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If you have an ever-different schedule due to your work schedule, a partner’s, or something else, the Bright Method may sound like it wouldn’t work for you (after all, I talk a lot about calendaring repetative things), but it SHINES for people like us. Let’s dig into it, talk about things to calendar when you get, e.g., a shift schedule, and more.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Join the 10-week Bright Method program here: 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 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. [00:01:00] All right, today’s topic is somewhat niche, but I really do think that you will get something out of this even if you, you know, don’t think this sounds like you, which is fair. It’s pretty niche. But again, my goal is that it gets your wheels turning on maybe something totally different, but there’s something here.
There’s something here that I think might be useful, and so just give it a listen. I don’t think it’ll be a long one. And also, if you do get something out of it that’s really unrelated to what we’re talking about, but it just sparks an idea for you, let me know, because I love to hear about that stuff. Okay. Today, I wanna talk about shift workers, whether that is you or it’s your partner.
In my life, my husband is an ER physician, and so every week, every day looks really different for us because of the ever different schedules that he works, which has a ripple effect on me. You know, just like, you know, when I do pickups and drop-offs and all that kind of stuff in the way that we’re gonna talk about.
So definitely listen if you’re in that boat, whether you or your partner work ever different shifts. [00:02:00] And also share this with someone who’s in that boat if it’s not you, or even if it is you. If it’s you, you probably have many friends in the same boat, so feel free to share with them. The biggest thing here is that I worry that I sometimes scare people away who really could benefit from the Bright Method because I talk about repetitive things that we do in our life and calendaring those.
And I worry that by talking about those things, I’m scaring away the very people who could benefit from this system the most.
And that’s because for those people — and also, as I mentioned, I think for everybody, I would say that it’s augmented and, like, you know, exaggerated for those people, um, shift workers or their partners, but this does have an impact on everyone — is that things don’t happen at the same time every day. So when someone who knows that about their life hears about the Bright Method and hears me talk too generally, blaming myself here, about repetitive things and repeating things in your calendar and that kind of stuff, they think, “Oh, this approach won’t apply to me.” [00:03:00]
But what I really want you to hear is same, same in my life. These things aren’t happening at the exact same time every day.
My husband’s schedule and its impact on my schedule means that every day looks different over here too. And what I wanna tease out today is how the Bright Method helps me manage all of that because I truly do not know how I would manage our weird life without the Bright Method.
So today I wanna talk about ways to reframe the Bright Method through an ever different schedule lens that might help you see why that is the case for me and how it could give you a whole lot more clarity and less stress. So the first thing I wanna talk about is those invisible to-dos that I talk about calendaring all the time — the showering and getting ready, bed and bath time, prepping meals, all that kind of stuff. [00:04:00]
What I want you to do is not think of those as things that we, you know, engrave in time and have to do during those times, and every day we must eat dinner at 6:00 PM and blah, blah, blah.
What I want you to think about is, yes, we calendar those things on a repeating basis, but they are just default building blocks that move around.
For example, as I just mentioned, I calendared on a repeating basis from now until the end of time that I shower and get ready at a certain period of time, when I work out, when I do certain work-related tasks, when I drop off kids, when I pick them up, and so on. These are default building blocks that I have in my calendar to represent what I have to do and what I want to do, and I plan for them roughly when they tend to happen.
But then I adjust based on the season of life that I’m in by, like, school semester, summer, so-and-so, that kind of stuff. And then, more importantly for purposes of today, when I get my husband’s schedule, I have a checklist of sorts that I work through to move those building blocks around. [00:05:00] They move in light of what’s going on in his shift world, the impact it has on mine based on that, but I’m not reinventing the wheel every time I get a schedule of, like, well, okay, what else do we have to do?
All those default building blocks are in there, and I just drag and drop or even delete some things around as I plan out the next… We get his schedule in three-month blocks, as I kind of plan out those next three-month blocks.
And to bring this to life a little bit more, what I mean is when I get my husband’s ER schedule, I do, as I said, that checklist of things. And just here are some of them. So among other things, I block out his driving time to and from each shift. He has a significant commute, and so I like to see, like, when is he actually out of the house.
