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!

Profession: Director of Public Relations & Content at a Mid-Major University
Hybrid (mostly in-office 4+ days/wk with a long commute)
Partner: Yes (In-office)
Children: Yes – 1 kid (8-month-old)
Tennessee
32

Regardless of whether I'm remote or in-office, I wake up at 4 a.m. The alarm goes off and I'm downstairs by 4:15. That hour is mine — usually a workout video, the walking pad, or both. I love a group fitness class, but it just doesn't fit this season, so this is my workaround. If I'm into a show, I'll walk and watch. Sometimes I take it slow and read instead. I try to watch my caffeine intake, so coffee waits until I'm in the car.
By 5, I'm in the shower, and I spend the next 45 minutes getting ready at a relaxed pace. At 5:45, I head downstairs to gather my things — work bag, lunch, and my son's daycare bag.
Breakfast is something easy: a smoothie, hard-boiled eggs and sausage, or leftover casserole I can heat when I get to the office. I don't like to eat first thing in the morning, so I'm eating in the car or once I get to work.
I wake my baby up at 6, always making sure I'm fully ready before I walk into his room. Once he's up, he has my attention. I get him dressed and changed before we head downstairs, feed him his bottle at 6:15, and soak up a few quiet minutes snuggling. By 6:30, he has some independent play time while I load the car. We're out the door by 6:50.
Daycare is 30 minutes away and doesn't open until 7:30, so I get a full hour in the car — the first half with my son, the second half alone to call my mom, catch up on a podcast, or run through my mental to-do list before my day officially starts at 8.

The biggest one: I have to be 95% ready to walk out the door before I ever wake my baby up. It means that when it's time to leave, there's no "hair on fire" scramble.
Most of my prep happens the night before. I decide how I'm going to spend my 4 a.m. hour in advance — if I'm working out, my clothes and sneakers are already set out; if I'm reading, my Kindle is waiting. I pick out my work outfit and steam it if needed so there are no decisions to make in the morning. Bags are packed — daycare, work, lunch — and my son's bottles are made and ready to grab from the fridge. He drinks them cold, so there's no warming, no waiting.
I use my watch as my alarm so I don't wake my husband, who sleeps until 5. I relish in that quiet time by myself.
Keeping my son on a consistent morning routine helps too. When everyone knows what to expect, it just flows. And I save coffee until I'm in the car. I am mindful of my caffeine intake, and love sipping my coffee in the car.

The hour in the car does a lot of that work for me. By the time I've dropped my son off, caught up with my mom, or worked through my mental to-do list, my brain has had time to shift from mom to professional. Pulling into the parking garage at work is almost a physical trigger.

My division (a team of 30) operates like an internal agency. Every department, college, and office on campus is essentially a client. We're all working toward the same university goals, but each area has its own needs and expectations for how marketing and communications can support them. That means I don't have a lot of control over my calendar. Mondays and Tuesdays are heavy meeting days; Thursdays are protected for our MarComm senior leadership team with no meetings scheduled, which helps.
The rest of my day is a balance of proactive and reactive. I can have a full plan for what I want to accomplish and shift entirely into crisis communications mode by 9 a.m. I'm juggling my own deadlines — press releases, talking points, email communications, presentations, ghostwriting for executive leaders across campus — while also editing, managing, and helping my team move their work forward. I have a lot of tabs open at any given time and switch context frequently, sometimes working on several projects in different increments throughout the same day.
My inbox is honestly not as organized as I'd like it to be after six years, and at this point it might be a lost cause. That said, I'm incredibly responsive, which is incredibly important in a client-facing role. I want to be known as someone who answers the phone and gets back to you quickly. The challenge is that communication comes from every direction: email, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and texts from people across campus. It's a lot to monitor, but responsiveness is non-negotiable for me.
As for work-life balance — I believe if life bleeds into work, work has to bleed into life. Most weeks, that means an hour of work before bed one or two nights. But I try to model the inverse for my team too: work hard while you're here, and leave it here when you can. If you need a personal appointment or an early exit, that's okay.

Lunch varies. I pack most days — usually leftovers — and I eat at my desk more than I'd like. I try to eat with my team once or twice a week, both for the break and for the relationship-building. There's a balance to strike there though. I want to be approachable and in community with them, and I'm also their supervisor.

Not regularly. Most days are simply too busy. But when time allows, a 20-minute walk through campus is a great reset for a change of scenery, fresh air and some extra steps.

Our workday is 8 to 4:30. Pre-baby, I was notorious for staying until 5:30 or 6. Now that's a hard no. If I don't leave by 4:30, I won't see my son before he goes to bed, and that's non-negotiable.

My commute home is 45 minutes to an hour, and it does the same work in reverse. I talk to my mom twice a day, so we usually catch up for part of the drive. The rest is podcasts or music to decompress. By the time I pull into my garage at home, the transition is mostly done. The physical moment of arriving is its own reset.
Since I do the morning shift with my son, my husband handles afternoon pickup. He's a high school teacher and coach, so we've built our days around each other's schedules. Since daycare is so out of the way (waitlists for daycare in Tennessee is WILD), it's a real blessing to only have to do drop off.

Once I'm home by 5:30, it feels like a mad dash to get the baby ready for bed. I love doing bath time, but if I'm running late, my husband will make sure the baby is bathed by the time I get home. We use bedtime as family time for the three of us. My husband sits in the nursery with us while I feed the baby and we put him down together. It's one of my favorite times of the day.
He's in bed by 6:15 and sleeps through the night until 6 a.m. It's not lost on me how blessed we are to have a good sleeper.
Dinner is on the table by 6:45. I do all the cooking; my husband does all the cleaning (dishes, dishwasher, bottles).
While he's cleaning up, I'm getting ready for bed.
By 7:30, we're both winding down, and we take an hour to watch a show, read, or just talk. One or two nights per week, I may need to use that time to wrap up work, but I try to keep that limited.
We alternate baby monitor duty every other night, which means neither of us is "on" every single night. We're usually lights out by 8:30.

