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In this episode of The Bright Method Podcast, Kelly Nolan is back from the break and walks through the one line item she wants in your weekly planning session – the Clean Slate – and why reviewing last week packs a bigger punch than you’d expect. It sounds anticlimactic, almost boring, but this one line item is sneakily powerful, and its ripple effects go much further than it sounds. If you regularly end your week landing in the “I didn’t do enough” story, this episode is for you.
Related episodes to check out:
- Episode 8 (more on the Clean Slate weekly planning session)
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.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Join the waitlist for the 10-week Bright Method program here: https://kellynolan.com/bright
- Google Calendar Event Checker Chrome Extension
Full Transcript:
Kelly Nolan: Hey, hey, and welcome back. It feels really good to be back. I will say that my headphones that I wear for recordings were actually dusty when I put them on, so it has been a while. [00:00:00] Feels great to be back, and thank you for being here. Thanks for, you know, waiting through the break and being here now. All right, so today we are gonna talk about one line item that I wanna make sure is in your weekly planning session.
I call it the clean slate session. You can call it whatever you’d like, but it’s one line item I wanna make sure you’re doing. And it, I’m not gonna lie, sounds very anticlimactic but is sneakily powerful. [00:01:00] It really packs a punch and has much broader ripple effects than it sounds. So stick with me even if you feel your eyes getting heavy when I talk about it.
All right. Before we get there, now that I’ve sold it so well, two quick housekeeping points. First, the podcast is back, obviously. It is back for a season from now through early March of 2027. It’ll be here every Monday, maybe, you know, some weeks off for Christmas and things like that, through, as I said, early March of 2027.
So sit back, soak it in, share it with a friend if you’d like, and thank you for being here. All right, point number two is the 2026 to 2027 season of the Bright Method 10-week program — those dates are all set. And I’m telling you this now even though it kicks off in September because I know you’re busy, and if you wanna take this program and learn the Bright Method, it is a somewhat time-intensive [00:02:00] program, at least if you wanna keep pace with it. You don’t have to, but if you want to, and so it helps to block the time well ahead of time. So everything I’m gonna share next, and I’m gonna keep this quick and we’ll get to the good stuff, all of the details are at kellynolan.com/bright. So don’t feel like you have to memorize this or, you know, write everything down.
Just know it’s at kellynolan.com/bright, and here’s the quick version. The 10-week program returns in September 2026, and it’s gonna have monthly start dates this time. So we’re gonna start September 9th, October 1st, November 2nd, December 1st, January 4th, February 1st, and March 1st. So we’re having monthly start dates.
A change this time that I think is great is that we’re gonna allow people to sign up ahead of time so that you know if you’re starting, like, a month ahead of time.
Enrollment for the September and October start dates opens on August 6th at 11:00 AM Central. I think that’s great. It allows you to know in [00:03:00] early August if you’re doing it in September or October, which, as I said, you’re busy. It’s really helpful to be able to block that time ahead of time. So I’m really excited about that change this time.
So when you enroll on August 6th, you pick your start date. So September, if that one works, awesome. If October is a better fit, great. You can lock it in on that August 6th date, and then each month after that will open on its own cadence, and I’ll share more about that at another time.
To join the wait list, go to kellynolan.com/bright or DM me the word bright program on Instagram. When you join the wait list, you also get some add-to-calendar things to block the enrollment date with the URL in it, that kind of stuff to block the call dates, all that kind of stuff.
So it’s just a nice way to start blocking your availability now if you wanna take it even before you jump in. One final heads up: in September of last year, of 2025, enrollment sold out in 30 minutes. So I just wanna throw that out there. Join the wait list. It’s a great way to just make sure that it’s all on your calendar, as [00:04:00] I said, URL, everything like that, to up the chances that you jump in right away and get your spot.
Okay, let’s turn to the fun stuff.
So if you’ve been here a while, you know that I’m a big believer in a weekly planning session. I call it the clean slate.
It takes about two hours, which I know is a lot, and it’s okay if your reaction is like, “Ugh.” Like, it is a lot. What I want you to hear, and, you know, we can tailor this and personalize it and perhaps break it up — there are a lot of ways to tailor it — but at the end of the day, what we need is time each week, in a way that works for you, to really look up, to gather action items that flew at you from all the different channels, to look ahead and understand: what do the next two weeks look like?
What are my priorities? Do these fit? Do I need to ask for extensions? Do I need to move some meetings? Do I need to… Like, you know, there are just a lot of things that go into this. We’re also doing this across all roles, so personal and professional, because they all have to fit together and come together.
And so there’s a lot of work, and that’s why it takes [00:05:00] two hours. But as I said, we can tailor this. And the way I also think about it is that it’s a way to gather a lot of the decision-making we’re already doing throughout a week and corral it into one period of time to free ourselves up the rest of the time from having to do it.
