Realistic Time Management for High-Performing Women Entrepreneurs with Kelly Nolan

In this episode, Kelly Nolan shares her approach to time management that helps women achieve more without the stress. Drawing from her experience as an overwhelmed attorney, Kelly offers practical strategies for managing both personal and professional tasks with less anxiety and more clarity. She explains how she learned to confidently say “no” when needed, create space for much-needed breaks, and end each day feeling proud of what she accomplished. If you’re tired of feeling stretched too thin and are ready to take control of your time with more peace of mind, this episode is for you.

 

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Press play for the full interview or keep reading below!

• [00:00]: Introduction and Background
• [02:56]: Transition from Law to Entrepreneurship
• [06:01]: The Birth of the Bright Method
• [08:59]: Navigating Time Management as a Mom
• [12:01]: Building an Audience and Launching Courses
• [14:53]: The Bright Method Explained
• [18:00]: Finding Harmony in Chaos
• [20:57]: Financial Goals and Business Strategy
• [28:43]: Evolving Program Structure for Better Support
• [31:33]: Understanding the Financial Landscape of Entrepreneurship
• [32:51]: Lessons Learned About Money and Work Ethic
• [34:40]: Navigating Personal and Professional Balance
• [41:45]: The Role of Partnership in Financial Goals
• [46:57]: Defining Success Beyond Financial Metrics

 

 

 

Kelly Nolan Shares How She Started Her Time Management Business

So I know it’s kind of a theme on your podcast—I’m probably the last person anyone would’ve expected to become an entrepreneur. I decided back in sixth grade that I was going to be a lawyer. I spent the next decade pursuing that path and eventually became one. It never even occurred to me to do anything else, let alone start my own business. And honestly, I loved practicing law. I was a patent litigator in Boston for several years before I met my husband.

When he started his residency in San Diego, we moved there. I took the California bar and continued practicing for a bit. That’s really when I started feeling unhappy in my career. I’m originally from Minnesota, so I have more of that classic Midwestern personality, and the legal culture in Southern California felt really harsh—very scorched earth. It just wasn’t my vibe. It felt so negative, and I realized I was becoming really unhappy.

I knew that switching to another law firm wasn’t going to fix it. The culture was just too embedded. So I started exploring other opportunities—looking at in-house roles and different paths. Around that time, I saw an acquaintance from college who was doing professional organizing, more like a Home Edit-style business. I remember thinking, “Wait, you can do something that enjoyable for work?”

 

Finding Work You Love

So I started following her more closely, and I began working with a career coach. She told me, “Don’t leave your law job until you’ve been building the new business for at least a year.” I was exploring professional organizing, and through that I found this organization called NAPO, which supports professional organizers. They not only teach organizing skills, but also how to start and run a business. That’s really when I started thinking, I could actually do this.

So I gave it a try. And candidly, physical organizing wasn’t my strong suit—it never had been. It turned out not to be the right fit, but it was a great exit path from law. Around that time, I got a call asking if I could take 20 depositions over the summer, and I just thought, I can’t do this anymore. I was already miserable, and that was the final straw.

 

Kelly Nolan’s Lightbulb Moment

So after a lot of number crunching and discussions with my husband and family, I left law earlier than I’d originally planned. I kept working on the home organizing business, but eventually realized I was more interested in the professional side of organizing—things like workflows and systems. I worked with a psychiatrist on streamlining her office, and then with a lawyer on similar things.

At some point, I showed them my calendar for another project, and they both said, “This is actually really interesting—how you organize your time.” And I thought, Really?

Rewinding a bit—when I was a lawyer, I had been completely overwhelmed at first. I tried every productivity tool and tip out there, but nothing really worked. Eventually, I cobbled together my own weird little system just to survive. I assumed my system was helping me keep up with everyone else, but when these professionals pointed out how unique and effective it was, I realized—oh, I could actually teach this.

And that’s how I ended up teaching time management from a business perspective.

 

Why Kelly Nolan Chose to Stop Practicing Law

When I was practicing in Boston, patent litigation was a pretty tight-knit community. You really couldn’t burn bridges—you were bound to see the same people again at some point in your career, and everyone had a reputation. There was a sense of accountability.

But in Southern California, it felt different. I wasn’t doing as much IP litigation there; it was more general commercial work, which was much more regional. Between LA and San Diego, there are so many lawyers that there seemed to be less accountability—like, I may never see you again, so people behaved very differently. There were more personal attacks, and the tone of the litigation just felt more hostile.

