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One week. That’s how long a contractor’s email had been sitting in Kelly’s inbox, waiting on a reply. Her first reaction was the familiar one: I teach time management, I should’ve responded faster. Then she stopped herself, because the email wasn’t a priority, it hadn’t harmed anyone by waiting, and everything she’d been doing instead was more important. This episode is about why that is good time management, and why being behind is often a sign you’re doing things right.
We tend to look at unfinished tasks in isolation, that one unanswered email, that one unreturned call, that one project on the back burner and feel like failures. But that’s not an accurate picture. You didn’t skip those things in a vacuum. You were doing other things, and some of those things mattered more.
Kelly shares her own version of a packed winter stretch where plenty slid on purpose, and what it felt like to be behind and still feel solid. If the backlog is making you feel like you’re falling short, this episode is going to feel like a relief.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Join the waitlist for the 10-week Bright Method program here: https://kellynolan.com/bright-method-waitlist
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: 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. [00:01:00] All right, today we are gonna talk about something really important. Really, really important. I’m excited to dig into it. And that is that being behind often is good time management. And every now and then I have to remind myself of this. It’s really fun to see the progression I’ve made on this myself, because it’s not something that I naturally knew.
And if anything, whether it’s natural, whether I’d been programmed this way, who knows? It was very much not how I felt. And I think some stories will help bring this to life because I think I can say that in, you know, theory, but it’s not until we, like, feel it and hear it played out that it makes sense.
So first story was years ago. I remember this still clearly. I sat down to email a contractor about a home repair issue, and I realized it had been a week since he had emailed me. Like, he’d been waiting on my response for a week. And immediately I had that [00:02:00] familiar reaction of like, “Ugh, like, Kelly, really? Like, I teach time management. I should’ve responded sooner,” all that stuff. But thankfully, I then stopped myself because the reality was that contractor email, like, it really wasn’t a priority. It was not a priority in the context of everything else in my life from kids to clients to work projects to family responsibilities.
In addition, not only did it rank against all those other things, that email sitting there for a week had no meaningful negative impact on anything — on him, on me, on any situation. It just was making me think that I should be able to respond quicker, but in reality, like, it was fine.
And again, zooming back out to the broader things that I had been focusing on, my focus on those things instead of this email that had no negative impact by waiting was very solid time management. And what’s hard is somewhere along the line, I think we assume that being good [00:03:00] at managing our time, our tasks, projects, to-dos, all of it, being good at that means getting everything done right away, and that is impossible.
I don’t mean difficult, like it’s difficult. It is impossible because there are always going to be more emails, more requests, more opportunities, more projects, more things you could do, more meals, more laundry, all the things. There is also no invisible but there capacity of workload that the universe is aware of for you, and when it is full, like reasonably full, the requests stop coming.
That doesn’t happen, right? They just keep coming. And I say that because past me, past overwhelmed me in some ways thought, “Well, my bosses at work wouldn’t ask me this if it weren’t reasonable,” when my bosses had no idea, like, what was on my plate, much less what was reasonable and whether that, like, reasonable metric had been reached. [00:04:00]
The requests will keep coming. The bids for your time will keep coming. And so the goal cannot be get everything done, much less get everything done right away, because it won’t fit. So if you assume that — which I hope you do, because that’s just reality. You can fight against it if you want, but reality will win.
If you assume that, letting an email sit that really doesn’t matter for a while is good time management when you look at what you were doing. Another example: a friend of mine has a fascinating job, and because of her work, people constantly reach out to her for informational interviews. You know, students, colleagues, people interested in her field, they just reach out and understandably want an informational interview.
And she told me that she just stopped responding to some of the requests. There were just so many, she just couldn’t even decline them nicely anymore. She just had stopped responding, and she felt really [00:05:00] guilty about it. And she wondered if it was a sign that she was overwhelmed or not managing her time well.
And maybe — I mean, maybe, yes, that could be a sign of that, but maybe not. You know, those informational interviews might just not be able to rank as any priority. Like, they’re just completely a zero-priority thing in her life in the context of all the other things she’s managing: her job, her family, her goals, her energy.
Letting them sit isn’t necessarily a sign of failure. It’s actually maybe a sign of good prioritization.
And throughout all of this type of stuff, I think it’s just helpful to think about, instead of immediately going to beating ourselves up when we’ve dropped the ball on something, on anything — like, if we’re just not doing something. And by drop the ball, I don’t even mean, like, in a big way. It’s just like, we dropped the ball in that we didn’t do it perfectly in the time we, you know, feel like we should, quote-unquote, have done it. Instead of having your immediate reaction [00:06:00] be beat yourself up, feel shame, that kind of stuff — which I very much relate to, I have been there many, many, many, many times.
