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00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning, This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode will be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us. So today I am excited to be interviewing Kelly Nolan. Kelly is a time management expert and the host of the Bright Method podcast. So, Kelly, welcome to the show.
00:00:33
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. It's a joy to be here.
00:00:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, excited to have you. So tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: Sure thing, My name's Kelly Nolan. I was a patent litigator for years and had been decently organized up until that point of my life, and quickly got overwhelmed when I became an attorney and I looked for help, didn't really find anything. That's stuck at the time, and slowly pieced together my own weird little time management system and kept practicing law. I thought I was kind of creating a system to get me where everybody else was, and it wasn't here till years later that I realized other people felt the way I felt, And so that's the time management system I teach now, the Bright Method. In addition, I'm married to any our physician, so I get very wacky ever changing schedules. We have two little girls, a seven year old and a three and a half year old, and our original baby, our black lab Alice.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: That sounds wonderful, so a full house as well.
00:01:26
Speaker 2: Well.
00:01:26
Speaker 1: It's interesting when you say you know you were feeling overwhelmed, What was it that made you overwhelmed? I mean, is it the volume of incoming stuff, the requests like weird hours? I mean, what was it that? Yeah, when people say they're overwhelmed, what do they tend to mean? I think it was the.
00:01:40
Speaker 2: First time in my life I just felt like the input kind of outstepped what my systems could keep track of. I love paper planners. I'd loved them all the way through law school. I had worked before becoming a lawyer, but usually in a little bit more maybe manageable settings where people were kind of like looking out for your work and helping you manage that. And when you become an attorney, especially in big law, like I worked for multiple different partners, so no one really had eyes on everything I was doing. It was up to me to manage my workload. But I didn't also really realize that. It sounds silly, but you're just you're like assuming that what the work coming at you is reasonable, or else they wouldn't ask you to do it. And so there was that the volume of email went up exponentially based on anything I dealt with. And I'm managing multiple matters that have no relation to each other, so you know, deadlines are set without worrying about what's going on in my other matters. And it's just a sheer amount of volume of managing clients and you know, documents and information and all this kind of stuff. And then the expectation that you know you're really supposed to be on. You know, as a junior associate in big law firm, your job is make everybody else's life easier. And so there was just a lot of demand. And I will say that when I say overwhelmed, I looked like I had it together. I hit deadlines. You know, it wasn't like I was a mess, but inside it's how I felt. I just felt stretched, way too thin, anxious I was going to drop a ball. I'd be like out with friends and not able to focus on their stories because I'd be worrying about work and I just was like, this cannot be. I reject that this is what adult life feels like.
00:03:14
Speaker 1: Well, what do most people get wrong? Like when they have a high volume of work? What are they doing wrong as they're managing it?
00:03:21
Speaker 2: You know that took me a while. I mean for a long time, I really blamed myself. I'd had these systems that got me far, and I was kind of like, well, these systems work, so it must be me, and I think what I So for a long time I beat up myself. I was like a character flaw in my head, where in reality it was just a system failure that couldn't keep up anymore. And I think that the biggest thing we get wrong on time management is assuming we should know how to do it naturally, and so when we struggle, we blame ourselves and in reality we just need to change some things up. In terms of what to change up, I just think that the amount that we juggle in our heads is amazing but also weighs down our brain from the stuff that we should be doing with it. And so a starting point that I like to work on with clients. That I had to do myself is just get it all out of your head and into a tool that helps you manage time, because all of these things come back to time, and for me, that's I really lean on a digital calendar now, despite being a paper lover. I just think that it really helps with that organization in an efficient way, and it's really getting everything out of your head into the calendar, so you know down to yes, the tasks that we do at work, but also when do you shower and get ready? When do you cook meals? When if you have little kids, do you do bed and bath time with kids? If you have older kids, when do you do homework? What are all the activities when you drive? Between all the activities? Like lay it all out, because I think that that gives you a better sense of what your actual capacity is to take on anything else. And I think that's the tricky part is when I was drowning at work, I knew I was drowning. I knew that I was overwhelmed, but I didn't know if it was reasonable for me to feel that way given my workload. And it wasn't until I made everything in my life and everything in work visual that I had a more objective understanding of what my workload was in relation to my capacity, which helped me manage my workload and also helped me feel far more confident in drawing workload boundaries at work
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and dealing with the pushback and managing that.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: Well, what is it about a digital calendar that makes that more effective? I mean, I can tell you I use a paper calendar, and I know I'm a bit of a dinosaur that way. I mean, people send me invites like calendar invites. I'm like, they go somewhere.