What really bothered me, though, was that because I had re-taken the bar in California, my bar number was relatively high. People assumed I was a first-year associate based on that. Older male attorneys would treat me so terribly—just incredibly disrespectful. It was disheartening to see how they talked down to what they thought was a young female associate. And then they’d be surprised when I pushed back and they realized I’d actually been practicing law for quite a while. But at the end of the day, it left me with this internal conflict—Should I stick it out and try to improve things?

 

Starting a Family as a High-Performing Woman

But we were also trying to start a family, and I just couldn’t bring that negativity home with me every day. I was so miserable practicing in San Diego that once we had the logistics, finances, and savings figured out, I was ready. The emotional part wasn’t hard—my day-to-day experience was already so difficult that leaving felt like relief.

But I will say, the ego hit came later. I didn’t realize how much my identity was tied to being a lawyer. I didn’t think I had any vanity around it, but culturally, there’s this weight to saying, “I’m an attorney.” You go to a dinner party and people instantly give you that credibility. Even if they don’t like lawyers, they respect the title—it’s a marker that you’re smart, accomplished.

And suddenly I was saying, “Well, I do this kind of weird organizing job…” It was a strange ego shift, and that part was harder than I expected.

Logistically, I kept my bar licenses active for a long time—in California, Minnesota, and Massachusetts—just in case. I wanted that safety net. If something happened to my husband or I needed to go back to work quickly, I wanted that option. Eventually, once my business really started to take off, I let them go. But I held onto them for years, just in case.

 

Starting a Time Management Business

Then I had my first daughter, and so there was a period in there where I wasn’t doing a whole lot. So I think it was in 2019 was when I was like, I’m going to go online. I’m going to take this virtually.

I think in late 2018 I must’ve been working one-on-one with people, but around 2019 I started thinking more seriously about taking it online. That’s when I started my Instagram account. I started thinking maybe I’d do a course with this. I was just exploring that world.

For a long time, I was doing mostly one-on-one work, and I thought I’d eventually sell a standalone course. So I took Amy Porterfield’s DCA course to learn how to do that—she teaches how to market through webinars. I kind of had this feeling like, That wouldn’t have worked for past me, but maybe it would work for other entrepreneurs.

 

From Course Flop to Group Program

So my first course that I created was just for the entrepreneur, and I worked on it for so long… and it was candidly a flop. I think I sold five.

And just to be really clear, I had gotten the advice—You should do a group program to scale. But I really resisted that because I thought, My past self—the lawyer, the physician, the corporate woman—has a lot of shame around this issue and wants privacy. Time management can feel really personal, and I just thought a group program would never work.

Then COVID hit. My husband’s an ER doctor, so he was gone. My two-year-old was home, and suddenly I had no daylight hours to give to one-on-one clients. At the same time, a bunch of prospective clients were reaching out like, Hey, the courts are closed, I actually have time to work on this now. And I was like, Well, I don’t.

So what I did was I took that flopped course for entrepreneurs, took those slides, and reworked it into something geared more toward that past me version. I sold it for $397 and re-recorded the lessons one week ahead of the group—at night when my daughter was asleep. I held group calls on Fridays at noon, hoping my daughter would be napping.

 

Going Against Your Gut in Business

That’s how I did it. And it was a total, total surprise. I’m a big fan of listening to your gut, knowing your people best—but it’s also good to be challenged sometimes. And I was very wrong that a group program wouldn’t work. There was so much magic in it.

I can tell people all day long, This is very normal—a lot of high-achieving women feel this way. But until you’re in a Zoom room with other women sharing the same thing, and you’re thinking, Wow, I find you really impressive and you feel the same way I do, that’s when you start to release the self-judgment and really look for solutions outside of yourself.

That was the magic. I actually got better results than I did working one-on-one. And that kicked off everything. That’s how I ended up doing the group program, and it’s evolved since then, but that was the start of that whole trajectory.

 

Marketing to High-Performing Women

Well, I would say that even past me was on Instagram. I was using it very differently back then than I do now, but I was definitely on it.

A lot of people told me, “You should go on LinkedIn for marketing.” And I thought, yeah, but if I’m thinking about marketing to me—the person I used to be—I’m not scrolling LinkedIn at 8 p.m. when I’m tired and looking for something to decompress with. I’m on Instagram. Sure, sometimes people scroll LinkedIn to see what others are up to or check job postings, but it just didn’t feel like the right platform for this.

So I started an Instagram account in February of 2019, and I just began sharing results, tips, and time management content.

 

Pricing a Group Program or Online Course

In terms of pricing—I’m trying to remember exactly how I figured that out. Honestly, it was a lot of trial and error. I looked around in the entrepreneur space to see what people were charging for standalone courses. I ended up pricing mine on the lower end of that range.