My goal is dinner on the table by 6:45. I try to cook on the weekends so we have meals ready for the week. The best nights are when I can just microwave leftovers. We live on leftovers. If I haven't prepped, we'll do something easy like breakfast for dinner or salmon burgers from the freezer.
I try to keep meals balanced, and I'll sometimes do component prep so we're not eating the same thing for days on end.
My husband eats lunch at school, so I only have to worry about packing my own.

I'm a big believer in putting the kitchen to sleep before we shut down for the night. Counters wiped, island tidied, no dirty dishes in the sink, dishwasher running. My husband unloads it in the morning before he leaves for work. Walking into a clean kitchen keeps me calm in the mornings.

Sleep is sacred. My days are full enough that I will give up TV time to go to bed at a decent hour. If we're getting to bed later than 9, I'll skip the 4 a.m. alarm and just get up at 5 to shower.
I have lists everywhere — Notes app on my phone and computer, a notebook, sticky notes on my desk. The volume of work moves fast, so I'm constantly ticking things off and adding new ones. In the afternoons, I'll brain dump where things stand and where my attention needs to go the next day. This is especially important Friday afternoons so I'm not walking in Monday without a plan.

We try to divide and conquer. I do the morning shift with our son; my husband handles afternoon pickup and chores in the afternoon. I do all the cooking; he does all the dishes, cleaning, and trash. He manages our finances; we each handle our own car maintenance. I do most of the laundry, but if he remembers to check the dryer, he'll fold a load. Whenever I fold laundry, he is always offering to help (which I take him up on).
The mental load still falls mostly to me — diapers, formula, baby clothes, family gifts, making social plans, daycare logistics, kids doctor's appointments. That's the part that's harder to divide. I'm still figuring that one out.

Having an infant has been an adjustment. Free time looks different now, but my husband and I are intentional about making sure we each get a few hours on the weekend to do our own thing — run errands, go shopping, get a pedicure, grab a coffee. Whatever it is. The other is on baby duty.
I love the slower pace of the weekend. My son still wakes up at 6, so I don't sleep in, but I'm a firm believer in waking up before your baby — even 15 minutes to brush your teeth and get yourself together before you're "on."
When we had our son, we were really intentional about acknowledging that this season was going to look different. I have a demanding career that matters to me, and I also want to spend as much time with my baby as possible. Our down time is mostly spent at home, which has honestly been wonderful — just different.
Something that has helped in this new season is romanticizing the everyday. The coffee I look forward to in the morning. A hot shower. A slow Saturday morning. In some ways my world has gotten smaller, but in others it's expanded in ways I didn't expect. I find real purpose in my work and in being a mom — and on the weekends, I lean hard into the mom side.

I wish it was every day, but I do what I can. During the week, I'm moving about three days out of five — usually during that 4 a.m. hour, either a workout video, the walking pad, or both. On weekends I try to do a strength video and a walk, either outside with my son or on the walking pad. My goal is 45 to 60 minutes of activity five days a week.

Two things that make a real difference: a house cleaner who comes twice a month, and grocery delivery. The house cleaner was really important to my husband, so he owns that completely — communicating with her, getting cash, managing the door code. Grocery delivery is a game changer and a necessity post-baby

This season has changed my relationships in ways I expected. I don't see friends as often, and some friendships have shifted. My very best friend is single with no partner or kids, and our lives look wildly different right now. But she has so graciously met me where I am. Sometimes that looks like her coming over for breakfast on a Saturday morning to visit with my baby and me. We've been friends since college and she's like a sister to me.
It's also important to have women in your life who are either in the same season or have been there before. For me, that's colleagues at work who are also navigating motherhood, and my mom. She wasn't a working mom, but she was often a solo parent. She understands the juggle in her own way. Our relationship has changed so much over time, and watching it grow into a deep friendship has been one of the unexpected gifts of this season. She was very much Mom when I was growing up, which was exactly right. And now she's also one of my closest friends. I hope someday my son and I find our way to something like that when he grows up.
This season has clarified my priorities. I find real purpose in my work, but at the end of the day, my family comes first. I'm grateful to work somewhere that is genuinely pro-family. My boss doesn't have kids, and yet she extends real grace when my baby is sick or daycare drop-off and pickup create a scheduling snafu. That grace exists because I've worked hard to build trust, and I'm not going to take advantage of it. It's also shaped how I show up for my own team. I have a much deeper respect for my teammates who are parents. It's a lot to juggle, and I want them to feel that I see that.
Something I've had to make peace with is that you cannot be 100% at everything all the time. For me, that shows up most clearly at 4:30. There are nights when work isn't finished. I would rather leave on time, get home to see my baby, and finish after he goes to bed than stay late and miss him entirely. Good enough means knowing there is always more to do, and that it will be there in the morning.
It also means being able to choose my baby when he's sick (which feels like all the time being a daycare baby!), and I'm still working on doing that without guilt. Some days I lean more into work; other days I lean more into motherhood. I'm figuring out the balance in real time. That tension is real, especially in this first year.
My husband and I try to share that load fairly. He's a teacher, and we had a summer baby, so he didn't have to take time off when baby was born. Before each week starts, we go through our schedules and talk through who has the most flexibility: who could manage a sick day at home if it comes to that, who has less margin that week. It's not always equal, but we try to be fair to each other and to our work commitments. He is so supportive of my career aspirations which I am so grateful for.

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: Director of Public Relations & Content at a Mid-Major University

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