Episode 171: Interview with Kelly Nolan
Dr. Chelsea: Time management is hard, and we often beat ourselves up when we can't do it well. So let's change that. I want to introduce you to a new way to look at time management so you can get it all done and actually relax during what very little downtime I'm sure you have.
Hi, I'm Dr. Chelsea. Welcome to Passion for Dance. I'm on a mission to create happier, more successful dancers through positive mental skills. And today I have a special guest who taught me the time management strategy I still use today. So I had to bring her on to share it with all of you because it's not just another app or a planner. It is the best stress-reduction tool I use.
My guest today is Kelly Nolan. She's a former attorney, now a time management strategist who created a new system, The Bright Method. She's been published in Forbes, Business Insider, and Parents magazine, and I am personally a walking five-star review, as you will hear in the show, because The Bright Method is the only way I survive two jobs I love plus life as a wife and a mother and a woman with my own desires and goals outside of all of that.
I also have taught pieces of this method to my college students, so if you're a teacher or a dancer, this will help. And want to know the best part? I don't have a to-do list anymore. It's gone. I go to bed every night feeling accomplished and able to relax without feeling like I'm missing something.
And before I really dive into it, if you are enjoying the show, please just take one second and hit subscribe wherever you're listening right now. When you subscribe to the show, it doesn't cost you anything, and you get each new episode delivered to your feed every week. So you always have a new mental skill tool or an interview ready for you, and it really helps me know what you're looking for so I can do more to serve our community. So please follow the show wherever you're listening, or you can go to www.followthepodcast.com/passionfordance. It'll walk you through how to follow on your favorite platform. Your support means a lot to me, so thank you for being a part of this community. All right, let's get rid of these to-do lists, shall we?
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[Motivational Music]
Hi, I'm Dr. Chelsea, a former professional dancer and mental performance coach. I know what it feels like to be a passionate dance teacher who cares about your dancers, but you want to challenge them and help them be their best, and I also recognize that some traditions and teaching practices in the dance world are harmful. So I'm on a mission to change our dance industry by creating happier, more successful dancers using positive mental skills.
When you understand how to help your dancers with their confidence, how to find their own motivation, work together as a team and more, your dancers will unlock new levels of competitive success and happiness. And it's not just about them; you deserve the same. So we'll talk about how dance teachers can use positive mental skills to be more confident, resilient, and motivated as well.
Be sure to hit “subscribe” wherever you listen to podcasts. There are new episodes every Thursday, and each week you'll hear from me and my guests with advice and actionable tips for building mental toughness, covering topics about mindset, motivation, resilience, and building a community. Passion for Dance is a show designed to help dance educators like you have a positive impact on every dancer you teach.
[Motivational Music]
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Dr. Chelsea: Hi Kelly! Welcome to the show.
Kelly: Thank you so much for having me. It's so much fun to be here and such an honor!
Dr. Chelsea: Thank you, and I'm excited to get to share your time management because I have personally been using it and learned from you, I don't even know when, a couple of years ago now, and it is life changing. And so, I need my audience to hear from you because it's incredible. So will you share a little bit about your business and who you are and what you do?
About Kelly and The Bright Method – 3:36
Kelly: Sure thing. Sure thing. So I was a patent litigator in Boston and California, and I'd, you know, wanted to be a lawyer since I was in sixth grade or something like that. And I'd felt decently organized all the way through law school, and then I became an attorney and quickly got overwhelmed.
And I looked for help out there, nothing really survived that two-week honeymoon period, and over time I started building out my own weird little system to help me manage time and tasks and everything as an attorney. And I thought I was creating a system to kind of catch me up to where everybody else was, and I just kept practicing law once I started using it. And it wasn't until years later that I figured out, oh no, other people feel the way I felt and are interested in learning this system.
And so, that's what I do! I left law about seven years ago now, which is wild it's been that long, and I work predominantly with working women, women who work outside the house, to learn this system that helps you with your professional and your personal life.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes, and that's how — so we met at a kind of entrepreneur conference. I love those kinds of friendships that are just born out of we were in the same place and felt support in the same way, but that led to me learning, it's called The Bright Method, and I'm sure I'll have you dig into it exactly so everybody hears, but that method — again, I have been, what I would call, a planner my whole life. Like, I've always had physical planners. I am good at it. I am the one that people lean to for planning. But I brought you here to talk about time management because I felt this difference, whether you are someone who's like, “I am a planner, but I'm still overwhelmed,” or if you're other people who are like, “I've never been good at this.”
So even though I am a planner, I felt that block at one point. And, for me, it was when my son was born (my first child), and all of a sudden I was like, “All of the world's no longer balanced,” and I had — you know, I was coaching, I was still in graduate school, I had my family, and all of a sudden I was like, “Too many things are happening. I can't do this.” And kind of what you just alluded to, I was like, “Something's wrong with me. Why can't I handle this?” And, “I'm supposed to be good at this, and why can't I handle it?”
