HISMD: 4th Year Litigation Associate, Big Law

Partner. 1 kid (almost-2yo). Hybrid. Seattle, WA. Strong work boundary: offline 4:30-8pm everyday.

This "How I Structure My Day" series started with an Instagram post I made about my own life, which prompted a woman to ask if it would be possible to see how women working a more traditional, full-time job did it. I asked women to share, and, man, have people responded. The goal is to show how 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. structure their day. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I do!

The Snapshot

• Partner: Yes

• Children: Yes (almost-2yo)

• Hybrid: averages 3.5d/w (2.5d/w required)

• Seattle, WA

Typical Morning

• 6:30am: My alarm goes off, but usually, I wake up to or with my toddler. He hasn’t consistently started to sleep through the night yet (we don’t sleep train) and is ending up in our bed most nights right now. I would love to be someone who wakes up at least 30 min before my kid and think it would be really good for me, but I’m trying to give myself grace in a tough season of parenting and work as well. So, toddler alarm it is!

• We go into the kitchen for coffee and breakfast. I tend to bake him something like muffins on Sundays, and he has that with a protein. I am still trying to figure out a consistent breakfast for myself, so I’m all over the place.

• Around 7:15am, whoever is doing drop-off goes to get dressed and the other parent goes to get the toddler dressed.

• If I’m going to the office and dropping off, we leave between 7:45 and 8 (shoot for earlier, but toddler whims are what they are). I get to the office around 8:45.

• If I’m working from home and doing drop off, I leave around the same time and come home straight from there, logging in around 9.

• In both cases, I check my email before I leave and will make any necessary one-off follow-up calls from the car after I’ve dropped off my son (while he’s with me, we spend our time looking for trucks and buses). This lets me squeeze in a few extra billable minutes each morning.

• If I’m working from home and not dropping off, I try to log in around 8 or 8:15 to give myself time to walk the dog and tidy up later in the day.

Morning "Make Life Easier" Strategies

• We sit down Sunday evenings for “family meeting” and go through our calendars dividing up pick up and drop off, and discussing potential toddler sick day coverage in advance. We also talk meal plan, weekly highs and lows, and any ad hoc items (we keep a shared running agenda in Apple Notes) at that time.

• My wife scaled back when we had our son, so she default covers sick days, but I’ll take a break to cover a meeting she’d rather not cancel. She also travels for work more than I do, so when she’s gone I’m the full default parent (about four-five weeks a year).

• Usually I do drop off on my way to the office and my wife covers pick up, but we’re pretty flexible week to week. I block my work calendar for both pick up and drop off everyday, and then on Sundays I delete any blocks that aren’t needed.

• I have a template weekly chart that I fill out after we talk through the week: it has whether kiddo is taking lunch or eating at school (usually school lunch unless his allergy seems unavoidable), pick up, drop off, any kid schedule items, any parent schedule items, and the meal plan. I print it and keep it on the fridge.

• I always pre-pack my work bag, and right now I buy lunch at the cafeteria at the office to keep things easy.

• I also pack my son’s daycare bag the night before.

Transition into Work-Mode

• This is part of why I like going to the office (although I’m anti-in office mandate). The change of scenery helps me here. I think through my cases and tasks on the way in.

• I have a harder time on WFH days.

What my work day looks like

• As an associate and someone subject to the billable hour, a lot of my workday is out of my control. I keep a weekly to-do list in OneNote, and move things from day to day as urgent tasks come up. I track things I’m waiting on from someone else in the same document, as well as my “backburner list” - things I need to do at some point but aren’t happening this week. I try to plan my weekly work on Sundays while my son naps. My actual week rarely looks like I expected.

• I don’t block actual work (there’s too much uncertainty around how long tasks will take me) but do calendar reminders and deadlines.

• In a given day, I have 1-2 hours of meetings, 1-2 hours of email, calls, or messaging, and the rest is deep work on my cases.

• I work from 9am until 4:30ish on days when I’m in office and 4:45-5 on WFH days so I can start dinner (generally, about 80% of that time ends up being billable). Then back online around 8.

• My firm has a 2000 hour billable requirement. Technically, I’m currently on 80% but I’m tracking to full-time right now.

• My firm doesn’t true up if I land in between 80 and 100%, so I’m incentivized to try to push for it after a busy fall. We also are saving for a down payment.

• I don’t love it, but like a lot of my colleagues with kids I do pull a second shift almost every night. I wouldn’t make my full-time hours otherwise. I’ll work until 10 or 12, sometimes til 2 or 3 AM when things are very busy. I anticipate that the firm will require me to move back to full-time in the next few years (maybe a little longer if we have a second baby), so I’m also viewing this year as a test of how I can handle these hours with little kids.

• I will sometimes try to do a short workout (usually Peloton strength or barre) before I log on, but this doesn’t happen as often as I’d like. Ideally, I’d do this twice a week and do a weekend workout - right now, it happens twice in a good month.

Lunch/Snacks

• Since I have a pretty light meeting schedule, I don’t block my lunch. I eat when I’m hungry, between 11:30 and 12.

• In the office, I get a salad from our cafe.

