This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 119 / Time Management with Kelly Nolan

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, time management is crap. Time is fixed and neutral, we all have the same 60 minutes in an hour, the same 24 hours in a day, the same 7 days in a week. Unless someone has figured out how to manipulate time, then time cannot be managed. So if it’s not time management, then why do some people seem to accomplish so much more? I’d suggest that it’s because those people have figured out the art of CHOICE management. They understand that their big differentiator is the choice they make with the time that they have. On this episode I’ve asked Kelly Nolan - attorney-turned-time management strategist, to join us to share some of her tips for making choices with less stress and more calm. Her system, the Bright Method, has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, and her work has been published in Forbes, Parents, and Fast Company. To learn more about Kelly you can visit www.kellynolan.com. You can access her free mini-course by going to: www.kellynolan.com/reset-refresh. You can follow her on IG @_kellynolan_ To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com. And if you haven’t already, please review our podcast here!

here's a quick glimpse into today's incredible episode. Can you listen to a fun podcast like this one while you're folding laundry and cleaning the house and things like that? So the things that we can't fully eliminate from our lives, how do you make them fun? I am Nicole Khalil and I've said it before and I'll say it again, time management is crap. At the very least, it's a misnomer because it's not at all time that any of us are managing. Time is fixed and neutral. We all have the same amount of it, the same 60 minutes in an hour, the same 24 hours in a day, the same seven days in a week. Unless someone has figured out how to manipulate time or the time turner Hermione Granger uses actually exists, then time cannot be managed. So if it's not time management, then why do some

people accomplish more, do more, have seemingly more time and capacity, or somehow manage to make it through their day without feeling like their hair is on fire. I'd suggest that it's because some people have figured out the art of choice management. They understand that the big differentiator is the choices they make with the time that they have. And in full disclosure, there are periods in my life where I am great at this. So great that I actually travel around the country and train on this topic. And there are times where I suck at this and feel like I'm just barely making it. And if just one of the balls I have in the air drops, the whole thing will come crashing down. And there are times where I'm somewhere in between.

All that to say this, this is a topic that I think we can all revisit from time to time. So on this episode of This Is Woman's Work, we're gonna do just that. I've asked Kelly Nolan, attorney turned time management strategist, to join us to share some of those tips

for making choices with less stress and more calm. Her system, the Bright Method, has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, Parents, and Fast Company, just to name a few. Kelly, thanks so much for carving out the time and making the choice to be here today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really, really excited to be here and such a fan. Oh, my pleasure. This topic, I think we could probably do once a quarter and it still wouldn't be enough. So I want to start with this first question that I have a little bit of an answer to, but I'm curious from your perspective, does anyone really have this figured out? Is anyone living with their life perfectly prioritized or are most of us feeling stretched thin at least in times or periods of our lives?

I think it's definitely the latter in the sense that time management, it's one of those things that you can create a wonderful system that works really well for you that really moves the needle in a significant way. But time has a funny thing of like, you know, life has a funny thing of giving us more meetings, more new things. They keep coming up, you know, curve balls that hit us and even good things like different life phases have different demands. And so we're continually learning how to manage the different demands on our times and the competing rules for our times. But I do believe that if you have a system and a framework you can leverage to manage your time in those systems and

your activities, then you can optimize your ability to feel less stress and more clarity through the process as best as possible. I couldn't agree more. It kind of makes me think, I don't know if you've heard this before, somebody explained it like a duck. On top of the water, it looks like everything's easy and they're just sort of gliding and smooth, but underneath the water, their little legs are pedaling like crazy. And that's kind of how I think sometimes life looks from the outside looking in. So we look at people or women who seemingly have it all together and it's really more like a doc than it is that they actually have it all together. It's all smooth sailing, right? Yeah, completely. I think you really nailed it. It's something I really relate to. I created the system out of feeling overwhelmed myself. I'd been

pretty organized through law school, became an actual practicing attorney and just super overwhelmed. But as you said, on the outside, I looked like I had it together. It was just how I felt on the inside. I was like, I'm stretched way too thin. I'm constantly anxious. I'm going to drop a ball. I'm like going out to drinks with friends and trying to look at them and listen to their stories. And like, I'm constantly thinking of all these like thoughts that are snagging my attention and my brain's over there while I'm looking at them and nodding here. And exactly as you're saying, it's a feeling that I felt very weird about and felt very alone in, but the more and more I work with women, that's how a lot of women feel. Like no one would know I feel this way, but I feel incredibly stretched too thin and I don't like it. Yeah. Okay. So like so many of us, you've turned your pain or frustration or what wasn't working and created something incredible out of it. I know you talk about making activities and choices visible. What does that mean? Like, how does that help? Yeah. Well, so I think to start with, you kind of have to think about what we are doing in the alternative or like before you use a system like this.