So, and I think you've shared some that you are not naturally good at planning and that's partially where the system came from. So I guess maybe let's just start broadly about what makes your approach to time management different and why it's worked so well for you, for me, and for all the women you've been able to help.
Why The Bright Method Works – 6:02
Kelly: Yeah. I mean, I think your experience is very similar to mine in that we had systems that got us far, that gave us the clarity and the peace of mind and the organization we were looking for, and then life just hit some sort of tipping point, and those systems stopped keeping up with our life and being able to give us what we were looking for.
In terms of your question of why is it different, I think there are a couple reasons for it. One, I'm going to speak about this in terms of, like, it's designed for women, and I know that it helps other people beyond just people who identify as women, but that's where it came from for me, was the clarity around, “Oh, all the advice I'm turning to when I was overwhelmed as this young attorney tended to be for men and typically men who had a lot more support at home.” So all the time management advice I was getting was for, really, the workplace and how to do well at work but ignoring all the other competing demands on my time.
And I like to think I was an early bloomer. This was before I was even dating my now husband and I have two kids. Even back then I was very overwhelmed by the tension between work and personal life. And I didn't feel like a lot of the time-management advice out there also addressed — it didn't address that either. And so, this system to me has really helped reduce the mental load and account for all the different roles down to the little things.
An example I can think of is when I was practicing law, I would struggle to get my dry cleaning. My dry cleaning would sit at the dry cleaners for, like, two or three weeks because I would either get out of work too late or if I got out of work early enough, I wanted to go do something fun. So I would rush off to do that and forget about dry cleaning. And so, I started using my calendar to say like, “When do I drop off dry cleaning, and when do I pick it up,” so I could see it. It wasn't a surprise. I could plan on when I would get it. I could move it around based on my schedule. But it wasn't something that I would forget until I had no more blazers or work dresses to wear to work. And little things like that, I was like, “Oh, I could use a system to help me manage the mental load and the tension between work and personal in a way that I hadn't seen.” So that was a big one.
Another distinction that really helps me at least that helped me and still helps me now is it's the best way I have seen to lay out all of work, all of personal life to get a much more clear understanding of, “What is my workload? Do I have room? When am I full?” And the reason that's really powerful, beyond the obvious, is it also gives you the confidence to hold boundaries, which when I was practicing before I used the system, I really struggled with. I was like, “I know I'm drowning in work, but I don't have the confidence that it's reasonable for me to feel that way, so I'm just gonna keep saying yes,” and using this system really helped me push back.
And the last thing I'll say around it is just that it's really practical. I think a lot of time management advice out there is like, “Just do this,” as if it's easy, and then you go to implement it and it's hard. And I'm like, “Tell me what to do. Tell me how to bring it to life,” and that's what I really enjoy teaching in this is the step-by-step, practical, like show me how to do it so it's not one more thing I feel bad about as I struggle to figure this out.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes, for sure. And I think the mental load is what originally spoke to me and all the rest of what you said is true for sure. But the mental load was the piece that was so life changing, and I keep saying life changing. I'm not kidding. It completely shifted how I show up at work, how I show up for my family, and, more importantly, also how much stress I am carrying when I'm getting ready for bed.
So, yes, that was when I felt the shift was, like you said, it's that mental load, and whether you have kids or not, however many jobs you have — I know many of us in the dance industry have more than one job — and it's trying to balance that. I constantly had all this stuff in my head. And again, it's the little things like you said of forgetting to go pick this up or, “I need to go get a birthday present for somebody,” and we tend to just hold it all in our head, and our calendar is like, “Oh, well I have meetings here and here. I teach class here and here, and then I have all this white space,” and it's that burden of like, “I feel like I should have all this time, and yet every day I'm like, ‘Ah, I couldn't even get a workout in today. I keep saying, I want to do that, and I don't have time,’ or all these things I want to do –.” I talk about living in your values. “I have all these things that matter to me, and yet I can't figure out why I don't have any time. Where is this coming from?”
Kelly: Exactly.
Dr. Chelsea: And that was the shift of like, “Oh, I actually don't have any time. I need to figure out how to do something about that,” whether that's a work issue, a personal-life issue, something. And it was that awareness and that putting a mental load out of my head, putting it somewhere else. I can see it. I can deal with it. I can rearrange it, you know, and it's just so much of a lift. So much of that burden is gone when it's like, “Put it out somewhere else,” and then you can actually see what's going on.
Kelly: Oh, I love that. I love hearing it, and there are a thousand things I want to say yes to, but I will leave it at that. But I just — it means so much, and I'm just so happy you're experiencing that because those are a lot of the reasons why I love it too. I can't imagine managing everything I manage now without it.