00:05:33
Speaker 2: I don't know.
00:05:34
Speaker 1: I just but you know, I tend to manage my life on paper and that has worked for me. But honestly, I know if I were in a big corporation that would just be a no go. But what is it about the digital part, as opposed to it being a necessary evil being in an organization that you think helps make it easier to organize yourself?
00:05:53
Speaker 2: Well, first things first, I never my position is not everybody should be using my method. So paper is working for you know, obviously you and anyone listening stick with it. You know, I'm not saying no, you should use mine if you have struggled with it, and you were like me who had used paper and it just couldn't keep up. To your point, I mean, half of my work was on already in an outlook calendar being scheduled for me and moved around, and it just became inefficient to also write it on paper and keep up with it. There. There are a couple of reasons. One, the communication factor is awesome. So you know, obviously in a work environment, digital allows you to send calendar invites, share calendars, all that kind of stuff, and you can do that at home as well. So I particularly work with women, and that helps a lot with sharing the mental load is having these calendars that partners also see, so you're not like the house I think a lot of women tend to still be very generally speaking in heterosexual couples, tend to be the quarterbacks of the calendar and the house management. But they're also not the secretaries and the keeper, like the only person who has the information when you'd use digital, you know, going to the calendaring, like the invisible to do list stuff. I was talking about something that you can, you know, schedule repetitively every workday or every Monday Wednesday, Thursday or all that kind of stuff, and then drag them around and move them around as you need. I'm a very firm proponent of flexible time blocking and moving things around. But I just find that if you were going to write out, let's say, shower and get ready every day when you're gonna do it, that would get really tedious at a calendar, in a paper calendar, and I would not judge you for being like, this is a waste of my time. But you can do that easily in a digital one and then move it around other things like backups is one thing. I've had a client who lost a paper planner and that stinks, you know, And there are just some other reasons like that, But on the whole, it's just that, like, for me, that efficiency of calendaring everything and being able to move it around quickly into new plans is really where a digital calendar really shines.
00:07:47
Speaker 1: Yeah,
well, it's getting at this idea that all tasks take time, and so you have to give them a time. And if there isn't a time within your twenty four hour day and one hundred and sixty eight hour week, well we have a problem.
00:07:58
Speaker 2: Yep.
00:07:59
Speaker 1: So we're gonna take a quick ad break, and then I will be back with more from Kelly Nolan. Well, I am back talking with Kelly Nolan, who is a time management expert. She's the founder of the Bright Method, which we are now going to talk about. We've been learning about, you know, calendaring all our stuff, and I know that that is a important first step in this, but why don't you talk about what the Bright method is so people have a sense of what you're talking about here?
