Reading · Kelly Nolan · RSS Amplifier

Each Thursday, the “How I Structure My Day” series features women from different industries, with and without kids, with and without partners, with family living with/near them and not, wfh to 1+ hour commutes, etc. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do!

Know that if you’re ready to learn a time management system designed for professional working women, the 10-week Bright Method program is open and ready to get you results! Learn all about it here – and send any questions my way! Happy to talk out whether I think it would work for you, your main concerns, timing, etc. Send me a message, and I hope to see you in there!

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Alright, on to the good stuff!

Profession: Assistant Professor and EdD Student
In-office
Partner: Yes (Hybrid)
Children: Yes – 4 kids (8, 7, 6, & 3yo.)
Idaho
31

I usually wake up around 7. I am a bit of a slow waker upper, so I have my cup of tea immediately and my kids know that I don't really help with much until I am done with that. I usually scroll on social media for around 10 minutes and then jump into the fray.
Mostly that involves making sure that everyone has done the tasks they know they need to do in the morning (change clothes, brush teeth, brush hair, pack lunch, shoes, and backpack all ready.) My kids usually wake up before me and I will often leave notes for them about chores that they need to get done in addition to getting themselves ready. Trash taken out, laundry moved over, socks gathered from the clean laundry etc.
I'll do hair for my girls and get myself work ready, but my makeup is simple and I have a very low maintenance haircut so it doesn't take long.

Getting my kids as self-sufficient as possible is a game changer. It takes a lot of work on the front end, but they can take great care of what they need to and remove a lot of the mental load from our plates.
We have all the breakfast options reachable. We have an electric kettle so they can easily and safely heat up water for their own oatmeal. All of my elementary kids pack their own lunch (with specific qualifications like you have to have a fruit and sandwich etc.) That means having everything reachable and clearly set up so they know where to grab from. My 3 year old has lunch provided at preschool. I will wake up when my 3 year old wakes up if he comes to get me, but usually his big siblings think it is fun to get him breakfast and play with him without parents being right there.
We let the kids pick out all of their own clothes (within reason. It has to be weather/school appropriate). This allows for great freedom of expression and less on my plate.
We also have a big emphasis on personal responsibility. If you don't remember your lunch, you get hot lunch regardless of what it is. If you don't remember your backpack, I am not going to bring it to you. They are all still little enough that they generally don't have things that they need to turn in for grades or anything. I could see this policy getting revised when they are bigger.

I do a lot of puzzles. Nanogram, crosswords, sudoku etc. I kind of use those as my transition for everything. Usually when I sit down at my desk at work I do a puzzle or two, then turn on Focus Friend app on my phone and jump into my tasks.

I get to work around 9:30 after dropping kids off at school. I come in and do whatever task I can most easily make progress on. Usually it’s answering emails, sometimes it’s grading an easy assignment. I will check my to do list from the day before and pick something to work on like creating an assignment/exam/study guide. I teach between 2-3 classes per day. I usually only have one really challenging class per day, so I spend a majority of my time in between classes prepping for that class, reviewing slideshows, checking instructions, and reviewing the chapter in my textbook to make sure I can teach it well.
I tend to have more time on Monday mornings, so I save my grading for then and do it all in big batches. I can get into a flow, put on some fun music and drink a warm drink to make it a little more enjoyable. I intentionally grade on Mondays because I don’t want to deal with emails from students over the weekend with any questions/clarification. I also think its kinder to them. If they got a bad grade on something on a Friday and I am unavailable to talk about it with them, I would rather not have them stress about it over the weekend.
Usually after my last class I am spent for my big thinking for the day and it gets harder to focus. I usually stay in my office for a while longer to be available for students to answer questions and do some ideating (research ideas, class changes, etc.). It looks a lot like me sitting and staring at a wall, but I have to let ideas roll around in my head for a while before they are usable. I also do some “academic scrolling” looking at research articles I find interesting or need for an assignment and taking notes on how I would like to use them. I usually do an audit of tasks that I need to get done to leave for the next day and leave it on my desk.

Whenever there is space between classes. I cannot get myself to pack a lunch consistently and have a bad habit of not eating when I get busy. So I have a full shelf of snacks in my office. I also bring yogurts and single serve guacamole to keep in the fridge. Just things that I can keep a bunch of there so I don't have to think about it every day. I just grab those whenever I am sitting at my desk.
I usually eat at the cafeteria about twice a week. Sometimes I eat with coworkers, sometimes I keep my head down and keep working on my laptop. Other times I do puzzles for a brain break.