I hear often from clients that doing the clean slate allows them to spend more of their week than executing — they’re not trying to figure out what to do. They just sit down, know what to do, and get to execute and get a lot more done because of the thought they put in during the clean slate.
So that’s just a general, very high-level overview. Again, check out episode eight if you want more. I really recommend doing it on a Thursday or a Friday. The reason for that is just that you get this weird on-top-of-it high after it, and I want you experiencing that going into your weekend, not having that, like, looming Sunday-scaries feeling all weekend and then getting the clarity and on-top-of-it feeling, you know, Sunday night just in time to go back into work, and you didn’t get that, you [00:06:00] know, high and get to experience that clarity that allows you to really relax in your weekend.
You didn’t get that for the whole weekend, which is a real bummer. So we wanna do it ahead of the weekend so that you get to soak in that weekend before going back to work.
Okay, so we’re running a weekly clean slate agenda. It is a time that, you know, if you wanna feel on track, you gotta lay down the tracks, and this is the time when we’re laying down the tracks, and we’re protecting time really to do that and to lay it all out. And one line item on the agenda — and yes, I’m very agenda-driven, otherwise I don’t fully know what to do or when I’m done, so I’m a big fan of an agenda.
One line item on this agenda is review last week. Did you get everything you meant to do done? And is there anything you need to follow up on? Now, before you roll your eyes, as I said, I know that it’s anticlimactic and just kind of boring sounding. I completely get it. Just stick with me. I wanna talk about what this looks like practically, and then why, because the why [00:07:00] is bigger than it sounds.
Okay, first up, practically. Now, really all it is, is wherever you keep your tasks, the to-dos, all that kind of stuff, you wanna go to the specific ones you intended to do this week, and again, ask, “Did I do them and do I need to follow up?” This is easier when everything has ended up in the calendar, so that you are literally just going back to your last clean slate in your calendar, and then scrolling from there down.
So you’re just looking with your eyes everything that happened after the clean slate up to the next day. Going down that day, looking through it: did I do all this? Anything need to follow up? Up to the next day. It’s easier when it’s on the calendar. Is it still tedious? Absolutely. When you stumble upon something you did not do or that you need to follow up on, it is well, well worth it.
I do wanna flag one thing though for you that trips some people up, and that is that some people, when they use their calendar in a way like the Bright Method, similar [00:08:00] or within the Bright Method, when you use it, it can be tempting to delete things you get done. And because of this line item, I want to encourage you never to delete things that you do in your calendar, because then you don’t see it when you’re doing your clean slate, you know, weekly look back.
And so I wanna give — if you are someone who likes to delete things once you do ‘em, and you’re like, “Well, how am I supposed to know what I’ve done then?” Very fair. And I just wanna give you some options before we dig into, like, keep moving forward. So first option is if you are in Google Calendar and you are in Chrome, which I know is a small subset of people because a lot of us do a lot of our work in Outlook, and so totally fair.
But if you are in Google for your personal and definitely for your work, then just know that there is a Chrome extension called Google Calendar Event Checker — I’ll put the link in the show notes as well — that allows you to click into an event. It is kind of annoying, you have to, like, go into the event, but there’s a green emoji checkmark thing at [00:09:00] the end of the title.
You click on that, and it puts that green checkmark emoji at the front of the event title and crosses out the title. And so then you can hit save. Then that entry in your calendar has that green checkmark at the front, and the title is crossed out. So that’s a really nice way that some people like clarifying in their calendar what they have done versus not done.
If you’re not in Google, like if you’re in Outlook or you just don’t want to use that Chrome extension, you can kind of borrow the same logic if you want. You could put an X at the front of the title. You could drop in an emoji that means done to you. You could change the color, you could, you know, maybe change it to gray once you’ve done something. There are a lot of options. Another creative one for the people who really like to delete and just get it out of there is, instead of deleting it, moving the entries that you complete to a specific time of day that wouldn’t confuse you.
So for example, let’s pretend your normal workday, I’m just gonna say, is like 9 to 6. All the things that you finish within that block of that larger window of [00:10:00] time, you could move up to like 5:00 AM or down to 9:00 PM to clarify that you’ve done it, but you’re not deleting it, and they just hang out at a time of day that you’re like, “That’s just kinda my, like, holding zone for things that I’ve done.”
And again, to remind you of why we’re talking about this: that way, when you get to your clean slate that Thursday or Friday and you’re looking back at your week, you have the things that you’ve done saved at the top of the calendar, or, you know, within the calendar but checked off or grayed out or whatever, so that you’re clear on what you did and what you didn’t.
Now, I still want you to read them when you’re doing this weekly look back.