Dr. Chelsea: Right. I think that's exactly where we're at, where the expectation is you just manage it all, and I have people tell me all the time of like, “How do you do it all?” I'm like, I have — one, first of all, I don't do it all. Second of all, I have really good systems for the things I do well. There is a system behind my ability to have essentially two full-time jobs and feel like I'm a present mom and living in my values and have good relationships. It's because the systems behind it let it work, and I'm able to prioritize the things I care about and not feel bad about things I'm not doing because I intentionally chose to spend my time somewhere else.
Kelly: Absolutely.
Dr. Chelsea: And it’s so powerful. So, okay, now that I've hyped it up, let's talk the specifics. I'm always actionable, tips that people can try. So some specific topics that I know you've helped with that I think would be relevant to a lot of our listeners is one thing is people dealing with weird schedules.
Tips for Navigating Unconventional Schedules – 12:01
So most of us in the dance world do not work a nine-to-five. There's again, multiple jobs or like you have a job but then you go to a studio after school, or many have a stay-at-home-mom schedule and then teach later in the day. The point is it's usually evenings and weekends on top of other things. So any tips for balancing those weird schedules when you have multiple jobs, not the typical nine-to-five?
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that I relate to a lot because my husband is an ER physician, and so, every single week is wacky and different in our house as well. So I very much empathize with managing all of that.
A couple thoughts. First is to get to what we were already kind of alluding to is really thinking about your invisible to-do list, the things that you don't typically calendar but that take up hours of your day when you really think about them. So things like getting up and showering, walking a dog if you have a dog, if you have little kids, running bed and bath time with little kids, if you have older kids helping them with homework, or in the summer months, I mean, all the activities we do with our kids, for our kids, but also for ourselves, working out, all that stuff, really plot it out. All the meal planning, that's another huge time one, really plotting it out in a digital calendar and putting it in there on a repeating basis as it makes sense. So, you know, “Roughly I do this from here to here. Roughly I do this from here to here.” Repeat it every day so that you can start to see where your time is actually going.
I'm a big proponent of a digital calendar because you can do this efficiently. You know, you're putting it in, and you repeat it every workday or every day, or Monday, Thursday, Friday, you know, whatever you need it for, and if you get it wrong, you can easily move it and then you change it for everything going forward and it's fixed. So, really, first and foremost, getting the invisible to do's visible so that you can see how they play, and what you were talking about, Chelsea, of getting really clear on what is my actual time to do other things.
The other thing I would say is for all of the evening and weekend stuff in particular, it can be really helpful to obviously calendar all of the events, but also think about all the other little things that go with those things. So driving time to an event, driving time from an event, any prep work you need to do, gathering items that you need to bring, reminders to charge things the night before. All the little things, if you can calendar those out, it gives you a better understanding of your time. It also helps with that mental load. So that can be really helpful.
And the thing that I think is most important here, if your workload evolves a lot, is there is so much flexibility in this approach. I think sometimes some people talk about calendaring things, and then they are like, “And then you live and you die by what you calendared.” And I very much do not believe that. I really think of this system as how do we just make visual everything we have to do?
So the reason I bring that up is, if you have an ever-changing schedule because you don't know exactly what evenings or weekends, what those plans hold, you can still plot out some things like, “In my ideal world, I want to work out twice a week.” And you just plot it out when you roughly think it will happen. Well, as you get your schedule for the next week or whatever it might be, then you just drag and drop those little blocks around, but they're default building blocks you get to play with. So you're not starting each week from scratch. You're not trying to figure it all out. You have this flexibility to see what you want to do, find the right home for it, and just play out this new system.
And the last thing that comes to mind, although, Chelsea, I'd love to hear if you have also found something that's more valuable that I haven't mentioned, is I do think that, especially if your schedules shift a lot week to week, a weekly planning session, one, I'm a big fan of it for anyone, but when your week shifts a lot week to week, you have to really sit down and plan. I'm a huge proponent of a Friday planning session. Some people prefer it like a Thursday afternoon. I would love for you to do it before your weekend starts so you can soak in your weekend.
That said, if your weekend is really busy with dance stuff, and maybe Monday is a lighter day, then you can always shift this as it makes sense. But really what I want you to do is do it before you have fun coming up so you can soak in the fun and not be stressed about all the other things and really sit down and look ahead at the next two weeks and just really — I mean, it's a little tedious, but you go day by day and like, “Does this work? Do I have driving time? Do I need more childcare here? Do I have pet care here? Ooh, do I need to walk the dog earlier in the day?” Figuring that stuff out on the frontend just really helps reduce your stress and the scrambles for the whole next week.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes. All of those: true. So I want to give some examples of how this has played out in my life and why it's made a big difference. So what you were just saying about the planning session, when I first learned your method, I was a lot more strict about, “I'm doing this on Friday. I'm mapping it out.” Now that I'm used to it and I've been using it for a while, it's more fluid, but it works really well. And I can look at, “Oh, I usually do two weeks out because that helps me with enough time to adjust.”