I have several mental health challenges that make me extra inefficient. I have to kind of go with the flow of what I am able to do on any given day. Sometimes I can lock in and write/grade/prep for a couple hours, but I will forget to eat or drink water. Other times it is a struggle to get 20 minutes of work done. I try not to beat myself on days where I need more breaks and just adjust my tasks accordingly. I can't work more than about two and a half hours at a time without feeling very anxious, so if I get to that point I take a more intentional break like a walk and then only have short bursts of focus after that.

I tend to leave work between 3-4 depending on my class schedule. I am still available by email in the evenings. This spreads out my workload and ensures that I am not missing anything important (I am prone to missing important things). Any emails after 5 though I consider non urgent. I might or might not get back to it that evening depending on the complexity of the response needed or how busy I am.

Before I leave work, I usually do a couple more puzzles. I don't have specific hours that I need to be in, and doing puzzles allows me to slowly transition out of work mode while still being present for anything that may come up at the end of the day.
When I get home I usually change into comfy clothes and sit quietly for a few minutes and/or scroll on tiktok for a while before my kids get home.

If I have a little bit of time before kids get home I will often do a "sprint clean". I put on tennis shoes, set a timer for as long as I have and try to get as much cleaning done as possible. Like, literally running from task to task.
We have our kids very involved in activities, so a lot of our evenings are spent taking kids to practices etc., but I absolutely love it. I could watch them do the things that they enjoy all day.
We are almost always able to eat dinner all together as a family before shuttling off to activities.
We try to have at least 1 day per week where we don't have anything scheduled and we watch a show together as a family. We have been very into Dancing With the Stars and The Amazing Race. It has opened up a lot of talking points about culture, art, and communication!
The kids go to bed around 7:30. My oldest stays up later, but enjoys having her own quiet time in her room and it allows us all some space. After the kids go to bed, my husband and I usually watch a couple of shows and then have "TikTok Time" where we save up the funny videos we have shared with each other and watch them together. I highly recommend this.
If my husband is busy in the evenings, I usually read, paint, or play the piano to entertain myself.
My husband and I almost always go to bed at the same time and we are both chronic yappers so we spend a lot of time chatting and stay up too late. We are usually in bed by like 11:45 ish. I stay up a little later doing more puzzles and sometimes journalling to settle down. If I have a new class to prep for or a lot of schoolwork that I need to get through, I am likely to stay up very late to accomplish that, but that's not often.

We usually eat at about 5:15 on nights where the kids have activities. A little later for a more complicated meal on days we are home. We plan all of our meals together on Friday nights and put them in the order for delivery the next morning.
We also put what we are having for dinner in our family google calendar usually with a link to the recipe. This reduces the amount of time I spend thinking about what to make for dinner. My husband doesn't enjoy cooking as much as me, so he usually does 2 weeknight dinners on the days that he is working from home and I do 3.

If I have the energy I will start a load of laundry before bed that my son can move over to the dryer in the morning. Sometimes we get a load of dishes going. But honestly by the end of the day we are so spent that we do not take care of much in the evenings.

One of the things that is most likely going to throw off our evening is kids fighting and arguing. It ratchets up the mood for everyone in the house so we all get crankier. Keeping busy helps reduce that. The trade off is our house is messy a lot of the time because we are on the go all the time, but reducing the number of opinions during free play time by having each kid out at various activities throughout the week I think is helpful.

As silly as this sounds, my best "tip" is have the fight. My husband did not grow up with much of any homecare task skills (He didn't learn to do laundry until after college). It wasn't that he couldn't or didn't want to, he just didn't need to. It would have been easier/more harmonious for me to just take care of everything. He is a good man, his mom just took care of everything for a long time, so he had a big learning curve and I'm so glad I didn't pick the path of least resistance and let resentment build. That's part of why we prioritize self-sufficiency in our kids at such an early age. My husband takes care of at least as many (if not more) home care tasks as me now.
Also! I am hugely calendarly challenged, so he manages our family calendar and appointments. He also manages almost all of our administrative work like insurance and taxes. I am specifically very bad at handling those kinds of tasks, so I appreciate that he takes care of those.