00:08:27
Speaker 2: Sure thing? So I think that a tricky part with time management that I know you know, Laura, is I think a lot of these concepts are talked about as if they're relatively easy, and then you go to implement it can be kind of challenging. And so really what the Bright Method is is walking people through how to use a lot of these tools at our disposal. You know, I'm a tennis player. I wouldn't give you a top of the line tennis racket and be like now you're set, Like you have to learn the strategy and like how you will employ it to have success. And so basically what we do is we leverage digital calendars, whether it's Outlook, Google, Apple, some combination of them, and then walk through kind of four pillars. The first pillar is getting clear on that invisible to do list. I already talked about calendaring that out and also setting up the calendar to be able to do that. That can be its own headache and my least favorite part of it, but it is what it is. So we tackle it at the outset and then really get clear on those invisible to dos and make sure your baseline works, and also issue spot challenges and adapt those so you might You know, it could be something as simple as, oh, I'm trying to squeeze an hour and a half of stuff into an hour every morning, and that's why every morning feels the way it does. And if I showered the night before four times a week, that would be great, and then it just kind of frees up space. The next step is doing somewhat the same in the work environment, so figuring out email, when you hold meetings, the repetitive work things you do, like if you know, set up for board meetings or you know, do financial reviews at times, like building out those repetitive work tasks, and then again that then shows you the white space of what actual time you have to give to the more one off stuff, assuming you have white space. I know a lot of people in corporate America are like, it's like a whole day of meetings. I don't have any white space. But then we can work on blocking availability to give you that white space in there. That then in the third pillar we turn to the one off to dos and start filling in that white space with the plans of what you're going to do. And I'll just note here that when people talk time blocking, this is often where people start. They take their to do list and very understandably start time blocking. But if you have an accountant for all the things that we talked about before, that can lead to a lot of frustration because you calendar eight hours of beautiful things to do, but you never had eight hours to begin with to do it. And so that helps with that element of it. And then the final component is planning. I teach a couple different planning sessions. The main one is a weekly planning session, where essentially you take all the inputs that have flown at you over the course of a week, calendar them out, and then review the next two weeks. And it's also in that first step you know time to check in on all your major projects, look ahead at major deadlines, make sure you've act everything out so you have game plans laid out in your calendar to hit those, and then really I like smoothing out the next two weeks at a time, just so that you know you're looking ahead a little bit farther than just the next week.
00:11:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, So let's talk about a couple of things with here. I mean, one is, we're trying to calendar everything, and as we all know, life changes and and you know, we had white space from two to four in the afternoon, and then the magic happens and there's no white space between two and four beca something you know, urgent came up that we have to deal with. So how do how often do we need to recalibrate? Like how far can we plan out with these things? I mean, what what do we do to make sure that we are giving tasks time but acknowledging that we cannot one hundred percent control what time will be available.
00:11:50
Speaker 2: Absolutely absolutely, So one of the big things I would say is just like take a step, and this is not perfect. It's not going to like solve all the issues. You know, a sick kid home for or five days is going to derail the best of plans, but we do what we can. And in a lot of work environments, a lot of people spend their day dealing with the curveballs, the fires, the reactive stuff, and there are different ways we can get at that. I really like thinking about, especially for people managers, that might be where your value is. Your company wants you in that firefighting role versus the headstone work, and so we just need to acknowledge where our value is. First of all, we can work to eliminate some of the curve balls, but it's not realistic to eliminate all of them. So what I like doing is thinking about even though the curveballs are unpredictable in substance, they are predictable and that we know they're coming usually not Again, it's harder in the personal life, but in our work life. Most people will say I deal with thirty minutes of curveballs a day. I deal with five hours of curveballs a day. But there's some sort of awareness of how many curveballs hours of curveballs you might deal with, and so we just plot those into the calendar. And I know that sounds
weird, but essentially what I like doing is making visual your curve balls three hours, five hours, two hours, half an hour, whatever it is, and kind of putting it towards the end of your day. And you can move them around as those blocks, as like meetings get booked or things like that. But it's a visual reminder to you that about that much time of curveballs is coming, and do not fill up the rest of the day or else this plan, you know, isn't going to work. And if you don't have it every day, some people more like you know, it's more like three to four hours a week, and so maybe block a Thursday afternoon and all this curveball is is obviously you're not only dealing with curve balls at the end of your day or on Thursday afternoons, but you're building in the cushion in the rest of your schedule for everything else to get pushed into as they go. So again, it's just in one of those things we're making visual that we usually are trying to juggle in our head that kind of trips us up when we're planning well.
00:13:53
Speaker 1: And of course the million dollar question there is how do I create open space for this this buffer. I mean a lot of people are very booked. As you said, you get everything out of your head, you may realize that you're dealing with many tasks that could occupy all eight or more hours of the day. So what should we do to set boundaries or to get more open space in our schedules.