Instead, shifting it to: what else was I doing? Should that thing have outranked those things that I was doing? Even sleep, even resting. Should that email that didn’t harm anyone, or should the dozens of requests for my time from people who I don’t otherwise have a relationship with, should those things outrank sleep, eating well, working out, my other clients, my other projects, my kids, all these things?
And I hope that brings it into context in the right way. ‘Cause I just think the context here is so important. We often evaluate our unfinished tasks in isolation. We just look at that one thing, that one unanswered email, that one form, that one phone call, that one house project, whatever it is that [00:07:00] we’re delaying on or not getting to or feeling like we’re kicking the can on, or, you know, all the things.
And because we’re looking at it in isolation, we beat ourselves up. But that’s just not an accurate portrayal of your life. You didn’t skip that thing in a vacuum. It wasn’t like, “Should I do this or not do that?” And that’s the end of the inquiry. You were doing other things. And I think that’s really empowering to realize.
Because while I think some people can feel frustrated by it — and I get it, I do, I do understand the frustration behind sometimes realizing you can’t do everything, certainly not immediately.
I think moving through that frustration and just accepting it is how we get to the real empowered freedom on the other side. A truth, a hard truth about time management is that if you are prioritizing well, some things will not get done. Some emails will sit, some opportunities will get past you, some projects [00:08:00] will wait.
None of those things are evidence of failure. Those are often evidence of prioritization, and good prioritization when done intentionally. The goal is not and cannot be to get everything done. The goal is to make sure the things that matter most have room to happen, to exist, to be done well. And again, sometimes that means — I mean, every time that means — letting something else go.
Again, not because you’re failing, but because you are actually making decisions to manage your time well. And it’s really cool that I’ve seen my own progression through this. I’ve realized that I didn’t have to bat down those feelings of shame as much anymore because I get to think about this a lot, not just live it, but I think about it a lot. So I think I can pick up on these things. But even me, like, thinking about this all the time and nerding out on it, it’s still really cool to see the progression because I didn’t start with this feeling.
But there was one [00:09:00] point last winter that I was behind on a lot, and I knew it. I could feel time feeling tighter. I could feel myself being behind on more, and I also felt solid though. Like, I knew email was sitting there, a ton of email was sitting there unanswered. I was late to my gym class multiple times.
I was slow getting back to friends. Small tasks were dropping. My tire pressure light had been flashing nonstop for, like, two weeks. I knew that the actual system was fine. It was just, like, the sensors hadn’t been linked up on my winter tires, that kind of stuff. And despite all that, I actually knew and felt really solid in my time and, like, my time management.
And that feeling wouldn’t be there if my definition of good time management means doing everything right on time, you know, all the time, and that any deviation meant failure. That’s not real life. Like, we can’t strive for that or we’ll continually be disappointed.
Like, real life is not smooth, and [00:10:00] you are not a robot. So that can’t be the goal. We have to make the goal: I know I can’t do everything, much less on time. Good time management is making decisions on what to do and what not to do, and when time gets tight, having the clarity of what I prioritize and what I don’t. Because zooming back, during that winter, the reason I felt good is in those five weeks preceding that — like, the five weekends preceding that — I had traveled three of those weekends, which is very weird for me, and I had family in town for the other two.
I had gone to Mexico to reconnect with childhood friends from when I lived there as a kid. I had met online friends in New York. I had spent time with my law school friends in Boston. My family, when they’d been in town, I’d focused on spending time with my sisters and their families and my parents, and it was all incredibly special to me.
And each trip had meant traveling at least the Friday of the [00:11:00] weekend, and two of those trips, the Thursday also of those weekends. So my capacity at work had been drastically reduced, and some of it had additionally been taken up by packing and things like that. And so when I saw my limited capacity coming down the pipeline — like, rewind from when I fell behind, you know, six or seven weeks prior to that.
When I saw that limited capacity coming down, I decided my focus during those tighter capacity weeks would be: one, being present with my girls and my husband when I was home, and two, ensuring my clients didn’t feel the impact of my travel and were really well taken care of as if I were home. And what that meant is a lot of other things needed to and should slide. Social media, Orange Theory, getting back to any email that was not a client, pushing out tasks longer than I normally would want to to get them done — all of those things happened proactively in those moments, ‘cause I could see it coming. Sometimes we can’t do it proactively and we have to have [00:12:00] that clarity in the more, like, reactive mode, but still have that clarity and can triage in that way.
This I at least had the benefit of seeing it coming down the pipeline. But I adjusted my calendar to account for those things and kept those, like, big priorities in mind as I lived through those weeks.
And just to reiterate — I know I’m like a broken record right now, but I just wanna really drive this home because I think it’s so important. I think some of us don’t even realize the assumptions we’re making in our head about what good time management means and what then any deviation from that means about ourselves.