And the reason for that is that you might realize, “Oh, I did that, but I never heard back, and I should’ve heard back by now.” Or, “I did that. I haven’t heard back. It’s a little early to follow up, but I really should follow up, like, let’s, next Tuesday.” And you could calendar a reminder to follow up next Tuesday.
So it’s just a really nice way to say, “Eeh, even though I did it technically, [00:11:00] something should’ve happened by now that hasn’t, and I see that and I need to follow up.” And so then you can plan that accordingly.
Okay, so first reason to really do all of this, you know, look back, and also to have the record of what you should have done, is, as I just said, make sure you did it all. And also, if you need to follow up, it’s the flag. It just reminds you to follow up on those things. That’s a kind of very tactical, obvious, straightforward, great.
There is a second reason that is a bigger reason, I think, and it is that when you look back, you see what you actually did. So often in these scenarios, whether we’re in a planning session or just living life, we really focus on what we didn’t do or what we have left to do, and we’re so, like, intimidated by it, and we beat ourselves up for not having done more of it already. When we’re looking, you know, at our next week and the pile of things that, you know, are left to be done, including the stuff that rolled over from the prior week, [00:12:00] it is so easy and human nature to land in the, “Ugh, I did not do enough this week,” or, “I should have worked harder,” or, “I clearly procrastinated.
Why didn’t X, Y, and Z happen?” And it’s so human. But when we look back and we look at all that we did do, it broadens the picture. Maybe X, Y, and Z didn’t get done because you were busy handling a whole pile of other things that mattered more.
On a group call inside a Bright Method program, a woman once confessed to the group that she had procrastinated. She told the group that she hadn’t gotten, you know, two or three work things done that week, and that, you know, it was just something about herself that she had to deal with, and she was really beating herself up.
But I had been emailing with her earlier in the week, and I had more context. It was a good thing, and it really brought a lot of this to life for me too.
I knew that one of her kids had ended up in the hospital with a broken limb, and I also knew that she had had a curveball work project that had landed on her out of [00:13:00] nowhere. And so after she finished talking about, you know, kind of beating herself up about not doing the things she calendared, I just kind of was like:
Do you think you really procrastinated? Or, you know, if it’s okay to share, I know that this happened and this happened this week. So were you really procrastinating or were you prioritizing?
And in the course of prioritizing all the things on your plate, X, Y, and Z didn’t happen because you had to prioritize these other things. And, you know, in my opinion, you prioritized the right things. And it was such an interesting moment to realize we do that to ourselves all the time. We focus so often on the things we didn’t do and just, like, black out the things that we did do and, like, the explanations of why we didn’t do those things,
and the why might have been really good prioritization in the moment.
And what I love about looking back at the week — like, yes, it’s tedious and all that kind of stuff — but it also highlights for us all the things that we did [00:14:00] do.
In a way, on that phone call with that woman, I was playing the role of that weekly look back. I was doing for her what the clean slate does for each of us — like, helping her see everything she had done instead of only focusing on what she hadn’t and the story she’d, you know, told herself about why.
And that awareness, in, like, broader context brought in — that awareness of what’s really going on, not just the, you know, more narrow, beat-ourselves-up version of the story that we tell ourselves — that broader, realistic awareness of the whole picture really matters, and it really matters in three ways.
First, it matters ‘cause of our own perception of ourselves, and I’ve kind of talked about that. You know, did you procrastinate or were you actually prioritizing correctly? Did you not get enough done or did you do a lot, just not that particular stuff? I really think the stories we tell ourselves matter.
It affects how we view ourselves, how we [00:15:00] view our work, how we feel motivated to get up and do things. It matters a lot. And doing this review that we’re talking about, this, like, weekly look back, builds a more accurate understanding of our reality and therefore our perception of ourselves.
The second point is that it also has a bearing on how other people view ourselves, kind of in a contagious way from that first point of, like, how we view ourselves. Just kind of bringing this to life — almost every week that I do my clean slate and I hit that line item and I’m looking back and doing my tedious scroll through the week, there are moments of, “Oh, man, I can’t believe I did that this week.
Like, I forgot I did that. I definitely forgot it was this week.”
And I’m genuinely surprised and kind of impressed by myself about how much I got done, because I’ve already forgotten, like, half of what I did. And I bring this up because if we can’t remember all that we did, the people around us definitely can’t either. Like your boss, even your partner at home, [00:16:00] like, I mean, even if they were aware in the first place of what you’re doing, they’ve forgotten.
And so that’s really important — that, you know, I always think just generally it’s important to make our wins and our work visible at work and at home, but this is a great, you know, example of that — of that, as we change our narrative about ourselves, we can use that same data to also communicate with the people in our lives about how much we did do, particularly when — and I’m bleeding into my, you know, third point as I do now — but particularly when we need to ask for extensions or adjustments or things like that.