And, like you said, for us, it's usually a family personal thing because my husband's job as a real estate agent is also all over the place as far as where he is and when. So I can look and see like, “Okay, I have an evening workshop, so I need to make sure, is he home? Is he not home? Now I need to figure out carpool for it to get my kids to this event,” and you can just kind of glance at it and decide.
But then I honestly personally like it within my work calendar because I can see, “Okay, if I'm on campus from this amount of time, what am I getting done in that time?” And it's the to-do's of that job that are not a meeting. I'm not actively teaching class, I'm not actively meeting with another professor, but I have to get this stuff done. So can I get it done in between those two classes? If I can't, does it need to happen after class? I need to be aware of that. Did I just assign a big paper? So I need to block out more grading time than I usually have, which is not fun, but it has to happen. So that stuff makes a huge difference.
I will say the travel thing — and I think for a lot of dance teachers, putting in how long it takes you when you are traveling to and from studio, that changed my perspective because I realized if I'm commuting to and from campus — I go Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but I have basically an hour at the beginning of the end of the day that's blocked for travel, and that's literally all my calendar says. It says, “Blocked for travel,” because it takes me that long. I don't live that far, but by the time I'm like, you know, you get there and park and walk and get in my office and get set up again, it's realistically an hour before I'm actually doing anything. And when you put those on your calendar, you start to see like, “Oh, okay. Well, you know, I leave my job and practice starts here, and I feel like I have an hour and a half,” but do you really have an hour and a half? Like, no, you don't actually have an hour and a half.
Kelly: Right.
Dr. Chelsea: And having it blocked helps you see that. And then I feel less guilt at the end of the day when I'm like, “I didn't get anything done today. I was just running around all day.” I'm like, “Yeah, you were running around all day doing all these things.”
Kelly: Yeah.
Dr. Chelsea: “It's okay.” So that block the travel, it was like a subtle thing that made a big difference, and then, practically, it's linked to other things. So if people are going to request a meeting with me, they can't because it's blocked because I'm in my car getting to and from places, right? So those little things that block the travel has made a big difference.
Kelly: Yeah, I love that, and I and I just want to say that I find that I love that you keep what I keep hearing you say too is so often we blame ourselves. We're like, “Why didn't I get more done,” or things like that, and I just really believe that often if you think you struggle to get anything done, it's not that you're not doing enough. You're just not appreciating all that you are doing.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes.
Kelly: And that's a really big benefit of calendaring all these things we don't typically calendar to see where our time is going, and it can be frustrating. It's not like puppies and rainbows when you're like, “Wow, I have no time.” But at least then you can solve the right issue of like, “Okay, how am I going to fix some of this,” versus continually just living in denial of that fact instead blaming yourself and beating yourself up at the end of the day.
Dr. Chelsea: Yeah, and I do think that's why it speaks so much to me and the mental load because you can put it out there and say, “Okay, I really don't have any time.” So, one, give myself some grace, two, is this just a season where I'm not going to have any time, and that is what it is, and it's okay, but I'm going to find the time later, or is there something I can do about this right now to protect the time? As you're saying, so many of us, we just say yes to too many things, or we just decide, you know, “Oh, it's competition season. It's just going to be crazy for the next few months” Like, that's true, but you can look at this differently and calendar it differently.
So, yeah, that mental load makes a huge difference, which I guess kind of leads to that sense of feeling overwhelmed because we schedule too many things and we say yes to everything because we want to do them, or we take on tasks but then don't think about, “When is this actually going to happen?” Which is what I do all the time. I'm like, “Oh, yeah, I can totally work on that.” Nope. I don't know when that's going to happen.
Tips For Those Who Have a Tendency to Overload Themselves – 21:07
So will you share some tips for people who just are saying yes to too many things, you know, not planning for — I think we do this a lot in dance where it's like, “Oh, I'm teaching all night, so I'm like back to back to back to back to back, and I didn't plan to eat anything.” Like, “I have nothing to eat, and I didn't plan to have anything to eat,” so that kind of teacher-life that can be so crazy as well.
Kelly: Yeah, well speaking just to that point, the eating component, I actually really do love calendaring when I'm going to eat, not to be like, “This is when I eat,” and live rigidly. But it helps you spot those conflicts ahead of time. Let's just say I calendar lunch every day, and it moves around a ton because sometimes I'm hungry at, like, 10:30 because my kids woke up at, like, 5:30, so it's that permission to move it. It doesn't mean that I have to wait till that time.
