Theme Days: Why I don't do them, but it's a personal call!

To listen to Apple, click here; to listen on Spotify, click here.

I get asked a few times a year whether I theme my workdays – e.g., Marketing Mondays, Admin Tuesdays, Finances on Wednesdays. While I’m sure this works for some (and keep on keeping on if it works for you!), I’ll explain why it hasn’t worked for me – and what I do instead.

Below is a transcript of the episode. Enjoy!

Full transcript:

Kelly Nolan: [00:00:00] Hey there. Before we dig into today’s episode, I just wanted to let you know that my 10 Week Bright Method program is currently open for enrollment. So if you’re ready to learn the full Bright Method and get the full results, I hope you join me. Go to Kelly nolan.com/bright, and I hope to see you in there. All right, let’s get to the good stuff.

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 what we’re gonna talk about is a little bit random, but a few times a year I get asked if I have kind of a cadence to my work in the way some people think of as theme days. So some [00:01:00] people talk about a time management approach that some people use that is about doing specific work on specific days or maybe half days.

Kind of like capturing all of, let’s say. Strategy on Monday and your more creative work on Tuesday and more administrative work on Wednesday. I’m just making these up, but like teams on Thursday, things like that. Some variation of every single Monday you do this. Every single Tuesday you do this, or at least Tuesday morning you do this, and Tuesday afternoon you do this.

And it’s just the idea that focusing on a theme in your work for a whole day or a part of the day helps you focus. It helps you avoid task switching. It just kind of helps you corral your activities into a specific period of time with the i, I guess the idea that you can then stay in that mode and focus in that capacity.

And I’m just gonna share today the reasons that I don’t do this. I just don’t think it’s the right fit for me, [00:02:00] and I’m gonna explain what I do instead. But obviously to preface this, I, I truly, truly believe that time management is incredibly personal. So. If you do something like this and it works for you, please keep at it.

I’m not saying it’s wrong by any means. I’m also not saying like, if you’re thinking about doing it, doing it, that you shouldn’t try it. I think everything’s great to experiment with. Even if you don’t love it, you can kind of learn like, why don’t I like this? Like really pull it through and be like, not just why I don’t like this, but like what is it about this that I don’t like?

So I really wanna preface that. I’m going to talk about why theme days don’t work for me. Mainly to also help people understand like if they haven’t worked for you, like a lot of time management strategies out there, it can feel weird when a supposedly great time management strategy doesn’t work for you.

And if you don’t realize that some don’t fit people and some do, you might feel bad about yourself. And so I just wanna explain that it’s just maybe not a good fit. It has nothing to do [00:03:00] with whether you implemented it well or not, or things like that, or anything about you or your character. It wasn’t the right fit, and by me explaining why it hasn’t worked for me, it might shed light on you for you on why it didn’t work for you, and also what to do instead.

All right, so I’m just gonna explain where I’m coming from, and you can use your own judgment and knowledge about yourself and your industry to take what you want from it. So the reason theme days don’t really work well for me is that my work schedule is not consistent enough to lend itself well to theme days.

Like I don’t have. A full day of work in finance or in marketing or even like a half day of work on financial things or marketing things every single week. There’s no predictable, perfect repeatable cadence to my work in that way. And my work varies by kind of season. Like if I’m in a program or not running a program, that obviously has a big differentiator on like where I [00:04:00] spend my time and.

I don’t know, just life is different, like in different parts of my work. For example, this is a really small scale example, but it comes to mind for me is that, so I have a woman who helps me with social media. She is wonderful. Her name is Bella Foxwell and she helps me with my Monday and Wednesday posts.

If you really wanna know, really wanna get into the weeds, she helps me with the Monday, Wednesday posts, and so we do six weeks at a time. We both brainstorm ideas, we like check those off, and then I film a bunch of B roll, which is really awkward and not great at. She will draft up the posts and the captions and everything like that, and then I will edit them probably more than she wants to, but I’m like crazy about my voice and then she publishes them.

And so we do this cadence for every six weeks. And so every six weeks I have to really dig deep on the social media side of things, and then I [00:05:00] can let go for about six weeks of time, probably like four weeks until we start plotting the next ideas again. It’s awesome. I love working with her and that’s just an example though of every six weeks I have to spend about a day, day and a half going over social media content.