So I would just ask anyone listening to take kind of an inventory of where are, where are you keeping track of all the things? Do you put everything in your calendar? Do you also have to-do lists, post-it notes, to-do apps, project management apps, your email inbox? On the personal front, I guarantee a ton of it lives in your head, like how you're going to manage bath time with dinner and that activity and when you're driving and all that kind of stuff. And when we realize, oh man, I'm keeping

track of all these action items in so many different places, I don't have a clear view of everything on my plate. I know I'm overwhelmed, but I'm not totally sure exactly by what, because I don't have one place I can look at to see it all. So I definitely cannot understand how I'm going to get it all done. What I like to do is say, okay, let's make it visual in a tool that's designed to manage time. Unfortunately, it's usually a tool everybody's using already, a digital calendar. And we leverage it with some tech strategies to make this not incredibly overwhelming, but just bear with me of really getting clear on, let's just make it all visual, get it out of our brain. You know, when are you going to get ready in the morning and

shower? If you have a dog, when are you going to walk the dog? If you do have little kids, when are you doing bath time? If you have older kids, when are you doing homework? When are you making dinner? What are you, you know, all the things that we do, including those invisible to-dos that never make it into a calendar, typically never make it on a to-do list, but take up hours of our day. Like, let's just get it out of our head and see how it all plays. And when we can see that next to our work projects and the one-off tasks we need to

do in our personal life and things like that, then we can start seeing with more objective clarity. What is our capacity? What is our current workload? Am I happy with all of this? Like where my time is going? And you can make some adjustments in a lot of different ways that we can talk about, but from delegating to eliminating to say no and things like that. Okay. So making it visible is basically taking all. And when you were saying, maybe you have this, I think most of us are like, yeah, I have all of that. Right. Plus I'm so glad you made the point of how much of it lives in our head. I've heard that, you know, called the mental load. And I don't know a woman who doesn't walk around with a mental load. So when you say making it

visible, you're basically saying, put it all on your calendar. Is this more, at least initially to see what is happening? And then it becomes a place where you make choices out of. Explain to me. So if somebody is listening, they're like, okay, I need to do that. Walk us through maybe a couple steps and how to, so it doesn't just become another thing to do. Yeah. So what I encourage you to do is start with that invisible to-do list, typically on the personal front. That's a good starting place is if you really think of your morning and your

evenings, that's typically where we're really managing a lot of this in our head. The point of it is to get it visually out of your head again, to reduce that mental load, but then also evaluate and be like, it's kind of like cleaning out a closet. It's going to get messy before it feels good. But looking at it, you might be like, now I get why I've been feeling overwhelmed and why we've been running behind every morning because I'm trying to do all of these things. And just to be really clear, what I mean is calendaring each of the tasks you're trying to do in the morning, like shower and getting ready, make breakfast, pack up backpacks, that kind of stuff.

Just so you're clear on how much time does that roughly take and do all of these things actually fit in the amount of time that I've been given. Now, just to be clear also, I know curveballs hit. You need to be flexible with this, but we need our baseline to actually work before the curveballs hit. I think sometimes even the baseline's not in good shape. So even on the days where there aren't any curveballs, things aren't going well. And this can help you evaluate, huh, okay. And now I can evaluate and make some decisions on, okay, if I could have my partner do this specific thing and take that off my plate, that will ease up this whole morning.

And so you can kind of start making these decisions on, is this working? If it's not, do I eliminate? Do I get somebody else to do this? Do I outsource and things like that? So that's kind of a good starting place and I can keep going, but I don't want to just keep monologuing at you. No, that's great. And it actually leads really nicely into my next question, because you talked about making the choice of what you want to do with it. If we're going to get really good at this skill of what is traditionally called time management, I call choice management, it's going to involve saying yes to some things, but saying no to a lot of things, no to things that we might be defaulting to yes, or not even making the conscious decision. So any tips on how to say no? And also when we say no, what does that mean? So like, no, I'm not the right person to do it. I should leverage it.