Even though I felt confident in the results I could deliver—because I had already been doing one-on-one work—I went lower because I was still recording the course one week ahead of the group. I’d never run a group program before, and I didn’t want to feel uncomfortable selling it.

There’s a lot of talk about “charge what you’re worth”—and I get that—but I also think you need to feel confident when you’re talking about your offer. For me, I’d rather start lower and build up over time. That felt better and more authentic.

And honestly, Instagram was really helpful. I think my friends wanted to be supportive, my husband wanted to be supportive—but when I’d say, “I help people with time management,” they were like, “That sounds nice… but what does that actually mean?”

Even my husband at one point said, “Okay, now I get what you do.” And I was like, Cool—finally!

So Instagram helped a lot. People would see the content and say, “Oh wow, that’s me—I could really use this help.” And even now, Instagram is still my number one way of finding leads.

 

Launching a Time Management Course

That very first course—the one that flopped—I launched it using webinars, and honestly, I did not enjoy them. I found them super stressful, especially from a logistics standpoint.

By the third webinar, I actually had to cancel. My daughter had a high fever and was throwing up. She was in daycare at the time, and I had backup childcare lined up with a neighbor since we didn’t have any family around. But obviously, I couldn’t hand her off to a neighbor who also had her own kids.

That experience really made me realize that the live components of things were just too stressful for me. So from that point on—and even now—I sell through email and Instagram only.

That’s it: email list and Instagram. I just send out content and offers that way. I also have a free evergreen program that people can try out—it’s a way for them to get a feel for what I do. So there are other ways for people to learn about my work, but when it comes to launching, it’s always through email and Instagram. No live components anymore.

 

How Kelly Nolan Finds Harmony in Time Management with the Bright Method

What the Bright Method actually is, is just leveraging a digital calendar with a lot of smart strategies behind it. I think so often we focus on tools without realizing there’s a lot more that goes into actually using them effectively.

And I say this as a paper planner lover—I used a paper planner all through law school. But I really believe that as our lives get more and more complex, paper planners just can’t keep up for most people.

So what I teach is how to use a digital calendar—Google, Outlook, Apple, or even combinations of those—and really start by getting clear on your personal invisible to-dos. That’s all the stuff we carry in our heads, especially if you’re a mom: mornings, evenings, when you shower and get ready, bedtime routines, helping with homework, walking the dog, working out—those things take up so much brain space and time in our day.

And if you don’t see those things visually laid out, you can really trick yourself into thinking you have more time than you actually do. Then you end up beating yourself up for not getting 12 hours of things done when you never had 12 hours to begin with.

 

Getting Realistic About Your Time

So I really believe that getting those invisible to-dos visual helps in a lot of ways: it lightens the mental load, helps you get more realistic about your time, and also improves communication with a partner if you have one. When both people can see everything that’s going on, it’s much easier to get on the same page and get support.

Then the next part of the Bright Method is getting intentional with work—really thinking about when your energy is at its best. When do you want to take meetings? When do you want to do focused work? How can you be more efficient with emails and all the day-to-day tasks?

From there, we move into handling more one-off to-dos. I’m a big fan of time blocking—it’s not my concept, of course, but I really believe in it. The thing is, a lot of people start there. They hear about time blocking and go straight from their to-do list to their calendar. But if you haven’t accounted for everything else we just talked about, it can get chaotic really fast. So we spend time backing projects out, building game plans, and being thoughtful about how that time gets used.

And then the last part is the planning process itself. I teach a couple of different planning sessions, but the main one is a weekly planning session. Because we all get stuck in the weeds of the day-to-day, right? So having protected time to look up, plan ahead, and make strategic decisions is so important.

Those are the four main components of the Bright Method.

 

How Kelly Nolan Finds Balance in Time Management

So, going back to your question about how to use this system to find balance—it really looks different depending on your season of life. It’s looked totally different for me when I was single, then married, then had a dog, then became a business owner, then had one kid, then two. It just morphs with you.

I think the most important thing I help people do is just become aware of all they’re doing. So often we don’t even realize it. People say, “I didn’t get enough done,” and I’m like, “No, you just didn’t recognize how much you actually did.”

 

Building a Business as a Mom

I think I’m just really aware of how limited my time is, and that awareness helps me stay pretty focused. I have my one program, and sure—there are so many ideas I have for where I could take this business.

But I also know how much time it takes to serve that one program, to market that one program, to maintain Instagram, manage my email list, and run a podcast. I’m very conscious of how time-consuming all of that is, and that keeps me really laser-focused on what I choose to do.