• I am much worse about eating something filling and healthy when WFH, and tend to snack all day.

Breaks

• No, besides my 4:30-8 block each day [see next slide].

• I have a sort of mental Pomodoro timer - when I can tell I’m slowing down or spinning my wheels, I’ll grab coffee and a snack (in office) or do a house task or a short dog walk (WFH).

Later afternoon/evening hours

• I very religiously am offline and unavailable from 4:30-8pm everyday for dinner, family time, and bedtime. I block my calendar, let new partners and senior associates I am working with know about this in advance, and (most impactful for me) use iPhone’s focus mode to block all work notifications during those hours. If it’s an emergency, people know to call my cell, and I’ve only had to work through this period a handful of times since coming back to work after my six-month maternity leave. It helps that I mostly work with parents of young kids, so other people have this same schedule (although I’m more vocal about it than most).

Evening hours

• After my son is asleep, 90% work, 10% read. In defense of my evening work - I could also slot these extra hours in on the weekend, but choose not to. I find I’m a better mom, wife, and lawyer if I don’t log on Saturday and Sunday, and my best working hours have always been that 10 PM til 2 AM block, so this is preferable for me.

• I am a big reader (fiction), so once I wrap up for the night I’ll usually read for at least 15 minutes to an hour, even if it’s quite late. And yes, I know my sleep schedule isn’t healthy or sustainable right now.

Nightime Non-Negotiables

• I’m big on closing the kitchen. Usually, we have dinner, and one of us (the one with less energy) cleans up while the other plays with our son. He’s not super into helping yet, but he goes to a Montessori school and is starting to show more interest there. Once the kitchen is put to bed (dishes done, dishwasher going, counters wiped, floor swept), we’ll all play together til bath time.

• I tend not to shower in the evenings, but skincare is a must for me. I’ve started doing it while my son is in the bath, which is such a mom hack.

Afternoon/evening “make life smoother” tips

• Filtering out work notifications has been huge for me.

• We also moved dinner way up - our son was starving when he got home, so we’d do a snack, but then he didn’t want dinner (which was usually more nutritious). Now we eat dinner as a family right at 5 PM when he gets home, and then everyone has a bedtime snack later.

Sharing the load with a partner

• We loosely follow Fair Play. It didn’t totally work for us, but we did take away how helpful it is to assign the whole “area” to one person.

• We divide either according to 1) tolerance, 2) who has higher standards, or 3) strengths.

• I hate weeknight cooking, so my wife mostly handles this. Because she’s cooking, she meal plans. She also handles the dog, vet and pediatrician appointments, and any people we need to come to the house (cleaner, landscaper, etc). Our dog is a 12-year-old German Shepherd, so this task has become increasingly demanding in recent years.

• I handle cleaning because I have higher standards there and enjoy it more. We do have a house cleaner come once a month to deep clean.

• I do a Sunday reset (vacuum, laundry, bathroom wipe down, restocks) and otherwise I just do things during the week if they’re annoying me.

• She’s not great at checking personal email, so I handle communications with daycare.

• I’m also extremely Type A, so I own our calendar and general schedule, and finances. We had to set a hard rule that if someone (my wife) doesn’t add an event to the shared family calendar (Google) and it gets scheduled over as a result, the first thing on the calendar wins out. It took a couple times of her having to back out of something based on that rule, but now it’s much smoother.

• Personal appointments go to the shared Google calendar, and if they’re during the workday I invite my work email. I can see both calendars on my phone.

Outsourcing

• Yes. We rent from friends, but have a big yard, so they have landscapers come twice a year.

• We have cleaners once a month (I’d love twice a month, but it’s not in the budget).

• We have full time daycare, and our dog goes to a sitter twice a week. She doesn’t need this anymore like she did as a young dog, but he loves her and she likes the social time, so we’ll keep sending her as long as she’s happy there.

Anything extra the sharer wants to share

• I’ve always enjoyed working, so I don’t mind my current hours. I am worried about how sustainable it is, particularly with the sleep deprivation long-term. However, big law requires a lot of work but at least at my firm, no one really cares WHEN I do that work. It’s letting me be a present parent and have an interesting, well paid career right now, which I appreciate. I will likely continue to request the 80% accommodation as long as they let me.

That’s a wrap for this one!

Thank you so much to this woman for generously sharing.

A reminder of the ground rules to ensure women continue wanting to share about their days and feel safe doing so.

• 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!

New here? Welcome!

I’m Kelly Nolan, an attorney-turned-time management strategist and mom of two. I teach the Bright Method, a realistic time management system designed for professional working women. In addition to this fun new series, I share bite-sized time management strategies on Instagram. Thanks for being here!

After experiencing overwhelm as a young patent litigator in Boston, I figured out a time management system to help me show up in the ways that I wanted to at work and at home – without requiring my brain to somehow magically remember it all. I now teach other professional working women how to manage their personal, family, and career roles with less stress and more calm clarity using realistic time management strategies. My system, the Bright Method, has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, and my work has been published in Forbes, Fast Company, Business Insider, and more. Learn more on my website, come learn bite-sized strategies with me on Instagram, or jump into my free 5-day program.

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