To me, solid time management is not about doing it all perfectly all the time. It’s about accepting that, you know, my time is limited — whether it’s that limited, like I was just talking about, or just in general, like my time, your time, it’s limited. And it is even more limited during certain periods, and we need to intentionally pick what will get done and what won’t, or [00:13:00] what will get done later.
Good time management — the time management that I just view as, like, solid time management — is knowing how to allot work within a limited capacity, like what makes the cut and what needs to drop when time is tight. And it’s bringing those intentions to life within a system to make sure we can stick with them over a relevant time period.
You know, it can be easy to be like, “Okay, these are my priorities,” and then you move along in life, and it’s hard to remember. Where to me, tying it to the calendar is my way of making those decisions about my priorities and then helping future me live them out on an ongoing basis. Doesn’t mean every day, but, you know, on an ongoing basis, my time and where I spend my time and attention and energy should roughly shake out onto those priorities and let go of other things to allow for that.
And in that context, all of those, like, quote-unquote time management failures — like running late to gym classes, [00:14:00] not responding to email for periods of time, having, like, my flashing TPMS lights going — all of those things, they’re not failures. They’re actually signs that I’m doing things right.
That my time and energy was not on those things because it was on the things that were more important for me during that period of time.
And then I had built in time to dig out of those things after all of that travel was over as well, knowing that there would be a backlog and a buildup. I gave myself time to actually deal with all of those things on the other end.
And so again — and I know that this is a little awkward, like I’m just repeating the same thing over and over — but I think it’s important to really understand how these things come to life in real life and drive it home. Because I just don’t think we fully appreciate the assumptions we make about what is, quote-unquote, right in this context. If [00:15:00] you feel like you’ve been failing because you’re behind on certain things and emails are stacking up and so on, make sure you broaden your aperture.
Look at what you have been doing. My guess is you have been prioritizing important stuff, even when that means other things have to slide. And if you haven’t, if you feel like, “No, I’m not getting to the stuff and I’m not doing my priorities,” my guess is it’s not because you’re bad at time management. It’s ‘cause you don’t yet have the clarity around the limits of your capacity, what fits into it, and how to decide what gets to claim space and what can slip.
And without that clarity, you live in reaction mode, and that’s very understandable. Again, I have been there. No one teaches us how to do this stuff. Without clarity about your capacity, your current workload, whether you can take on something new or not, what timelines this stuff can realistically get done over — all that clarity, over all [00:16:00] those types of things.
What gets done becomes somewhat of a crapshoot. It’s kind of a crapshoot based on, like, whatever’s screaming fire the loudest. And again, I mean, that was me before I learned the Bright Method, so very much understand it. And if you want help getting there — to understand, okay, all this makes intellectual sense, but how do I know what my capacity is? How do I know what my workload is? How do I know what’s reasonable, and when I need to let some things go, or say no, or say later, or all that kind of stuff, with more confidence because I have more objective clarity of all this type of stuff that we’re talking about —
then I would love to work with you.
I teach the Bright Method in a 10-week program, and the September 9th and October 1st start dates — you can pick either one of those, September 9th or October 1st. Enrollment for either of those opens on August 6th at 11:00 AM Minnesota time, so Central Time.
In the 10-week program, we go over time management for both your personal and professional lives [00:17:00] so that — I mean, time is time is time. So all of your personal and professional and family and all that type of stuff, all of it has to fit in the capacity that you have and work together in a way that works for you, like interact in a way that actually works for your life.
And as part of that, we dig into the repetitive personal and family things, the repetitive work things. We talk about breaking down projects and one-off tasks. We talk about planning sessions. We talk about delegating, and so much more.
And throughout all of that, we see: okay, this is the world of things that I’m trying to do with my time. Maybe it all fits, in which case, excellent, but often it doesn’t all fit, or I don’t like how it feels. Maybe it technically fits, but I don’t like how it feels. What calls do I make? What do I let go? What do I share with a partner? What do I share at work? What do we eliminate? You know, there are so many different options here, but what do we do with all of these things to bring our workload in line with our capacity so that life feels the way that we want it [00:18:00] to feel?
If you are interested in jumping in, again, August 6th at 11:00 AM Central is the time to know. You can go to kellynolan.com/bright. I would jump on the wait list. That gets you a lot of information in your email inbox. You can block your calendar — there’s a little, like, add-to-calendar blocking for the enrollment time.
Last year, in September of 2025, it sold out in 30 minutes. So joining the wait list, blocking your calendar, making sure you’re jumping on to sign up right away for the September or October start date will be really, really great. It’ll help get you in and up the chances that we get you a spot. All right.
I’m here if you have any questions. Never hesitate to shoot me an email or a DM on Instagram. Happy to chat about this stuff. And most importantly, 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