And I do like to kind of like do it all within a couple days if I can, just to kind of like stay in that zone. But that is a. Like every six weeks thing. I can’t fit that into like a weekly cadence of my life. Other examples are finances. I do probably about 45 minutes of finances every two weeks. So again, not a weekly thing, it just is every two weeks.

There are definitely things that I do daily and weekly, but again, they’re not like full half days. They’re kind of like their own standalone tasks. And so the reason I’m sharing all this is I think a, that’s. A little bit representative. I mean, if anything, my work is more repeatable, like repetitive [00:06:00] than a lot like definitely than pass me’s work, like as a lawyer, every week pretty much looked different of in terms of the substance of what I was working on.

If I was had a summary judgment motion that’s like a full week or more of work that’s gonna explode. If there’s like an emergency hearing or like a. Temporary injunction being said, or just like you can have these things that really dictate the ebbs and flows of your work, and it doesn’t lend itself really well to be, like, on Mondays, I check in on all my cases.

On Tuesdays I draft briefs. On Wednesdays I do legal research like. A lot of jobs don’t lend itself very well to thematic days. Don’t get me wrong. There are days that it’s great to be like, today I really gotta draft this brief, so I’m gonna draft it all day long. But that’s not every week. Like you can’t be like every Tuesday.

I do that. And so my first point really is. I don’t have, even with my somewhat more [00:07:00] repetitive schedule than it used to be. I don’t have the consistency of work that lends itself well to like theme days. In addition, I don’t think those theme days like repeating something every single week lends itself well to the seasons of work that I kind of already touched on.

But another example would be quarterly board meetings that you have to prepare for or tax season, or if you have big grant deadlines that happen, or we all have different seasonality in our work and what might work really well for one week. Would not reflect at all the work you need to do six weeks from now.

And so coming up with like theme days for everything, I don’t know. And it’s a lot of work to do that, right? Like coming up with theme days, you have to like think about what your themes are, think about what tasks go under them, assign tasks a certain days. Every time a task comes in, you have to think about what day does it go to.

There’s like a fair amount of formal structure maintenance that goes [00:08:00] into it. That’s. To me a little bit forced in terms of its structure, utility for the reasons we’ve been talking about. Like if your work doesn’t lend itself well to repetitive things and has seasonality in it, which a lot of jobs do, then trying to match, make tasks to specific times based on themes.

I don’t know. I haven’t seen it work very well for many people or any people directly. That said, I haven’t seen a lot of people try it either. I’m more just sharing how, why it doesn’t work for me and why, ’cause I’ve had it. Especially when I joined the entrepreneur world, there was a lot of that for some reason, like people were like, and then on Mondays you do this, and then on Tuesdays, and I was like, I just can’t make this work.

It feels. Kind of form over function for me. And so I’m just explaining why it didn’t work for me. And then also I can’t imagine it having worked for past me either as a lawyer. Again, I’m happy not to be. ’cause again, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong. I would love to [00:09:00] know for someone who it does work for, how they make it work in that way.

So feel free to reach out to me if you have an idea, but I’m just explaining why it doesn’t lend itself well for my work. For work that I’ve seen other people do. Another reason why I don’t really subscribe to this or like see how it could work in reality, like even if you’re like, theoretically this sounds great, but in reality the confusing part to me is like, what happens if you have to travel for work for three days in a week?

What happens if a client emergency comes in? What happens if you get sick or your kid gets sick and suddenly. Basically for any of these things, you lose a day or two. What happens to those theme days then and the work within that? And I mean, you can rearrange it of course, but then you lose the, I mean, obviously you have to do the work and you rearrange it, but you lose the theme day, like division that you worked hard to create.[00:10:00]

And so all the work, no matter the quote unquote theme, gets pushed into the other days. And losing multiple days like that has ripple effects for many days. And so it just confuses me on like, how long do things get messed up? And I don’t even think we’re messed up from a, again, not like an actual function perspective.

They’re not messed up like it. You rearrange things and you play out this new plan and yeah, it can be hard for a period of time, but I feel like we’re making it harder by then also having this derailed theme structure that. You put value on and see benefit in and, but you lose so easily with curve balls.