But what I love is let's say I have it scheduled, let's say at 11:00 because I like to eat lunch early, and I get a call booked for 11:00 to 12:00. I might not think at 10:30 to go eat lunch, but If I can see it in my calendar (that conflict) and just move that lunch up, then I just at least eat a snack before then, because I would have eaten then, and I save myself and the other person the hangry outcome that might happen here if I don't eat. So there's that element.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes.
Kelly: In terms of the larger issue of overbooking, the thing that I, it's such a good point of if we only use our calendar in the ways that we've been traditionally taught, where it's just events in our calendar, as you said, there's a lot of white space, but our brain knows it's not white space. Our brain goes to chase down all these to-do’s and all these other places. But we also, in turn, interpret it as, like, “Oh, I have all this time.” And so, when someone is like, “Hey, can you take this on?” you see all this white space and you're like, “Yeah, I can do it. I’ve got a lot of white space in here,” but you don't factor in the 20 to-do lists and the Post-It Notes and the email and all that kind of stuff.
And so, my first piece of advice is what I've already talked about, so I won't go into it more is really calendaring all those things. Anything that requires your time should be linked to your calendar and just so that can give you the clarity of, “When am I going to do this thing? How long is it going to take? And does it fit with everything else I have going on that day?”
So once you do that, what that gives you is a better understanding of your capacity and how full you are. And so, you're less inclined to just default and say yes, because you're like, “Well, I pull out my calendar and I see a lot in there. So I don't think I necessarily always have the time to do this.” But there are things we want to do, so I'm not saying never say yes. What I encourage anyone to do is to just have your default answer be, “This sounds awesome. Let me check my calendar and get back to you.”
Dr. Chelsea: Yeah.
Kelly: Even if you desperately want to do it, even if you're pretty sure you can do it, always your answer is, “This sounds really cool. Let me check my calendar and get back to you,” and then actually go check your calendar and plot it out in your calendar. Again, the beauty of a digital calendar is you can put a lot in there and then delete it in a click. So what I recommend doing is if someone's like, “It'll only take, you know, two hours a week for the next two months,” I would plot out at least four hours a week, because us and everybody that we talk to is a terrible underestimator.
Plot out four hours in there, put it in there, think about driving time, anything else, prep time, anything that will go into this as well, and then look and see, one, does it fit? And two, how do you feel about it being in there? What has to move to allow it to be in there? How do you feel about that? And it can be really illuminating to just use your calendar as a way to test drive what this might look like. And if you want to do it, even if it pushes you, let's say, into overwhelm for two months, but you're like, “This is really worth it to me,” that's awesome, and then you can have conversations with the other people in your life who can help you make it through that two-month period and then be able to like reevaluate again at the end of that period.
But it just helps you make more informed decisions if you slow down and use that calendar as a tool to help you decide.
Dr. Chelsea: Absolutely, and I think that's what's helped me so much being able to see how much am I traveling. For me, that's what really shifted when I started traveling a lot. How many times am I leaving? How many times do I want to leave? How long and then how often? And when it's mapped out, I could see that. So when a great opportunity comes up, I'm like, “Yes, please. I really want to do that,” it helped with the boundaries because I was able to even look at it and say, “Yes, I want to do this with you. But I can't for like three weeks. Is that okay?” Usually, in my experience, people are very receptive and respectful when I'm like, “I want to,” and like you said, “I'm excited, but I can't yet. Can we do this in a few weeks” And it just gives you that space and that protection a little bit to not overwhelm everything and not have that desire for like — we're so driven. We have so many things we want to go do, but is this realistic? And getting that advice. Is this even possible? Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah, and one thing that helps me just from the more mindset side of it is really understanding the seasons of life and that sometimes, you know — I guess I always try and think about if I knew this opportunity would come around again in like a year or two, would I say yes to it now? And that can really help me calm that feeling of like, “I need to do it now or it'll never happen again,” because often they come around again to some extent. And so, having that patience behind it will really benefit present you.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes. Well, like you said, it's the values check of like is this so important to me that it's gonna upend my schedule, but I'm okay with that because it is so important to me, or is this like a shiny object that sounds cool, but it's actually not what I need. You know, so I need to think about it before I add it in. That makes sense.
Kelly: Absolutely.
Dr. Chelsea: Yeah. So I want to be concrete with some examples and the how-to. We've kind of talked about scheduling tasks, and that sounds weird, and I remember when I first thought it I was like, “What?” But it's essentially– or obviously my interpretation or what I've done with it — maybe I took your method and went rogue, but I think it's like I essentially don't have a to-do list anymore, and that is the most freeing, amazing thing because if something needs to happen, it is in my calendar of when it's going to happen. And that way I have the time for it, and I can move it when I need to. And I can see how much time I'm spending and where and adjust things, but I don't have a to-do list.