It’s different than just the shift start time. I like to block his sleep in and recovery window. [00:06:00] So if he’s getting home after about, like, 10, 10:00 PM, then I tend to block out more time in the morning just for him to sleep in. Um, and then also obviously for overnights it’s like, you know, way longer than just sleeping in for that sleep in time.
And it’s just, again, for me to understand he is not available to help with kids. He is not available to play backup childcare. He’s not available for these periods of time. And then I also block time, like the nights that he is home, but he’s gonna be tired. And I either write like M tired or M zombie mode at the top of those days.
I don’t often do full day events, but those are sometimes things that I do. And again, just to drive this home, for me what’s important is planning our life with kids is understanding when is he around to help with these wonderful wild children of ours? And it’s not just the shifts when he’s not available to help, it’s all those other things — the driving time, the sleep in time — or even he’s around to help for sure, but he’s exhausted and maybe don’t plan like this big social thing. [00:07:00]
And I wanna note that I get that this sounds secretarial for him, like I’m doing this secretary function for him. But we all manage our time differently, and candidly, he doesn’t need those things calendared. I could ask him to do it. To me, it’s one of those things that I actually like seeing, um, where things fall manually so I can think about how is this having an impact on my life at the same time as I do it.
So he could do it, but then I don’t get that same thing, which I will note — this is a total side note — I’ve trained an AI project to do this for me, and I actually didn’t like it. It did an incredible job, but there’s value in doing the manual so that I can see how things shake out in relation to the plans I’ve already made.
Because sometimes I have to plan things when I don’t have a schedule yet, and then I get it and I’m like, “Ugh, I gotta like adjust these things.” If I have AI do it or if I had my husband do it, I don’t tend to go through it as carefully as I do if I have to manually do this stuff. [00:08:00] And so I just throw that out there as a side note that I actually like doing this because it helps my brain absorb what the next three months are gonna look like, what needs to shift, things like that.
So a bit of a tangent, but you could have AI do this for you if you’d like. You could have your partner do this for you if it’s their schedule. I’m just kind of explaining why I actually like doing it because again, I can catch those conflicts ahead of time in a way that I don’t if they just like magically all appear in the calendar, but I don’t see those conflicts.
More to the point, I do this because it helps me more than it helps him, but you can divvy this up differently if you’d like, and have your partner do it. Okay. Next — and I kind of just alluded to this, but I go through fresh again — is looking at how his schedule interacts with my business schedule.
I aim to hold, like, hard to cancel meetings — like podcast interviews, whether I’m on somebody else’s podcast, they’re on mine, that type of stuff. [00:09:00] I try to schedule those things just when he is home to play kid backup if a kid is sick. I’ve just learned that kids tend to get sick when you have those things, and so it’s just far less stressful for the weeks leading up to it, the days leading up to it, and the day of if there is backup for those really important things.
And so I make sure, based on everything that’s been scheduled, that those meetings I’ve made still work if I’ve had to make them already, and then I also — I use Acuity for my meeting booking software — and I’ll update Acuity in light of my husband’s calendar.
Okay, last thing I’m gonna share from this checklist of things that I calendar are lining up extra childcare support where it’s needed. So for weekends when I am solo all weekend, historically, I’ve booked a sitter for four hours on the Sunday morning so I get some downtime. What I have found that’s interesting is I desperately needed that when my kids were littler. [00:10:00]
Now that they’re eight and four, I feel like way less worn out being with my kids all weekend solo, and so I tend to not need them as much. However, I went through a period last spring where I wasn’t really booking sitters when my husband was gone ‘cause I didn’t really need it, and then I looked at my summer months and saw how much less work time I had and how much more driving time I had and all this kind of stuff, and I did bring that back in for the summer.
But I anticipate letting it go again in the fall. I just find it interesting. That’s not really neither here nor there. But just throwing it out there that if you solo parent a lot or your partner solo parents a lot because of your shifts, it just might be something to think about is, you know, do we want to build in some more breathing room here? And a weekend sitter for four hours, three hours, whatever makes sense for you, can be really, really, really useful.