00:14:18
Speaker 2: Well, one is just to start blocking it now and know that if you block it now and repeat it on a weekly basis over time, hopefully it shakes out. I will say it depends on the culture. I have had clients who've had to instead of blocking like a two hour block for focused heads down work, they'll block four half hour blocks, so they look like meetings and are a little bit more camouflaged and less people are apt to take it over. I wish that weren't the case, but you know, we work with reality here and so there's that I will. But you know, a lot of people I work with realize, whether it's meetings taking up your time or just sheer workload volume, that they have too much on their plate, and it's the first time. I mean that is the simple elegance of any calendar you use, paper or digital. If those boxes don't fit in a day, you're objectively trying to do too much and so making it all visual can flag that for you. When that happens, I like people starting to think about the conversation. I mean, if you can make the decisions you know, to latter like go for it. A lot of people have to have conversations with leadership around workload and really getting clear on you know, as I sit here today, this is what I view as like our departments or our companies or whatever's top priority, these are the three projects that will serve that I therefore recommend we you know, work on these. We table these for you know, next quarter, six months from now, whatever it is. This will free up you know, ten hours a day for me, for my team whatever to really ensure that we hit the you know, knock these projects out of the park and see what they say. You know, I've had I've been pleasantly surprised at how many clients go to their bosses and have those conversations and the bosses are like, I had no idea you were in this many meetings every day, or I didn't know you had twelve priorities set across four departments that are pulling on our department and help them prioritize I've also had clients and I've been in it myself where they're like, figure it out, and that answer, while very frustrating to hear, it does something to your brain. You stop, you know, selling, like putting work as your number one when you're like, these people are not going to work. Look out for me. I gotta start redefining what success looks like for me. I'm not saying you have to leave. I know in this work environment it's totally wacky, but there are It just does something to you in terms of what you are willing to do for a company that's not if you know that you cannot you literally cannot win by their rules. So you define your own rules of what winning looks like.
00:16:40
Speaker 1: Absolutely, well, we should always be defining our own rules of what wedding looks like. Big fan of that around here. All right, We're going to take one more quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Kelly Nolan. Well, I am back with Kelly Nolan, who is the time management expert and the founder of the Bright Method. So Kelly, let's pivot to you and your own personal productivity practices. I'm curious if you have any routines that help make you more productive.
00:17:10
Speaker 2: You know, I think about routines. A lot of mine are born out of the principle of just like embracing reality and the reality of my own brain myself. I think a lot of times we demand that we change and you know, get more discipline and all that kind of stuff, and for me, that's never been very effective, and so it's more like, Okay, my brain is not going to remember all this stuff on my own. And that's where the bright method came out of. Another one is, you know, social media and phones are highly addictive, and they're designed to be by a lot of very smart people. And so instead of just demanding I have more discipline and failing at that every day and beating myself up, it's using also other apps that are designed to help. So I personally love opal Opa l it blocks me out of social media. I have it blocked me out of Instagram, Facebook, and I also Safari browser every day from four fifteen I think to five thirty when I want to be really focused on my kids, and eight pm to five am to protect my sleep. And so it's just you know, acknowledging I don't do this on my own, so let me help myself out doing it. And the last thing that came to mind is I was thinking about this was you know, in terms of just building these routines and figuring out what fits in your life, is just really acknowledging what phase of life you're in. You know, For me, working out has
always been the first thing to go when life gets busy. I think part of it's because I hold myself to the standard of working out when I was in my twenties of you know, working out at five am and doing Class Pass in Boston, and so just switching up to like fifteen minute at home workouts, it's not, you know, the gold star that I wanted in my twenties, but there are a lot of fifteen minute workouts that can kick your tush in that time and it's really effective. And so a lot of my routines are just building around embracing reality and then getting creative about where I still want to go.
00:18:54
Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned that your blackout time on your device as it's eight to five am, which sounds like an early start. Do you do you have a morning routine that's that's part of your schedule.