And to me, I mean, curve balls hit all the time. It could be a client emergency and your client doesn’t care that it’s like research day, like they want the response now. And so you have to do that. And so I just, I don’t know. I struggle with it because I’m like, well, what happens when it gets derailed?

Because not only then are you scrambling and rearranging like. You would have to anyway, [00:11:00] but now you’re like worried about the derailment of the theme day. And my suspicion is those types of things happen often. And so for me, a better approach has always been just to account for the curve balls that are likely coming.

Plan in the flex time and wiggle room and the schedule. Give yourself the space to rearrange, but not be overly concerned about what type of task is landing in what type of period. You can focus more on. The deadlines and the energy and the overall capacity and workload and pushing things out versus worrying too much about this.

Another more form over function thing about theme days. Okay, two more small points. I also just think that some tasks switching in our days, I mean, it’s inevitable, so I think that trying to index too far into not having to task switch, it just doesn’t. Reflect reality of what a lot of our work is. You know, you’re gonna get email, as I said, from clients who, it’s not even [00:12:00] emergency, but they wanna talk about something else.

And you’re like, you know, you can’t really be like, well, what’s my marketing day? I’m not working with current clients at this time, like on this day, or push things off because of that. Like, I just don’t think it always reflects reality. And so that’s one thing is like, I wouldn’t, you know, while I. I am sympathetic to the desire not to have to task switch.

I think often that is part of our life and so while I like putting off task switching if you can for like an hour or two in a day to focus and just be able to like really get important work done, I don’t think it’s realistic for like full days or even full half days for many people. And so I just wanna throw that out there that like.

Instead of trying to resist task switching and try and eliminate it by using theme days. Really work hard to establish a structure that would prevent task switching, but then it gets derailed every day because you have to task switch in your role. [00:13:00] That just seems like, you know, it’s a losing battle and I think that we’re better off embracing the reality of, Hey, I’m gonna be interrupted a fair amount.

I need to build, like, make sure I have some flex time built into account for that and let me maybe get more creative to like really go dark and not deal with distractions and interruptions for an hour or two. A couple times a week, and that’s how I’m gonna get that protected time. That to me, has always been more realistic than trying to, again, theme your days.

The final point I wanna say, and again, this could be definitely my personality here, and so don’t worry if you’re different and follow what you know about yourself is. I actually like variety, like if I’m doing just marketing all day long or if I had to do, oh my gosh, finance all day long, or, I’m just trying to think, that would actually, I don’t think I could focus for very long.

Like I would probably get an hour, two hours in and then be like really more of this, where switching it up is kind of nice. Like I actually, it keeps my energy up, [00:14:00] keeps it fresher, so I just throw that out there that it kind of goes back to the. There was episodes ago about like, your brain thinks you need a whole hour to do something and so you don’t, and that we crave these like bigger blocks of time and I get it.

’cause I do think that having big blocks of time is wonderful, but I think more often than we realize, we also get really tired after like an hour and a half or two hours. So having four hours to focus on something. Sometimes when we get it is a we again. We peter out after like those two hours. And so same thing here is.

Maybe you focus on something for an hour and a half that you block time for, that you focus on it and it’s great, and then you get to switch it up and that’s great and you switch it up enough that it’s not like in the same vein that it brings more energy and fresh energy into your day. So that at least is something I enjoy that there is, to me, some value in task switching because again, it makes it fresh.

So what I do [00:15:00] instead .

And focusing on the repetitive stuff for purposes of today.

Kelly Nolan: is.

Stuff that I’ve talked about throughout this podcast and dig into in a lot more detail in the program. But essentially it’s a combination of really thinking through what has to be done. What do I want done? What cadence do these things have to happen at? Again, I talked about some things are every six weeks, some things are every two weeks.

Some things are daily, some things are weekly, and I try to just think about energy wise, when do I want to do that type of thing, like mornings, afternoons, that type of thing. Again, I’ve talked about this before in my job, some of my activities are reliant on when my husband is available for kid backup, just because.

There’s some things like podcast interviews, whether it’s on my podcast or I’m interviewed on somebody else’s. That type of stuff is just easier if I have childcare backup. But on the whole, that’s kind of what it comes down to, and I don’t overcomplicate it [00:16:00] with more formality around days of the week, like there are definitely mismatched, quote unquote themes present on every day.