For me, the actual practicality of it is I have (whether it's Outlook or Google, it doesn't matter) the different colors. So there's like the one that's the actual meetings, classes, practice, things that I have to be at, versus there's another color that's like the tasks. And so, I have a lot of freedom within those to be like, “Eh, I'm not actually in the mood to do that right now. I don't want to –.” Sometimes, for me, I have a lot of writing. I'm like, “I am not in the mood to write right now. So that's going to get bumped over here, and I will do some administrative tasks that I have the capacity to handle.” But the point is that everything is scheduled. So share a little about your strategy for scheduling tasks and how that is such an important part of your method.
Kelly’s Strategy for Scheduling Tasks – 28:10
Kelly: Well, I think you really nailed it. You know, when you have a to-do list, and I used to use to-do lists all the time, and also, by to do list, I mean if you use Post-It Notes or even an online task-management app that you're just listing out things to do, all of these things are just list formats, so you have to reference them every single time you're trying to figure out what to do next, which is inefficient, lends to decision fatigue and all the stress.
And what I realized over time is that to have clarity and peace of mind and not feel the pressure to do it all right now or it will never get done, you need to understand, “Okay, when am I going to do each of these things?” Even if it's in the future, “How much time is it going to take, and does it interact with everything well in the ways that we've talked about already?” And when you take your to-do list and sprinkle it over time, it really gives you that clarity of, “Okay, this thing doesn't have to happen for two weeks. I'm going to do it then. This thing, I can't do it right now, but I'll do it on Monday when that office is open. Let me schedule. Okay, it works for me to call at 10:00 AM, I'll do it then,” and you start creating an actual game plan for when you will do these things that's realistic, that accounts for everything else you've got going on, and you don't have this 48-thing to-do list staring you down, staring you down with things you know you're not doing right now, but because it's on the list you feel like you should be, and so you kind of freak out.
Dr. Chelsea: Right.
Kelly: And so, I really think about, if you have a meet or a competition on a Saturday, really thinking about all the things that go into that, that you want to do that you don't want to forget about and calendaring them out so you have a game plan that goes into that. It can also be one-off things, as I mentioned, like calling a doctor. Especially if you can't do something right now, when will you do it, and schedule it out then. But whether it's little things or all the little bite-sized actions that go into a bigger deadline, really plotting them out in your calendar to bring them to life.
One last thing I'll say, though, on this is I still process with pen and paper, like I write pen and paper all the time. And so, I will sometimes write a to-do list with pen and paper on my desk. It's just that then I bridge those things into my calendar at a cadence that makes sense. So if you like writing to-do lists and you're like, “I just want to get it out of my head so that it's not staring me down or choking at my brain,” really have the freedom to do that. Just think about maybe once a day I gather all the scraps of paper from around my desk or my car or my kitchen or whatever it is and bridge those things into your calendar and then you throw those things away. And that can be a really nice way to still work with your natural tendencies but then still bring these action items to life in your calendar.
Dr. Chelsea: Yeah, absolutely. And, for me, there's the short term and there's the long term. There are two very different ways that this works so well. So the short term, there are the repeated things that I do every week, like you said. So my tasks — I have the first 30 minutes of every day says “email,” because I know I'm going to open it. I know I'm going to walk through it. I know I'm going to handle or not and file and deal with that because it makes me happy to do that first thing before I do anything else. So it's repeated infinity in my calendar. That's the first thing. And then otherwise, like you said, sometimes it's the one-offs.
And so, in the dance world, if you have a big event coming up, your state championship, your national championship, having the time to calendar — I will calendar months out something like, “Okay, if this is happening, when do I need to order costumes? When do I need to have packing lists out? When is my meeting with the parents?” and you're, like, backtracking.
Kelly: Yes.
Dr. Chelsea: And so, I will put — you know, that means then you're going to have a task in your calendar that could be months from now that says, “Order these t-shirts,” and then I feel so much of a less mental load, then, because I know it's there, and when I get to that week and I do my two-week check, I see it. I'm like, “Oh yeah, it's time to do that! Okay, cool.” It's, like, there for you. It's huge.
Kelly: And for those things that repeat, to the extent it does repeat annually, then you repeat those reminders annually, and every single year you get those benefits.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes, that was the level-up that I just had. That was — sorry. That was amazing that, again, I’ve been using this for years, and then my kids both have summer birthdays and getting summer wellness checks for school is so hard to schedule. And I forget them every year. Every year we're scrambling to do it right before school starts, and I finally was like, there's now a repeating thing on my calendar June 1st every year that says, “Schedule wellness visits for the kids.” And it's just like, “Okay, it's there, and I'm going to remember.” That's so much better.