So I'll give a personal example. Jay and I just did our family planning retreat and I identified a few things that were really wearing on me. They're small things with really big personal impact doing the laundry. Like at some point in time, the five loads of laundry a week that I do is just, it wears on me more than it should opening Amazon boxes. It drives me batty. I have to do it right away. And it's disruptive, uh, doing a light cleaning, things like that. So I became clear and paying attention that this, if, if I can create it, this will be a no for me, but how do I do it? And what are my options? Because I mean, the laundry still needs to get done, whether I like it or not. Right. So Kelly, that was a

long-winded question, but I'm curious your thoughts. Yeah, no, I think it's great. It's great stuff because so often we don't think about these little things and we definitely don't talk about them publicly. And I think that it's struggles that all these, everyone has, um, how you say no to things and then what you do about it differs obviously in your personal life and then at work. So we can talk also about like drawing boundaries at work and dealing with the workload, but putting that aside for the moment on the personal front, I have found, I've been surprised by how much, how many clients have wins of using the system to actually improve their relationship with their partner. Because oftentimes, and you're already ahead of this and that you're able to identify the specific things you aren't enjoying. But some people are like, I don't know, I just need help. And by using, getting clear, whether it's through a planning retreat like you do. And so, you know, first is eliminating.

Obviously that's not on the table right now for laundry, but can you outsource? You know, some people do that, whether they take it to a place to have laundry or hire someone to come in. I actually know of one woman who has hired, this is like next level. So I'm not saying everybody should do this, but has hired instead of once a week or once every other week cleaning service to come in, she's hired a woman to come in every morning and help with the basic steps of cleaning up the kitchen, flipping the laundry, folding clothes, making the beds, that kind of stuff. So you can get creative and, you know, within your means of what you're able to do financially, but also what might work for you as a family, but then also tapping your home teammates.

You know, oftentimes we kind of set up, okay, we ended up doing all the laundry back when there were just two of us, but the more you have kids, the more things this stuff multiplies, like, is that really working anymore? Maybe you handle the laundry, but somebody else can handle the folding while they, you know, watch their favorite TV show. If you are, just for those who don't have partners, one thing I like to throw out there is for the things you have to do, like, can you make them more fun? Can you listen to a fun podcast like this one while you're folding laundry and cleaning the house and things like that? So the things that we can't fully eliminate from our lives,

how do you make them fun? How do you corral them so that you're doing them all together at one time when it's fun and not doing it all the time? I liked your point on the Amazon packages of fragmenting throughout the day. Like, could you just, is there a way to corral the things you're not enjoying? And maybe there's not in this scenario, but if there are ways that you can corral it and then make that more enjoyable throughout, that can be a really great solution as well. So I love all of those suggestions. The one I love the most, because I tend to lean more serious in nature is just making some of these things a little bit more fun or a little bit more fulfilling or a little bit more productive. I don't like laundry because it's not fun. It's not fulfilling. It's not productive. Well, I mean, I guess it's productive

in that I need to wear clothes, but I don't like, I, it doesn't fill me up in that way. But as simple as thinking about how could I play a great playlist and dance while I'm doing laundry, that would make it certainly more fun. Or as you suggested, listen to a podcast or an audio book. I find sometimes the smallest things have the biggest impact and that is a really good suggestion. Okay. So when we talk about choice management, I believe, and I know you do too, that self-awareness is a huge component of making the best right choices. Also being really clear on what's important to you. What are your priorities? What are your goals? And also what's not important or what kind of falls in between so that we don't fall back on tendencies like just work harder, or there's something wrong with me because I can't handle all this or God, I got to buck up and just, you know, take on more.