I’m also very much the primary caregiver. Like I mentioned, my husband is an ER doctor—when he’s at work, he’s just gone. He can’t come home to help with a sick kid or anything like that. So I’ve had to be really intentional about my schedule.

I don’t do things like podcast interviews unless he’s not working and can be on standby for kid duty. My childcare hours are limited, and I have to be really thoughtful about how I use them. I’m pretty ruthless about what I say yes or no to because the windows I have for this kind of work are so limited.

And honestly, between all those factors, that’s what helps keep me focused and intentional.

 

Setting Financial Goals as a Course Creator

Yeah, I think it became a lot easier to manage once I moved into the group model. When I was doing one-on-one work, I never really figured that part out—I was always struggling with it. But the group program model has made it a lot easier. I wouldn’t say easy, but definitely easier to understand, forecast, and set goals around.

It’s still something I’m continuing to work on. I’m actually moving toward more of an evergreen model next year. And honestly, you learn these lessons and think, Why didn’t I do this sooner? One big realization for me—something I didn’t fully appreciate early on—was just how much taxes hit you.

Two years ago, my goal was to run the program twice a year, each time for eight weeks, and aim for 50 seats per round. I’ve since raised the price to $3,000 for the eight-week program, and I feel really good about that value-wise. I constantly hear from clients that it’s game-changing, and I truly believe that everything in life comes back to how we manage our time. It has ripple effects in surprising areas—productivity, health, relationships, all of it.

And that’s part of why I wanted to move toward a higher-ticket offer. I pour a lot into my clients, and I realized I wanted to maintain that high-touch experience. So charging more allows me to support fewer people at a deeper level. That’s what I wanted—high-touch, high-impact.

In this most recent round, I had 59 people in the program, which I was thrilled with. But then there was that moment where I realized… wow, taxes. I now set aside 50% of every dollar I make for taxes.

 

Understanding Finances

I’ve worked with an accountant and explored things like becoming an S corp. But at my current income level, there hasn’t been a huge financial benefit to making that shift—at least not yet. That may change down the road, but for now, it hasn’t been worth it.

That’s part of what’s prompting this next shift. My youngest is now three, and I have more energy and capacity to give to the business. So I’ve decided to transition the program into more of an open enrollment model—running from September through early April. It won’t be year-round, but it’ll be open for more of the year so people can join when it works best for them.

The way the program is structured, the first three weeks are the most high-touch—helping people get set up with the tech, syncing Outlook with Google, navigating their work computers, and all of that. But after that, things calm down a bit.

So my thinking is: rather than onboarding 60 women all at once, I can spread it out. That way, it won’t feel overwhelming, and I can still give everyone the support they need. I’m also going to make a few adjustments—right now I run industry breakout calls, and I’m planning to scale those back a bit.

Sorry, I’m kind of rambling now—but overall, if I can move this to a rolling enrollment model, I think it’ll allow me to support more women on their timeline, grow the business sustainably, and hopefully, take more of that income home—even after taxes.

 

The Best Advice Kelly Nolan Has Received

During my wedding weekend, I was still practicing law and I was so stressed out—not just because of work, but everything else going on. I remember, on the Monday of my wedding week, I called to confirm our rehearsal dinner venue, and they canceled on me. So I was already feeling overwhelmed going into the weekend.

And I think it was October 2016, so it was an election year—there was just a lot happening in general during that time.

I remember my mom sat me down and said, “How do you want to feel driving away from this wedding weekend? Really picture it—how do you want to feel?” And she told me to let that guide how I moved through the weekend. It was such simple advice, but it stuck with me.

I’ve actually used that question so many times since then—in everyday moments too. Like if we’re having a tough bedtime with the kids, I’ll pause and ask myself, “How do I want to feel when I finally get into bed tonight?” And I let that guide my response in the moment.

And I use that same mindset in business a lot, especially now. I’ll ask myself, “How do I want my life to feel—not just my business, but my whole life—a year from now? And what needs to be true for it to feel that way?”

That question has guided so many of my decisions, especially as a mom of little kids. It helps me let go of the pressure to grow fast or scale in a certain way. Yes, sometimes the business grows slower than what I could push for—but if my life overall feels the way I want it to, then it’s absolutely worth it.

That’s really been a guiding principle for me.

 

Choosing to Grow Your Business Slower As a High-Performing Woman

I think whenever people reach out to me—especially because of my audience—not everyone is familiar with entrepreneurship. They’ll say things like, “What you do looks really fun compared to what I’m doing. I’m thinking about starting a business.”