Kelly: Yeah, and that's the thing is it's always thinking about not just the deadline or the event, but what do I need to do to make that a success? So even things like don't just calendar when your driver's license or your partner's driver's license is going to expire. Calendar when you want to start doing the renewal process. And so, because you're not going to remember. We treat our brains as if they should be alarm clocks, and when they're not we failed or something, and it's just too much to ask of our brains. So really thinking about that and really, you know, you and I could talk about this for ages, but everything comes back to time.
So for me, even, it's like the back-to-school stuff, even though we're recording this in July, I already can think about, you know, school's going to start less than two months from now. Those first couple of weeks can be a little tricky with transitions. Let me make sure the first like hour, hour-and-a-half of my workdays are blocked for two weeks, the first two weeks of school and the last hour. I'm still going to work during that time, but if one of my kids is having a big kind of emotional, transitional meltdown as we get out in the morning, that's stressful enough. I don't need a 9:00 AM meeting also causing my panic of like, “I need you to get to school so I can go to this meeting.” It just gives you that breathing space.
And so, as we talk about calendaring tasks, it's so expansive. You can really — to me, I'm almost like if anything is bothering me in my life, I'm like, “Well, everything comes back to time. What do I really want to do about this? And can I use my calendar to help me remember to do those things when I want to do them?”
Calendaring is a Stress-Reduction Tool – 34:12
Dr. Chelsea: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's what I want to lean into and make sure we wrap up about is this is really, honestly, a stress tool to me. Having this is a stress reduction because I can not only see it but then, like you said, it's the ability to move it.
So if something happens and all of a sudden my schedule has to change, because we know we have to adapt all the time, and now I need an extra practice here or now they changed the timing of this and everything is different, and being able to say, “Okay, I can see what's happening. What meetings need to change? What communication needs to change? What tasks do I need to move?” and I can just adjust.
Kelly: Right.
Dr. Chelsea: And this is for a sad reason, but I have to go to a funeral soon. And when that happened, it happened fast. And it was like in the middle, all of a sudden, three days from now, my schedule's about to blow up and I can't do anything I was supposed to do that day. And you're emotional enough. I have enough going on. It was actually really easy to look at the calendar and say, “Reschedule these two things, these tasks go to these other days in the future, and I'll be fine.”
So it's like when your schedule blows up for stressful reasons, having a way to handle it that is not adding to the stress makes such a huge difference in how you can handle it. So I just feel like the stress reduction piece to this is huge. I don't know if you have other stories or other ways you've seen it be such a good stress-reduction tool for people.
Kelly: You know, I think it, to me, it really helps reduce stress in a lot of ways. One is when you were talking, it reminds me that It's because everything's together. We haven't really talked about that, but, you know, so often when we are trying to manage our time, we kind of grow up with systems where we have to-do lists for our tasks and we have email over here and we have just our events in our calendar (and, you know, multiply that by nine), and then all your action items are in all these different places. And so, you don't have the clarity of like, “I know I know everything I have to do and how I'm going to get it done over time, and I know that it can get done over time.”
And so, by using a system, we really bring it all together. As I said, things live other places, like obviously email is going to come in, but you would just bridge everything into the calendar so that when something bad and stressful happens and you have to pivot pretty quickly, everything's there. You're not worried about, “Well, what if I'm missing, like, ten other things that I should have been doing right now?” It's all there already in front of you. The ability to move things just from a technical standpoint, that's why I do love a digital calendar. It just makes it easy to drag and drop and move things around, which is really, really nice.
For me, I would say the biggest benefit from a stress standpoint is I just used to feel like, one, I'm forgetting something, which goes to what we were just talking about like things are scattered, and now they're not scattered. They're all in one place. But two, I had this feeling of like, “If I don't do it now, it might not ever get done in time.” And by using this system, I'm able to see, “No, I can do that thing next Tuesday, next Wednesday,” and I have wiggle room built into my schedule. As long as the normal curveballs hit, I should be good. I've built some flex into the schedule to do that. I can do it then. I don't need to do it now. I can let it go. And that ability has allowed me to take breaks and actually enjoy them in a way that I did not used to be able to do.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes.
Kelly: And then the last thought on this that we've talked about, but just to touch on it, that from a stress-reduction standpoint is using your calendar in this way, it keeps you honest that your workload matches your capacity. It is, obviously, less stressful to do a manageable amount of work than an unrealistic, impossible amount of work. And so, I think that just helps from like a day-to-day stress point as well.
