think of something and I’m like, this is awesome and I’m [00:14:00] gonna totally do this.

And what I have learned is often. I cannot do with that in the moment. Like I look at my calendar and I’m like, no, I got five other things I need to do. I will say sometimes I do. I like just move those five things and then do this new thing that I came up with that I’m super excited about. But sometimes I look at my calendar, I’m like, Ugh, I can’t do that right now, but let me park this and I might park it in my calendar.

I might. Tomorrow morning, be like, consider doing this, or Next week consider doing this, or two months from now consider doing this. Or I have in my project management board like a back burner column that I just park ideas in. And what I will say is whether I then go look at that back burner column at some point or future me comes across that thing in the calendar that I calendared out down the road.

Usually my excitement. There’s a level of confusion. ’cause I read it and I’m like, man, I remember being really excited about this, but like I don’t see it anymore. [00:15:00] And that’s great. Like as silly as it sounds, you’re kind of like not embarrassed for yourself, but you’re just like confused. As I said, you’re like, what?

I was really amped about that often. You’re just not anymore. And that’s, it’s so great to realize that before you do the heavy lifting of the work versus putting in all this work, and either it’s somewhat of a flop or then later after hours of work you’re like, I don’t think this really works, or I don’t think this is as cool as I thought it was gonna be.

And like how great to realize that again before the work itself. So I just wanna throw that out there that if you are. Kind of your own worst enemy in terms of shiny objects and you wanna do things and you overload your plate ’cause you’re just so excited. I think that’s awesome, but also understand that.

Our time is limited. We can’t do it all. We have to prioritize, and that in the moment of you thinking of that awesome thing, that’s probably not the moment that you’re gonna be the best at prioritizing. And so giving yourself that space to cool down, [00:16:00] look at it more objectively, look at it more neutrally, will be of high value and use your calendar.

To do that if you’d like to, or park it on a project management board so long as, or like, you know, another list, any back burner place, so long as you have calendar reminders in your calendar to go check it out so you don’t just forget about it and then get stressed about that. So in short, don’t be afraid to revisit things with your boss.

Do so with the context to help them understand that we’re not just talking about one project in isolation, but the broader context and do this whether you’ve. Unintentionally kind of punted something down the road before you do it to see if you can avoid having to do it in the first place or do it intentionally as a way to counteract their shiny object tendencies or your own.

I really think that sometimes slow rolling tasks in this way. And having these conversations with a broader context with that other person or with [00:17:00] ourselves can really save us a ton of time and a lot of headache, and really help us focus on the important things. So check your own list. Come up with your shiny object, kind of like parking lot approach of where you’re gonna park things if shiny object things come up, whether with you or a boss.

Check your own list for things that you might wanna have those conversations around now, and really think about the context of things like really make your work visible and help them understand why you haven’t done something yet, and also what you need to do. And if you do this, it will take away time from that in a going forward way.

Have these conversations. I really think that it will reduce your stress, give you more clarity, and hopefully give you some of that focus time back. All right. Thanks for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.

Links you might enjoy:

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Slow-Rolling Tasks & Shiny Object Syndrome Bosses (or Selves)

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