And I always try to be really honest about it, especially with what you just asked. Yes, I’m sure there are people who make more money faster than I have. But more often than not, it’s a struggle for a number of years. So I never want to mislead people about that—both in terms of how much money you’ll bring in the door and, as we talked about earlier, how much you actually keep after taxes and expenses.

Having a financial runway is so important—whether that’s savings or a partner who can help support you in those early years. That absolutely plays a role.

The way I’ve always thought about it for our family is, sure, I could have kept practicing law. But in order to make that work, we would’ve had to hire a lot more infrastructure at home—like a full-time nanny, probably an additional evening nanny too. That would’ve been the tradeoff.

 

Growing Your Business as a Primary Parent

And to be clear, I do still struggle with being the primary parent sometimes. I don’t want to sugarcoat that or say, “And then I became the primary parent and everything was magical.” It’s hard sometimes. But right now, for our family unit, we’ve chosen to value my flexibility over income growth at certain points.

Of course, I want to make more money, and my husband’s very supportive of that. But there’s no doubt that flexibility has been a huge part of what we’ve prioritized in this season of life.

And honestly, even from a healthcare standpoint—I mean, we could get into the bigger policy discussion about why healthcare is tied to employment in the U.S.—but I truly don’t think I could have left law if I hadn’t been able to get on my husband’s health insurance. That’s a huge piece of the puzzle right there.

 

The Energy Shift Behind Selling

And having financial support has also changed the way I sell. I feel like I can sell from a place of calm and confidence. My energy when I’m selling is like, “If this is a great fit for you, I’d love to have you. I believe in the value I offer.” But I’m not in that panicked, high-pressure energy that I completely empathize with—because I totally understand how that happens.

I think that’s been a huge benefit—that I can sell from a place of groundedness. So I’m really glad you asked about that, because I like to be transparent. I don’t want to mislead people into thinking it’s easy or gloss over the reality of what this path takes.

And honestly, I also hope that, in the long run, I’ll be able to support my husband too—maybe even help him retire earlier. I do worry about the physical toll of being an ER doctor. So hopefully, over time, this business can go both ways in terms of support. But right now, at this stage, that early financial support was critical.

 

Creating Financial Goals Around Your Life

It can be a lot. I’ll say—when I was leaving law in Boston, not my career entirely, but just my first firm, I had this really memorable conversation. A partner at the firm and I were going out for coffee as kind of a mentor/mentee goodbye chat. And he said something that’s always stuck with me.

He said, “You can make a really good life making a lot less money than we do here—if you plan for it.” He went on to say, “I make a lot of money here, but we’ve also made a lot of lifestyle decisions that rely on that income—the schools we send our kids to, the house we bought, all of it. And I’m happy, but in some ways I’m also trapped by it.”

And that really stuck with me. I’m not saying I’ve perfectly applied that lesson—and I recognize I carry a lot of privilege—but that conversation made me pause. Especially when I entered this industry where there’s constant messaging around six-figure and seven-figure businesses and scaling endlessly.

It’s been important for me to keep that message in my head: At what cost? Do I really need that? And if we planned differently, could we make less work?

I’m not naive—money matters. It’s a necessary part of life and our culture. But that moment was such a valuable word of warning from someone who was making a lot of money: Be intentional about how much you actually need. You don’t need to chase an arbitrary number like a seven-figure business. Figure out what you really need—and design around that.

 

More from this Episode

To hear the full story and more about Kelly, press play on the player above for the full interview or click here to download the transcript.

 

 RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Reset & Refresh : Free Time Management Workshop

The Bright Method by Kelly Nolan

Amy Porterfield : Digital Course Academy

*Asana: Shanna’s Favorite Time Management Tool

*Some links above are affiliate links which means I receive a small commission when you choose to purchase through my link. I only recommend tools I love and use myself!

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Kelly Nolan

Kelly Nolan is an attorney-turned-time management strategist and mom of two. After experiencing overwhelm as a young patent litigator in Boston, Kelly figured out a time management system that helped her show up in the ways that she wanted at work and at home – without requiring her brain to somehow magically remember it all.

She now empowers other professional working women to manage their personal, family, and career roles with less stress and more calm using her realistic time management system, the Bright Method.

The Bright Method has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, and Kelly’s work has been published in Forbes, Fast Company, Insider, and Parents. Kelly also hosts the Bright Method podcast. Most importantly, the Bright Method works for real women, helping them manage it all with more clarity, less stress, and the confidence to hold boundaries at work and at home.

CONNECT WITH KELLY:

Website | Instagram