So where does in your mind, self-awareness and getting clear on what's really important, where does this fall? Like in what order, how important is it? Not important. What are your thoughts there? No, I think it's critical because as you said, it is about choice management. You know, you have limited time. You cannot do it all. So how do you decide what you want to do? And to get there, you really have to know what's important to you. That said, I'll just throw it out there that if you struggle with knowing this, don't feel bad about that. So many of us have been running flat out for so long that we've kind of forgotten who we are and what we enjoy as individuals and what we want. And so don't feel bad about it, but also

protect time to have those moments. I know Nicole believes in this too, but in my variation of this is like protecting three or four or more hours every six months, every 12 months. If you wanted to do this for the first time right now, pull out a calendar, protect some time for your first time right now. And this can look at whatever, protect some time for your first time right now. And this can look at whatever, it can look like whatever you want it to. For me, what I find the most compelling, and you could do exercises like Nicole has on like, who am I? What do I know to be true about myself? And then also, what do I want my life to feel like in a year? I really like the word feeling in this. I'm a very type A linear person. So just throwing that out there. But when it comes to what do I want my life to feel like in a year, that's so much

more powerful than look like. Because when we say, how do I want my life to look like, we get consumed and sucked into what society tells us will make us happy versus like, what do you want? How do you want life to feel? And then how do you back that out into reality? And then what I would love for you to do is to just pick one or two of those things that you think of and start protecting time for it in your calendar going forward. So just to give an example, we were living in California, the dream place in San Diego, sunny of everything, sunny in what society says should make you happy. And I really wanted to be home in Minnesota. And I realized that I love rivers. They like weirdly ground me. And if I go sit by a river and journal for a while, I'm not a big journaler, but when I do these exercises,

I do it. I really kept coming back to, I want to be home. I want to be near my parents. I want to raise my kids near my parents. Life will feel easier there. And so what I did is I just started blocking time to start building that reality. I started blocking time to do things like help my husband get his medical license in Minnesota, to researching neighborhoods, to just kind of figuring out what are all the little pieces to make this a reality. And that's a big example. That's a big move, but you can imagine the little things as well that you want to work towards. I really want you to put it in your calendar, partly so you bring it to life, but also so you are realistic about what you're trying to do. I think, you know, going into the new year, everybody's like, you know, wants to set five huge goals. When you actually back those out and plot time for them in your calendar next to

everything else that we've been talking about, you just start seeing like what's realistic and what's not. And we want to set you up for a realistic goal so you can accomplish it versus beating yourself up for, you know, failing at something you feel like you're failing at yet again. Yeah. I'm so glad you made the distinction between what does it look like versus what do you want it to feel like? My coach asks the questions, what do you want? And then what is the experience you're looking for? And it's such a good question because when we think about what we want or what do we want it to look like, we get into the things, right? When you ask about the feeling or the experience you're looking for, I think it takes to a deeper level of what it is that really matters to you and how you want to be operating and living and

feeling through that life. So, okay. I have this theory that the most successful people do less, and I'm going to be upfront that most of the examples of this theory are men, because I do know a lot of successful women, but I think we are all struggling with sort of, you know, adding role on top of role and thing on top of thing. And so I find when I talk to men, you know, they don't have the same mental load. They don't have the same household pressures or family time. That's not universally true, but generally speaking. And because of that, they seem to carve out time for thinking or strategizing or golfing or taking care of themselves or going to a game

or meeting up with friends and blah, blah, blah. So how do we, A, do you agree that part of success is doing less and any tips or thoughts about ways we can think about this differently and then also put it into practice? Yeah. So I'm kind of laughing because so that kind of thinking time I was giving you an example of, in reality, it became like three to four hours roughly, but it was, it got my wheels turning because Cal Newport's book talks about all of these male leaders taking like a week in the woods to do all these things. I'm like, what woman, particularly what mom can do this? Like, this is crazy. But,

you know, trying to get the core of the purpose is really important. I agree. I think that if anything, if you desire having this strategy time at work or in your personal life, first of all, you need to protect it. And so that's, you know, that sounds basic enough to put it in your calendar to have it consistently. Because at least in my world, it's never going to just happen. Like I need to intentionally plan it. That said, I think that, I mean, it drives me bonkers when everyone's like, just schedule self-care or things like that. Like if it were that easy, like we wouldn't have a problem with this. So just throwing that out there that I fully recognize that. tasks, your time, your activity, are that you start plotting out game plans of how you're going to get things done over time. And so you can say even little things like, okay, I need to call the pediatrician to set

up this appointment. Realistically, I'm looking at my week, not going to happen this week. It's totally fine. It'll happen next week. And you start punting things out into the future. That is so much more freeing than having, by the way, that thing stare at you for two weeks from a to-do list, stressing you out every time you look at your to-do list. You just let it go. Your system will tell you when you need to do it, when it's time. You do that