So these are just some examples of what I do when I get my husband’s schedule. And in addition, the repetitive things that I blocked that we were talking about at the top of this episode — those repetitive things, I can just drag and drop them around this new plan for the day and move things around. [00:11:00]
And I want you to hear that to me, that’s really helpful. Even though these things are shifting, the fact that these repetitive default building blocks like shower and getting ready and working out and walking our dog and all that kind of stuff, pickups, drop-offs, all of it — the fact that it’s already in the calendar, even if it’s gonna get nudged around a bit, it’s still amazing because, one, I’m not having to plan every week from scratch while trying to remember all of the basic moving pieces that I want in my days.
My brain just doesn’t have to remember all that stuff. It’s laid out in front of me. I just have to rearrange it.
I am doing all of that logistic management rearranging outside of my head. My brain is freed up to think clearly about it. It doesn’t have to hold onto those plans and be like, “Okay, on this day I’m gonna do this, and then on this day we’ll move that around.” All of those invisible to-dos are laid out.
I just get to, again, drag and drop, and like some people think of it like Tetris — like move things around — but my brain’s not holding onto it. [00:12:00] I’m not clogging up my brain with that, you know, cognitive load.
Three, I get to see how all the components of my life — personal, kids, business, all of it — how all of it interacts with each other each day and each week. I have not used a system other than this that gives me that clarity of how all these roles and pieces fit together, and they do have to fit together because they all draw on the same bank of time.
So I have to understand how they all fit together, and this allows me to do that. And then four, it allows me to communicate with my husband within the calendar. You know? So I’m not the only one understanding how all this stuff is gonna come together. It’s all in the calendar. Now, I will say this is a lot of information in the calendar, and I teach tech strategies to make it more manageable, but at the end of the day, what’s amazing is that it’s not just in my wheelhouse to know all this stuff.
He has it just as accessible to him as well. [00:13:00]
I know I’ve said it, but I will say it again because I truly, truly believe in it. I do not know how we would manage our life with his schedule, my business, two girls, a dog, parents nearby, all this type of stuff. I don’t know how we would do it without it, and when I see it all laid out in the calendar, I can’t believe that I would’ve been managing all of that in my head.
Now there’s really no getting around it. This is a fair amount of work. I don’t think it’s a terrible amount of work. I mean, it’s really like, you know, every three months when I get a schedule, I’ll just sit down for an hour, hour and a half, and like kind of play with all of this. And again, you could have AI do it.
I’ve set it up so that it can do it and I’ve given clients access to that if they want it and all this kind of stuff. You know, I’m like a believer in the manual thing — that time has its perks. I’m not anti-AI, but I do just see the value in slowing down for some things. Um, but if you do do it manually, it takes a fair amount of work. [00:14:00]
But I also think that that is the reality of having an ever different schedule, no matter what system you use. There are just too many moving pieces for it to be quick and easy.
And for me, having everything laid out in the calendar in the way that we do with the Bright Method helps me do this in a way that provides immense clarity, way less mental load, and great communication.
All right. So if you relate to having an ever different schedule, then just a recommendation is to come up with a list of things you do whenever you get your schedule or your partner’s schedule. And again, this could be shift schedule, it could be travel — you know, every time there’s a work travel thing set up.
There could be a lot of different scenarios for this, but you have a list of things you do. If you want, you could have a list of things your partner does whenever these, you know, shifts, schedules, that kind of stuff come out that you work through to adjust your schedule to make life easier and less scrambly and less, you know, stressful for future us going through it. [00:15:00]
In my program, I give you my full list to, you know, help get your wheels turning even more, but hopefully this gets your wheels turning enough for today.
And zooming back out, just the most important thing to note is: do not rule out the Bright Method if your life is ever different. Mine is too, and I truly don’t know how we would manage all of this shifting, every day looking different, without the Bright Method.
If the potential of the Bright Method in your life is clicking in a whole new way, and you’re looking for that system that can flex with your life and still give you the clarity and peace of mind that you crave, I truly believe it’s the Bright Method. Give it a shake.
Try out my free three-day program if you haven’t yet. I’ll put the link in the show notes. And if you wanna just jump into the whole thing and learn it, you can now. Enrollment is open. You can check out the link in the show notes and see which start dates are available. [00:16:00] And as I mentioned before, share this with a friend who lives in this kind of ever different, weird life.
It is a weird and wonderful life, but it does require an extra dose of logistics management for that peace of mind, and that’s what we’re here for. 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
