HISMD: Clinical Project Manager at Biotech Startup

In-office. Partner (Travels for work). 2 kids - 3yo & 1 yo. Oakland, CA. 34.

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!

The Snapshot

• Profession: Clinical Project Manager at Biotech Startup

• In-office

• Partner: Yes - Travels for work

• Children: Yes - 2 kids (3yo & 1yo)

• Oakland, CA

• 34

Typical Morning:

• My work mornings look different depending on if my husband is traveling or not and if I have an early morning meeting. I work with a global team across the UK and Australia, and often try to catch the end of the UK workday juggling around daycare dropoff.

• If my husband is home, I wake up with the kids around 7-7:30. He gets both of them fed while I get ready quickly and then I'll get my 1 year old son dressed and his bag packed while he gets my 3 year old daughter dressed and packed. My kids go to two different daycares about 10 minutes apart from each other. Since my son's daycare is closer to my work, I usually drop him off on my way in to work leaving the house around 8 and getting in to work around 8:30. We recently got a cargo ebike and if I'm just taking my son I love to ride it in with him on the back. I only work about 5 miles away but with traffic it can take me 25-30 minutes to get in by car, and I can make it in the same time via ebike!

• If my husband is traveling I get up a little bit earlier and get myself ready, feed the kids, get them dressed, and out the door by 8:15 at the latest. I try not to schedule meetings until 8:30 am on those days, but occasionally an 8 am meeting is unavoidable with the UK time overlap. If that happens I will leave the house at 7:45, unload both kids & drop my daughter at 8/join call in the car/drop son at 8:10/get into the office late for the meeting at 8:20 as the most optimistic timeline.

Morning "Make Life Easier" Hacks

• We always pack lunches for myself and the kids the night before and get the bags mostly ready.

• Otherwise no hacks besides hoping my toddler wakes up on the right side of the bed and eats breakfast quickly.

• If my husband is traveling and I have a lot of early morning meetings, I will skip breakfast and they eat Eggos in the car on the way to dropoff. I feel less guilty about that because they both get breakfast as soon as they get to daycare.

Transition Into Work Mode

• Often zero transition if I have to take a meeting from the car or have an early morning. But, when my husband is home and I just have to drop off my son I can take the ebike, and I love biking in and being outside. The weather in the bay is always warm enough to bike in so we aren't limited by that.

• Because our UK team has been working during our night, I often walk into a meeting or into the office with 30-50 emails, all of which I need the context for for my first meeting of the day. I do have some AI help now to get me caught up and use Claude Cowork to make me a morning briefing, prioritize my inbox, and populate first meeting context so I can hit the ground running. It has been hugely helpful. Before AI I was having to skim all my emails right when I got up to see what urgent things I needed to prioritize.

What My Work Day Looks Like

• My work day is pretty meeting heavy Mon-Thursday. I usually have a couple back to back meetings in the morning with UK team, then a break for some work around lunch or for internal team meetings, and then I catch the Australian team at the end of my day.

• Friday being my no-meeting focus time to get stuff done. I use that day to prep all my agendas, send out meeting notes and presentation slides, do all the necessary doc review, etc which helps because during the week I have little time to get actual work done.

• I usually eat lunch in a meeting or at my desk - I don't want to take a real lunch and then have to leave later. I do have a standing desk/walking treadmill setup in the office and I love it as a way to get some walking in.

• Our office is also pretty small and meeting room limited so I also take a lot of my 1:1 meetings walking outside which is great.

• I also have a couple of work trips, including international trips, a year. These are pretty infrequent though and honestly feel like a little mini-vacation where I get dinners uninterrupted and a hotel room all to myself. It just requires extra logistics to make sure my husband doesn't have overlapping travel. We don't have family in the area, but if he has a travel conflict we often fly out my mom or his parents to watch the kids for the week.

Lunch/Snacks

• At my desk or in meetings anytime between 12-3. I usually bring my own lunch (leftovers from dinner the night before) but our office has a stocked kitchen with snacks, freezer meals, drinks, etc if I forget a lunch.

Breaks

• I take walk breaks around the block when I can to clear my head when needed, but no intentionally scheduled breaks.

Leaving Work

• If my husband is out of town, I leave right at 4:30 to pickup my son first, then my daughter right before her daycare closes at 5 pm. It is always a struggle to pick her up in time but the Bay Area daycare waitlists are crazy and its the only daycare we got into where the logistics worked out.

• If my husband is home, he picks up my daughter and I leave work ~5 to pickup my son and get home ~5:30. About 2-3 times a week I will stop working early at 4:15-4:30 and go on a short run before picking up my son. One of these is on Thursdays, where I lead a run club at work.