on a broad scale with all your work projects, all your personal things, things like that. You start to trust that you have a system that will help you do the things when you need to do them and you can let them go until then. So your mental load, the worry, the anxiety type stuff really reduces in your brain. And that gives you the ability to actually do the thinking time when it rolls around because you're not feeling pulled in so many different directions by all the other things. You're like, nope, those things have a home in my calendar. They're in the future. They will happen. And by the way, I'm a huge fan of building in wiggle room and curveball time too, because I totally get curveballs are going to happen. So we want to account for that as well. You don't want to like pack up your whole next week, living in denial of that,

those curveballs that are unpredictable, but also predictable in that they're coming. But going back to this, when you can rest easy in my system accounts for everything I need to do, and it can happen over time, and it does not need to happen right now. Then when things like thinking time or reading a book or things like that roll around in your calendar, you can rest into that and actually do it without all the mental whirls going around. So even if you might only get half an hour or an hour a week compared to, let's say, you know, that person that the male counterpart that gets much more time, at least you're able to really grasp onto that and run with it and make the most of it when that time comes around.

Yeah. And I said at the beginning of our time together, there are times that I'm better at this and times that I'm not so good, but generally speaking, I have about six hours during the normal work week set aside. It's labeled on my calendar to do time. And that's where, when I need to set the dentist appointment, or I need to call this person back, or I need to fill out this form, I just pull up an upcoming to do time block and write it in there. Because I think you're right. Getting it out of our mind so it's not constantly like, oh God, I got to do this. What am I going to do?

It's really helpful. And then when I arrive to that block in my calendar, I pull it up and it's a laundry list of stuff and almost never get done all of those things. But I look at it and go, what are the priorities? And then I do as much as I can and then cut and paste whatever didn't get done and drop it into another to-do time block. Also, I have two hours a week of, it just says buffer. This is the shit happens, life happens, my hair is on fire, fuck it all, you know, moment where I'm just like, I got to do something. Right. So it's not always wonderful, but when I follow this, it gives me so much more breathing room.

And I would submit to you, I am so much better for all the other things that follow my calendar and for my relationships and for when, you know, day is done and all of that. I know we're getting close to time, but Kelly, I wanted to ask you before we end today, you mentioned something to the effect of, I put it in the, in the category of like being able to back out of commitments. If we're doing our calendar and we begin to realize we've said yes to too many things, there's too much on our plates. No normal human can handle all of this. How do we take steps back? How do we take things off of our calendar? I know it may sound oversimplistic, but I think a lot of us have a hard time. We just do what our calendar says as opposed to thinking, oh, I can take things off.

Well, again, it varies by social or work. I'll talk a bit more about work since we haven't dug into that as much. But one of the big things in our workplaces, especially in the more traditional, like corporate, legal, our backgrounds, environment, are there are a lot of meetings and there are a lot of standing meetings that have been on there forever. And so I encourage clients like once a quarter, evaluate those standing meetings and

just say like, am I adding value anymore? Am I getting value out of this anymore? And if you're not, get out of it. You know, broach eliminating it. I think that probably other people in that meeting also feel the way you do. And you might just, something might've been valuable for a while. It isn't any longer. Get it, get it off the calendar, but I bet more people will thank you than you realize. So that can be huge. People can reclaim a lot of hours and eliminating those standing meetings. But for other things like the one-off things, things like that, I do encourage, so I encourage a weekly planning session, and this is bigger than we want. I think that planning just takes more time than we want to acknowledge. But every single week, I would look ahead at the next big things on your calendar for the next month or two. When you can issue spot those things that

you're like, I don't really want to do this anymore, or this is not going to happen, and I need to push out this deadline. The more space between now and then that you have, the more you can handle it in a gracious professional way of saying, I'm not able to attend this workshop anymore. I'm not able to attend this party anymore. I'm so sorry. I don't think you need to go into full explanation mode or like, I'm just too busy. I don't want to do this anymore. But I think you can say, I'm so sorry. This is such a great opportunity. I'm no longer able to make this work for my schedule. I wish you all the best. And please let me know when you do something like this again. You know, on the work front, that can be phrased differently and we can talk about that, but just really knowing you have the permission to do that,

