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Sometimes, I think our goals around time management are just wrong. Let’s talk about it.
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. Today I wanna talk about something that I think a lot of us, including myself, get wrong when we’re thinking about what’s our ideal outcome with solid time management and this like light bulb moment clicked for me, actually, I think two years ago now, and I was running around the house with my kids.
It was summertime, they were home more. I was running around outside. We were coming inside and I was thinking about dinner, and I was thinking [00:01:00] about needing to clip their fingernails and all those random things that go through your mind. And I caught sight of a pair of my tennis shoes alongside a pair of tennis shoes from each of the girls.
You know, they’re like tossed roughly around by the back door. Nothing’s organized, but they’re just all sitting there piled together. And the visual of that for some reason, just stopped me in my tracks. In that moment, I felt so lucky to have scenes like that strewn about my house, even though those two cute little girls come with piles of to-dos as anyone listening with kids knows, and it really drove home.
Something that, as I mentioned, is funny about time management and that is that the to-dos that weigh us down that we sometimes wish away. Often relate to roles that we love and having no to-dos would mean that those roles that they relate to are no longer [00:02:00] there. And that’s very much not actually what we want.
I’m gonna run through some examples. So like you love having a home, you love having that warm, safe place to rest. Ensure, you know, it comes with buying paper towels and researching that insurance issue and mowing the lawn and shoveling the snow and all that kind of stuff. And while those things add up to a lot, we don’t actually wish, even though I know we do wish.
We don’t, in reality, wish we didn’t have them. ’cause then we wouldn’t have a home. To have a home. You have those things. Same thing with your career. There are parts of your career that excite you. That’s why you picked that career and sure the job comes with meetings and email and busy work and more meetings and all that kind of stuff.
And while you know, we’d probably take like 70% of the job and leave the rest, you don’t necessarily wish away that career as a whole [00:03:00] or even if you’re unhappy in your job, the ability to work perhaps or so on. Like, we don’t actually wish we didn’t have a job. Even if we wish away a lot of the work sometimes, and if you have kids, you love being a mom, the hand grabbing yours like the belly laugh when you do that funny thing, like seeing them articulate their personalities in a way that makes your eyes just like widen and wonder as they get older.
And yes, it comes with a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton amount of work. You don’t actually wish that work away. Because that would mean they’re not there. And I think that our thoughts around time management are a little weird in that regard. Like we think we crave the end of the to-do list. We want all the to-dos to be gone.
We want an empty plate. That’s what we think, but I don’t think we actually do. When push came to shove and we had to think through what that meant, we don’t actually do because we [00:04:00] love the roles that create the to-dos. Of course, not all roles. I’m not trying to like. Puppies and rainbows everything in our life.
But on the whole, a lot of the work that comes in our life relates to roles that we love and that we would keep with given the choice. Instead, what we really want is to have the to-dos, but handle them in a way that allows us to also feel like ourselves, to also be able to breathe, to feel like it’s all at a steady pace, a doable pace, and we have that breathing space.
We have to learn to live with all of the, to-dos that flow with all of the roles that we love, and learn to manage them in a way that gives us that breathing space and peace of mind, like understanding what to do with all the tasks, what to prioritize, what to let go, how to take breaks in the middle of it all, and so on.
And I recently read this quote by James [00:05:00] Clear that really reminded me of this light bulb moment. He said work is endless. Exercise is endless. Parenting is endless. Same with marriage, writing, investing, creating, and more. You get to choose the parts of your life, but many of the important things in life cannot be finished.
Do not approach an endless game with a finite mindset. The objective is not to be done, but to settle into a daily lifestyle you can sustain, and that allows you to make daily progress on the areas that matter. Embrace the fact that life is continual and look for ways to enjoy the daily practice. And that made me pull.
A post on Instagram that I’d written about this, that I just covered outta the archives because it really resonates with me. I think that we have to absorb that. There will always be more to do, that we cannot wait to take breaks until it’s all done. Because it [00:06:00] won’t be, and we don’t actually wanna wish it away because it means other stuff would go away that we don’t want to go away.
I just wanted to share that today. I know it’s brief, but I really want you to embrace that and I think we all need it, including me. We need those reminders that the tasks that come with all of this is what we want. I’ve heard it said before, I think I heard it from a woman named Susie Moore. I’m sure she heard it from somewhere else too.
We’re kind of shifting the uh, I have to do feeling to the, I get to do and framing it for the larger role that’s more important to you. I think her example was something like, oh, I have to take out the trash again, is I get to take out the trash again because I have so much that we fill up a trash can in our warm and cozy house, and that’s what I get to do.
I think you could quickly lean into the territory of toxic positivity here. That’s not what I’m trying to go for, but I think that the bigger thing is, is we [00:07:00] can’t. Wish away all the to-dos on our plate because we don’t actually want that. And also, it’s not realistic. We can’t wait to take breaks until we finish it.
We can’t wait to be finished to get that breathing space. And instead we have to create a life. And for me, that requires obviously a system to help us pace ourselves, to help us make steady progress in a way that feels good, that allows us to take breaks. We can actually enjoy. And so much more, and so I firmly believe that’s what the Bright Method does.
If you’re interested, I would love to work with you. You can jump in at Kelly nolan.com/bright. Let’s help you keep the roles you want to keep and all that they come with while reclaiming your peace of mind. All right. 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.