Dr. Chelsea: Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah, and I think the ability to move and/or, like I said, for me, I can fluctuate a lot of tasks based on how I'm feeling, and I will fully admit that's a privilege of my job that I'm very autonomous in both my jobs. So I have the ability to say, “Okay, I'm supposed to do that right now. But I'm really not feeling it. I can swap it. I can do something else,” or, like you said, I have the white space to like, “I have been on a screen all day. I want to go sit and read a physical book for 30 minutes.” And I can do that without feeling like I'm abandoning all these tasks that are now going to come down on me because I can see it. Like, I'm good.
Kelly: Absolutely.
Dr. Chelsea: I have time tomorrow to do this. I have time later. I'm not worried about it. I have the space. And so, the ability to lean into the self-care you're trying to do is so powerful because you can actually let it go and be present for those, like, go on a walk, read, whatever that self-care is that helps you feel better.
Kelly: Well, I love that you bring that up because I think that when people hear about time blocking or time boxing, there's this very understandable resistance of like, “I don't want to live so structured. I don't want to live my life according to boxes.” It is very strange to me that as long as you have the flexible approach that we've been talking about, I am able to be just as spontaneous as I used to be. Same thing. “I calendared this thing. I don't really want to do it. So let me move it around.”
But when I use the system and I can move it around and I can find a new time for it and I can bring something in that I want to do that's the right energy or take a break, whatever it is, and I can see that the plan still works, then I actually enjoy it. It's like the new plan is just a neutral new plan. Where in my past I used to be like, “I'm not going to do that,” and then I would spend the next 45 minutes being like, “Should I have done that?” Like, “Will it still get done?” Like, “I feel kind of guilty I didn't do it.” Where now I'm like, “Nope, this is a neutral new plan, new iteration. Now we move forward,” and I get to enjoy that change in a different way. It's really surprising that something so rigid can bring a lot of freedom and flexibility to your life.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes, I think that it's allowing for more freedom and more autonomy and more control. And even if you're in a job where you don't have a lot of autonomy, you have the things that are immovable, but then whatever is in your control, you're able to see that and control it more and decide what you're doing.
Okay, I hope people are inspired by this because, again, I'm not kidding when I say how much it’s changed and it is different in how much it's helped when you have that sense of overwhelm or not feeling like you ever get enough done, that stress that comes. So if people are inspired, do you have a way for people to test out your Bright Method? Will you share more about the method (I guess, be concrete of what that is) and then where people can test it out?
The Bright Method – 40:38
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. So what The Bright Method is, as you can tell, is leveraging a digital calendar to make everything that we do visual so that we have a better understanding of capacity and workload and drawing boundaries and delegating out and getting your partner's help and all this kind of stuff. There are a lot of ripple effects that come from that clarity. I typically teach it in an eight-week program, but I also do strongly believe that time management is incredibly personal, and so, I don't pretend it's for everyone. I think it is, you know, you want to make sure it's the right fit for you.
I have a free five-day program that kind of walks you through the main four pillars of The Bright Method, and then the fifth day is a bit of like a you-wouldn't-see-it-coming, maybe, ripple effect of how you could apply The Bright Method in a way that works for you. If you want to try that out for free, it's five days of video lessons and you can check that out at www.kellynolan.com/refresh. You can also DM me on Instagram. I'm not there @_kellynolan_. If you also DM me there and you're like, “Can you send me the link?” I'd be happy to do that too!
Dr. Chelsea: Absolutely, and I will make sure it's in the show notes wherever you're listening right now in the episode resources as well. And go follow Kelly! She has great just advice all the time, and again, I've been using the method for years and I still see stuff. I'm like, “Oh yeah, I lost track of that part,” or “This is really helpful!” So go follow as well.
But yeah, I hope people check it out or take one little piece of this. If it's not the whole method, if there's something you're like, “Oh, that might make a difference for me,” to go try it. Go try something different. See if it can help you. So will you share how people can connect with you and find you?
Kelly: Sure thing. So I'm most active on Instagram @_kellynolan_. You're also welcome to email me at kelly@kellynolan.com. I truly, truly nerd out talking about this stuff. So if you have a question or anything like that, just shoot me an email, and I just really love talking about this and making sure that it can be tailored for the person who's asking with their particular family, industry, preferences, all that kind of stuff.
Dr. Chelsea: Yes, and I will attest you've answered many of my questions. I’m like, “How do I make this work?” But it's been so helpful! So thank you so much for sharing your expertise, Kelly, and just honestly for creating this because it makes such a huge difference in making sure that you're able to share it with more people. We appreciate you. Thank you!
Kelly: Thank you!
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[Motivational Outro Music]
Thank you for listening to Passion for Dance! You can find all episode resources at www.chelseapierotti.com/podcast, and be sure to follow me on Instagram for more high-performance tips at @dr.chelsea.pierotti. This podcast is for passionate dance teachers and coaches who are ready to change the dance industry by creating happier, more successful dancers. I'm Dr. Chelsea and keep sharing your passion for dance with the world.
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