Of my week. And what I also really like about it is I move these things around. So I think of it as I’m building out these default building blocks, but I move them around based on meetings, based on other things I have going on, just based on my energy. And I rearrange ’em during that weekly planning session, but also even that day, I might be like, Hmm, I don’t really feel like doing that.

Let me move it to a different time, bring somebody thing else in. And I just play with these default building blocks in a very flexible way. And that’s really it. I don’t tend to overthink it too much on what types of work happens on which day it’s more functional, of what are the things that have to happen, repeat ’em out, see how they play, rearrange ’em based on a schedule, based on my energy, and don’t worry too much about what’s happening when other than deadline driven and [00:17:00] response times and that kind of stuff.

So in closing, those are really the reasons. Nothing groundbreaking, but hopefully helpful to understand why. I at least don’t worry about theme days when scheduling my days. I think that it would be a lot more work than I would get benefit out of, and it doesn’t realistically match my schedule or my personal life’s impact on my schedule and the curve balls that I experience.

And maybe it’s similar for you too, and it helps shed light on. Why they might not have worked so well for you in the past that has nothing to do with how you implemented or if you did it right or all that kind of stuff. Again, if they work for you, keep going. That is awesome, and push back on anything I said.

I think it’s helpful to hear, just understand why things work for other people. And so I think it’s wonderful if they work for you. I just wanted to share for the people who have been curious about it, curious if I do it, that kind of stuff. Just understand [00:18:00] why I don’t and it doesn’t work for me, and it’s okay if it works for you too.

My goal is more to share with the person who’s tried it and quote unquote failed at it. That I just hope it takes the pressure off of worrying too much about coming up with themes and divvying categories, like into themes and matchmaking, tasks to those themes, and stressing when life derails a theme day or forces you to bring, you know, non theme work into some other theme day.

I just think that. It’s tricky enough to manage all this stuff, and it’s okay if you can’t operate within themes that I just haven’t seen. Give the benefit to warrant the work that goes into it. That said, do account for the repetitive work that you have in your life and. Do represent it on an ongoing basis in your calendar so that you have those default building blocks so you understand what your workload is so that you see how it all comes together.

So it’s, you know, you don’t forget about it and reinvent the wheel every single week. But don’t worry too much about matchmaking it too, [00:19:00] like with like, and that kind of stuff. Like I just wouldn’t worry about it too much. As I said, be flexible with them When something happens, you know, something takes longer to do than you thought.

A client needs something from you. A boss needs something from you. A kid is sick, you are sick, whatever it is, rearrange. And then you don’t have to worry too much about the themes going forward. And if this approach sounds interesting to you, check out my free five day program. You can get it at kelly nolan.com/refresh.

And if you are interested in the full program, it is open now or will be again soon. My goal is that it’s open more of the time so that people can jump in whenever they’d like. It’s just that I also have to cap it each month to make sure I can serve those people well. So just know that if it’s closed right now, it’ll be open again soon.

I’m trying to open it about once a month if it is closed. Hopefully it’s not. Hopefully it’s just open and it hasn’t sold out, and you can jump in when it works best for you. I did wanna close by reading something that a woman who took the program earlier this year just sent me. She’s an attorney in Europe and she said, I [00:20:00] feel so much more calm as I know I will not forget stuff anymore.

Your system is very specific and hands-on, but also extremely adaptable, which makes it realistic. Even putting into practice just half of the things you suggest and being consistent with it helps immensely. Whereas I feel that other systems are too rigid and only work if you do them perfectly, which is just adding more stress and to dos.

If you’re considering the program, take the free five day course and listen to a few of the first podcast episodes and see how much change. If you actually implement only a few of the things Kelly suggests, then imagine how much more you can gain from the in-depth program where you can actually interact with Kelly and other like-minded women, and you realize that the money you need to invest will probably be the best money spent of your life.

It was for me, so I hope you consider joining me. You can learn more at kelly nolan.com/bright. Most importantly, thank you for being here and I’ll catch you in the next [00:21:00] episode.

Links you might enjoy:

🌿 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.

Theme Days: Why I don’t do them, but it’s a personal call!

Full transcript:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

A bit about me

Want to try the Bright Method for free?

TM

check out my 10-week bright method time management program

Reclaim your time from your inbox

Hello, more breathing space.

Like bite-sized time management tips?