What I mean by that is, if we’re like, “Oh, I didn’t do X, Y, and Z,” and I feel bad about myself, and then I go ask my boss for an extension on X, Y, and Z, and that’s just the extent of it, I just need more time on X, Y, and Z, that’s one conversation. Where if instead I’m like, “Okay, I didn’t do X, Y, and Z, but it’s ‘cause I did A, B, and C this week that were high-value and high-priority things,” [00:17:00] then one, I feel better about myself, I have more confidence, but also, as I go to my boss and say, “Hey, I need more time on X, Y, and Z because I prioritized A, B, and C this week, which had these great outcomes for us, but it did mean that I didn’t get to X, Y, and Z, and so I’m gonna need some more time there,” that’s a different conversation.
It’s shown the value that I bring, the strategy that I employed, all of that. Like, that conversation just makes me look better in a realistic way than it would have otherwise.
And I think that’s really important.
The third thing is really important, and it’s somewhat convoluted, and I’m gonna try to do my best to explain what’s going on in my head in an articulate way.
When we just focus on we didn’t do X, Y, and Z, and we beat ourselves up and all of that, we think the solution is: I need to work harder, I need to be more disciplined, I need to not procrastinate as much, all that kind of stuff. When instead we do this weekly [00:18:00] look back and get the broader context that we’ve been talking about, we see, okay, I didn’t do X, Y, and Z, but it’s ‘cause I did all this other stuff.
If this happens, let’s say, four weeks in a row, and I’m realizing every single week I’m rolling over a lot, but it’s because I’m doing all this other stuff that’s also high priority, and this is becoming a problem — like, the rolling over is becoming a problem, not just ‘cause it bugs me, but because it’s an actual problem for deadlines, that kind of stuff.
That gives more clarity that the issue is actually a workload problem. I have too much on my plate, and I’m aware of that workload problem because I’ve looked back and seen all that I’m doing. X, Y, Z not getting done isn’t because there’s a flaw with me. There’s a flaw because I have too much on my plate.
There’s a flaw with my workload. My workload is not matching my capacity.
And that’s completely different. Like, that’s a completely different posture, because I’m not trying to problem-solve me, I start [00:19:00] problem-solving my workload. You can’t just work harder out of a workload problem; you have to make actual adjustments. You know, how you handle curveballs, how you have workload conversations, how you make your own prioritization determinations, how you eliminate, how you punt.
There’s so much that goes into this, but the first step is realizing: is it a me problem or is it a workload problem? And this weekly look back can really shed light on that and help you see, oh, it’s not a me problem, it’s a workload problem. There’s still work to be done when you realize that, but at least you’re fixing the right problem.
And that’s what I love about this. You know, whether we’re talking about a little boring-sounding line item or the whole Bright Method and just a calendaring system, is that, you know, we’re talking about one very tactical thing, as I said, like a line item in an agenda or a calendar system, but the ripple effects go so much further [00:20:00] than what it sounds like it will provide.
It has an impact on how you see yourself, how you judge your own performance, how you talk about your value and your workload with the people around you, and helps you know whether you’re even solving the right problem in the first place. I absolutely love it, and I find it fascinating.
I also wanna say this step is so powerful, like everything we’re talking about today, but I just wanna flag for you that it is retrospective. It’s one of those things that it’s part of the Bright Method, where we look backwards and then gain information and data from it that we can, you know, apply going forward.
And while there is real value in that, I do wanna flag that so much about the Bright Method is more proactive. It’s more empowering, like to avoid some of this stuff going forward and build a plan forward, so you’re not just reviewing the week, but you’re setting it up to be realistic in the first place.
So I just wanna flag that, but I do think there’s just such hidden, amazing power in this [00:21:00] just, like, one line item in an agenda that I wanted to flag it and just share about it today.
If you’re interested in joining the Bright Method program though, I would love to work with you. Just quickly, if you’re new here, the Bright Method 10-week program is a program that teaches high-achieving women how to build a calendar-based system at home and at work.
Helps you manage it all — the work, the home, the personal, the mental load, all of it — so that the plans you build out are actually ones that are realistic and that you can bring to life, that you can execute on well, that feel reasonable, that help you do things well so that you are proud of what you got done each day and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow.
And if today was interesting to you, I’d love to have you join me in the fall. You can enroll on August 6th. Get on the waitlist at kellynolan.com/bright so you’re ready when the doors open. If you’re interested in trying out the Bright Method program, you can jump into my free three-day program, the Reset and Refresh, at [00:22:00] kellynolan.com/refresh. And as always, I’m here if you have any questions.
Thank you for being here. It’s great to be back, 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.