Transition Out of Work Mode

• I have ran and cycled for a long time, and going on a run is the easiest way for me to decompress after work and get ready for the second shift. Unfortunately, that is logistically harder but I much prefer to run after work than to get up early in the morning and do it. Depending on my schedule I try to get in weekday runs after work in 2-3 times a week Tues/Thurs/Friday. Sometimes this looks like going on a 45 minute run before leaving at 5 to pickup my son. If I have both kids to pickup because my husband is traveling, I will pack up the double jogging stroller, my running stuff, and tons of snacks the night before, pick them up, and go to a park where it is flat to run with both of them in the stroller. I obviously prefer running alone to clear my head vs juggling running and being a snack vending machine but I really try to prioritize a run or bike as something that helps me maintain my sanity.

After Work/Evening Hours

• I get home between 5:15-5:45 depending on the number of kids I have to pickup.

• We don't have a set evening schedule besides bedtime at 8.

• A lot of times if my husband is traveling I much prefer to take the kids to the park right after pickup and I will pack PB&Js or something easy for dinner. Similarly, the kids often play in the cul-de-sac with the neighbors all evening and we have a "girl dinner" style meal where everyone brings out a little something.

• The kids are always starving right when we get home, so I batch prep big meals on Sundays and we just reheat them all week for easy dinners. When I run out towards the end of the week its an easy dinner - mac n cheese, pancakes, eggs. I have accepted I just don't have the energy or time to cook meals on weekdays and try to lean into not making my evenings harder than they have to be!

• After dinner we sometimes do bath, then let the kids play and read books until bedtime at 8.

• Once they are down, I finish cleaning up the kitchen and pack lunches and take a shower.

• After is when I catch up with my husband, veg on the couch and watch TV until about 10, and then move to bed and read until I fall asleep between 10:30-11. I usually check my email during that time to see what came up during the Australian work day to address it before they are out for the day. During busy seasons at work I have more work than I can do in a workday and end up working in the last two hours before bed, but I try as much as I can not to. It is really hard for me to transition out of work mode to bed, and I end up not being able to fall asleep and not sleeping enough.

Dinner Time/Meal Tips

• Anytime between 5-6:30 depending on how hungry the kids are. My biggest tip here is that I prep large amounts of 2 or so dinners on Sundays that then we eat the rest of the week and I pack for my own lunches. By the end of the week I do tend to get sick of it, but I would rather not cook every night especially when my husband it out of town.

Evening Non-Negotiables

• I always clean up the kitchen and run the dishwasher at night before I go to bed so the mess doesn't compound throughout the week. I also pack lunches the night before.

Afternoon/Evening “Make Life Smoother” Tips

• Lower your expectations. Both of my kids are still very young and need a lot of mom time after work, especially if they didn't nap well at daycare. My husband always likes to remind me to not make it harder than it has to be - easy dinners pre-prepped, kids are happier outside in the evenings, no bath every night, etc.

• I'm pretty good about staying off my phone in the evenings and my coworkers know I am not available before 8 am or between 4:30-8 pm. I have a small internal team of 8 people and most of them are parents so everyone is in the same routine which is nice. I do occasionally get urgent evening calls from the clinical sites and if that happens I will turn on a movie for the kids and jump on my computer to work it out or join a quick meeting. I similarly block out my weekends for work.

Sharing the Load with a Partner

• My husband works from home when he isn't traveling and does a lot of the day to day weekday stuff - he does all the laundry, will make dinner if we don't have any leftovers, run errands. I do most of the house cleaning/meal prep on Saturday and Sunday while he does the weekly big Costco run. Because he is usually traveling, I take the kids when daycare is off, they are sick, or have Dr. apts. If he is home he takes them. No real tips here besides choosing a partner who shares the household management.

Things You Do For Fun/You During the Week

• Running and cycling are my fun time :) I run with people at least once a week if not more and it doubles as my social time.

• I also like to have drinks with the neighborhood moms and go get dinner with a friend at least every month.

Exercise/Body Movement

• YES - this my sanity. I run or cycle 4-5 days a week. This includes weekday runs after work usually tues/thurs/fri, and I do a long run on either Saturday or Sunday. I will also do a bonus run/cycle if I have the time and energy on the other weekend day.

• Both of the kids nap for 2-3 hours in the afternoon on the weekend, which is a huge blessing, so I usually use that time to exercise. I was a college athlete and now run a lot less than I used to, but this is the one thing I do for me time regularly. I try to be conscious about not listening to music/podcasts when I run so that my brain has some quiet time at least once that day.

• I also am very conscious that this was modeled to me by my parents, and I want to model to my kids the importance of exercise.

Outsourcing

• Not yet - I have been resisting this just because everything is so expensive in our area.

That’s a wrap for this one!

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

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. 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 3-day program.

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