00:19:06
Speaker 2: You know, I have always been and I always don't like this as someone works in time management, because it's so cliche, as like, I've always been such a morning person. I've also been a very early to bed person. I remember my mom in high school looking at me in bed at like eight or eight thirty. I was already asleep, and she's like, how are you going to go to college? I'm like, I don't know. I just like going to bed, and so I do wake up very early. I don't my alarm set for like six twenty five because I do prioritize sleep in this phase of life with little kids, I just that is my priority is sleep. But I do tend to naturally wake up around five or so, and so I kind of follow my energy. I used to work out then Now I actually do like doing the creative fun parts of my job in those early mornings and just enjoying a hot cup of coffee in the house is dark, It's like such a dreamy time. And in terms of morning routine, I don't have a full routine, but I have those non negotiables, you know, feed the kids, feed the dog, and do the dishwasher, pack up the bags, and then I use alarms to hit the school bus. Or now that we're transitioning into summer, like get us in the car for summer camps and all that kind of stuff.
00:20:11
Speaker 1: Absolutely, well, I was just curious because, yeah, we with a podcast called Before Breakfast. We have a lot of people who are definitely into their morning routines and including listening to this, which is part of a lot of people's morning routines. So I always ask my guests a question of what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
00:20:32
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think for me, you know, while I teach this and I live and breathe it, it's always one of those things you have to like catch yourself and iterate on. I think that I can be having a great day, but what doesn't let it be awesome is usually my brain being consumed by a lot of different things and not being fully present on you know, the little magics in the day. I don't mean, like, you know, my day's pretty boring. You know, I'm a mom the little kids. It's nothing like super exciting. But even like a three minute hot shower is pretty glorious, or a ten minute walk outside with my dog in this weather is amazing. But I can easily think my way to not absorbing that. And so I've heard people on your podcast talk about that like really absorbing the wonderful parts of your day, and I fully agree with that. For me, in order to be able to do that, though, it really is taking all those thoughts that are buzzing around in my head and getting them out. So whether that's paper and pen or Siri, if I'm on the go, I'll use like Apple reminders just to capture ideas and then know that I have time calendar to go to all those places and like hunt and gather them and then bridge them into either my calendar or wherever I keep like content ideas or just strategy ideas. And so I guess my point is whether you use a system like mine or something else, having a clear system that you use to get things out of your head, park them where they need to go, and then ridge them into however you manage your task in time is to me the first that's like the game changing step, so that I can let things go and then absorb my day and make it awesome. Whenever I've tried to be like stop thinking about that or whatever, it just doesn't work. I need to be able to get it out of my head because I don't trust that my brain will remember it. And I think that's what we do. We like ruminate on things in the hopes of remembering to do them. And so if you can help yourself get there outside of your brain, then that's how to me. I take a day from great.
00:22:27
Speaker 1: To awesome, amazing, amazing, And what's something you are looking forward to now?
00:22:33
Speaker 2: Candidly, I am in a really good I am not someone who romanticizes motherhood. I think it's very hard in a lot of ways. So just know that's the context. My kids now are seven and three and a half, and I do feel like we're hitting a really fun age where I just have more energy too, and so this summer I'm really looking forward to that. It's really fun to hang out with the kids. But I also love what I do, and I get to start my program again in September and work with a lot of awesome people and you know, nerd out with them on how to make all of this work in their industries, and they're with their families and everybody's life looks different, and it's really fun for me to like puzzle and tailor how to make it work for them, so I look forward to that too.
00:23:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, totally with you that as kids get older they just get more fun. Do you mean babies are adorable? I love babies. I had five of them, but I you know, I love when they become so much their own people and you can interact with them more and totally thanks together. Yeah, absolutely so, Kelly. Where can people find you?
00:23:32
Speaker 2: I am most active on Instagram. It's at underscore Kelley Nolan Underscore, and my website is Kelleynolan dot com. I have, you know, a free program there. I also have the podcast The Bright Method podcast. If people like nerding out on this, which I imagine if you're here you do.
00:23:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, we all do. All right, Well, Kelly, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime, this is Laura, Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.