I play on a volleyball team one night a week. It makes me feel as refreshed as like a 3 hour nap.
I also paint a decent amount and try to do 1 mural per year, but I usually work on those in the summertime when I am not as busy.

I actually teach exercise science! So this is very important to me, but reading this series I have been hugely surprised at the number of people who work specific exercise into their routine. I used to be a competitive athlete, so I have had to reframe exercise away from "being the best possible" to "what is going to make me feel good?"
I am VERY hyperactive, so a lot of how I am is naturally really active as I am very wiggly. I tend to "snack" on exercise throughout the day. I have a pull up bar outside my bedroom that I do a few pull ups on when I walk by. I am stretching throughout the day as I am sitting at my desk. I primarily do body weight exercises so I can do them in 1-10 minute increments. I feel really fortunate to have a huge mental repertoire of these so I can strengthen any part of my body without weights. While something is in the microwave, or I'm brushing my teeth, I'm usually doing something. I have recently started wearing a weighted vest at home so these exercises have a little bit increased intensity.
I also play on a rec league volleyball team and will occasionally go for runs, use the row machine, or do a dance class if I have unexpected time in the middle of the day or in the evening. If I haven't gotten sufficient movement throughout the day, I will usually end the day with 20-30 burpees to get the energy out of my body before I go to bed so I'm not anxious. (Gosh I sound like a Jack Russel Terrier...)

We don't outsource per se. But we think of the devices that make our household management easier as outsourcing. Like our roomba and our appliances. We spend good money to get really good ones so they work really well. We have often said that getting really good tools is the cheapest outsourcing that you can get.
We also get almost all of our groceries by delivery. It is absolutely worth the money to us. We don't keep a shopping list, we just add it to the cart!

Oh I have so many! With a bunch of kids this close in age we have to be really dogmatically organized to make it work with 2 full time working parents.
We have a year long calendar up on the wall with all the important dates marked on it so the kids don't ask 100 times how many days until xyz. They can go count it themselves and practice numbers, days and months. Win win!
We have an automatic feeder for our cat that puts out a little food for her twice a day. She also has a huge water jug so we don't have to fill it often.
All of the kids share socks. We have a smaller size for the 3 year old and another size for the bigger kids. The 3 year old has all grey socks and the big kids have socks with grey on the bottom. We do not deviate from this until they need a new size. They always match and are easy to find. They are all put in one bin by where they keep their shoes. (I have all black socks, and my husband has all white socks).
Did you know you can freeze sandwiches? PBJ and Meat and Cheese (as long as you aren't hefty on the condiments and don't add any veg) freeze beautifully and thaw out to a texture you can't even tell they were frozen ahead of time. Every couple of weeks we make 2-3 weeks worth of sandwiches in an assembly line with all the kids. We bag them individually and leave them in a container in the freezer for easy kid lunch packing.
All the kids have their own dedicated bins by the front door for specific things they need. Coats, backpacks, shoes, sports equipment etc. They are responsible for making sure that their stuff ends up in their bin.
We also don't fold laundry. I think I got this tip from KC Davis? (If you haven't, How to Keep House While Drowning is a must read!) We have big bins with categories in everyone's closets that act as their dresser. Most things don't end up wrinkly. If they do, we iron it or don't. But it takes SO MUCH effort just to get the laundry through AND sorted. We simply do not have time for folding.
And lastly, take your medications. It can be tempting with mental health medications to think "Oh I'm fine, I don't need these anymore". But that's the medicine doing what its supposed to. It has been a sticking point for me in the past, but with consistent reminders on my watch and phone I am much more consistent about taking them.

Thank you so much to this woman for generously sharing. These publish every Thursday!

Encouraging comments always welcome!
If you have questions or even hang-ups about what someone shared, you are welcome to ask a question for the sharer in the same kind, genuinely curious way you would if you were looking at that woman in her eyes. She might respond through me.
If comments are judge-y or mean-spirited, I reserve the right to delete comments. I can handle being criticized about my own work here (and even still, to a degree – I’m also a person), but I go into full mama bear mode when people come after my people – including women who are being vulnerable and sharing in the first place.
Thanks to the vast majority of people who are so kind!

HISMD: Assistant Professor and EdD Student

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