just do it in a respectful way and look ahead, right? You know, you could calendar time right now to do this. If you want, look ahead at the next three months and really get clear on what do I want my weekends to look like? And am I overcommitted on the weekends? You know, is, are these deadlines really going to work with the holidays coming up? And, or can I push some of these deadlines out now? And again, more people are probably, especially if you're pushing out a deadline that other people are working towards, they're probably other people who feel that pressure with the

holidays and things like that coming up. You might as well ask for it. And again, you can be gracious about it, but just know you can ask and more likely more often than not, it really, people will meet you where you need to go. Yeah. I will say anecdotally, I have rescheduled or canceled on more people in the last two months than I have ever in the culmination of all of the years of my life. Like, I don't even know how to say how much I've done this and not a single person has been upset, or at least that they let me know. Everybody I wanted or needed to reschedule with has been rescheduled. Everybody I didn't offer to reschedule with or whatever, it's like, we have a let's touch base next year. Like,

yeah, I just was, I've, I'd made this such a big thing in my head. Oh, I'll disappoint people. I'll people will be angry. They won't want to work with me. I'll lose the opportunity, whatever the case may be. It just has not been my experience, which it's like anything, the more you do it, it's the scariest is the first time. And then once you start doing it, you're like, oh, this is pretty great. You just gotta keep doing it. So I couldn't agree with you more. And think about, I mean, we all have that where someone cancels a meeting two hours before and you're like, oh, thank goodness.

Like I needed that time. Now I can do all these other things. People, there are pros and cons to this, but a lot of people will appreciate it. So don't be too scared to do it. Much better than also showing up at a meeting that neither of you really need to be at. Yeah. I had somebody cancel on me and they felt awful about it. And I was like, oh, thank God. Like I literally told them, I am so grateful. I can't even begin to tell you. And like, obviously that made them feel better, but I genuinely meant it. Sometimes it's good news,

especially for those of us women who are working like crazy people. Okay. So Kelly, I sure, I know I have a million more questions. I'm sure people listening do, because this is one of those things that falls into the category of easier said than done. I think completely, completely. I know you have a mini course that you're offering for free, which will put all the information in show notes, but can you tell us quickly about that? So people can get a sense of what they're going to get, what they're looking at. Yeah, sure thing. So really what it is, is it's a taste of the bright method. So you can kind of understand whether this might work for you. I'm a firm believer

that time management is incredibly personal. I don't think that everyone should be managing their time using my method. It's just a method that worked for me as a practicing attorney and now works for other professional working women. But what it is, it's a five-day mini course for free that you kind of work through each of the main pillars of the Bright Method and get a taste of it. And some people take it and can run with it. They can take it and run and other people are like, yep, I want to really have the accountability and the deep dive into this. And so we can talk about working with me further, but it's just a really nice way to get a taste of what I teach.

Also my teaching style and all that kind of stuff, if you're interested and really fun. Awesome. So if you want to find Kelly, go to her website, kellynolan.com. The free mini course that she just mentioned is kellynolan.com forward slash reset refresh. We're going to put this in show notes so you can just click on it. And of course, if you want to just follow Kelly and get some tips along the way, go to Instagram at underscore Kelly Nolan underscore. Again, we'll put it in show notes. I can talk today. Kelly, thank you so much for being here and talking about this ongoing universally important topic. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. I really

appreciate it. My pleasure. All right. I have a long history of being results and achievement oriented from being a doer, a problem solver, and a perfectionist. I've said yes when I meant maybe, or not now, or even a flat no. I take on more than I should carry. My mental load has been heavy, and I push, control, drive, force, and muscle my way through things. And it's worked for me. I've hit goals. I've made money. I've created success. I've had results. I've checked some boxes. I've also burnt out, felt anxious, disconnected from my people and what really matters. I've been exhausted and I've felt like it was never good enough. I believe the next step on my journey is to live with more ease and flow, to allow instead of force. And while that's the experience I'm looking to create,

make no mistake, it will involve tactics. It will involve being crystal clear on what really matters to me. And it will involve many, many choices, which will mean an abundance of having to say no, of saying that's not meant for me. I'm not meant for that. Not now or not ever. Thank you, but no thank you. Good thing though, because that's what it means to be doing woman's work.