Make Space to Thrive

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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Living mentally scattered can leave you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. You spin your wheels, tackling whatever is in front of you at any given moment, and then feel discouraged that you don’t make progress on the things that matter most to you.

In this episode, we talk about why you need a hub for your brain, a tool that can help you sort, prioritize and tackle all the ideas, plans and goals you have banging around in your head. We talk about why we created the Evergreen planner, and how each of our core products (the Annual, the Classic and the Cover) was crafted to infuse more peace into your day.

Read the full episode blog post here.

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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Effective yet flexible rhythms are one of the key building blocks in a sustainable and intentional lifestyle. But trying to copy a guru’s routine, whether for work or home life, quickly becomes overwhelming. There are dozens of “best practices” out there, so where do you start? How do you decide what you need in your personal rhythms?

In this episode, we walk through how to build a morning and evening rhythm that is uniquely crafted to your life! We talk about what our rhythms look like these days, and how we keep them flexible, but effective. We even discuss how rhythms can adjust and change in different seasons, such as when dealing with chronic illness or a postpartum season.

If you’re craving some order in your life, but don’t know where to start, this is the episode for you!

Read the full episode blog post here.

Other podcast episodes we mention:

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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If you’re in an overwhelming season, it can be really hard to know where to even begin. Friend, you are not alone. We know those seasons well. This episode is full of practical advice and encouragement to help you get out of survival mode.

We talk about how to navigate crazy seasons to begin to regain a sense of normalcy and get back to life-giving rhythms. We discuss focusing on what you can control and making progress (whether little or big) every day. We give six simple steps for beginning to take control of the crazy. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky ideas, these are the real steps we have each taken to bring more peace to the chaotic seasons we’ve been through.

6 Tips to Get Out of the Crazy:

Note: The Taming Your To-Do List Guide mentioned in the podcast has been reworked as part of Renew! This six-week course will teach you the Evergreen Planning Method from the ground up and help you find the time you need to do everything God calls you to do.

Read the full episode blog post here.

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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Are to-do lists your go-to when you know you have A LOT to do? We can relate. But the truth is that to-do lists are not a time management strategy, and they can actually hinder your productivity. When you rely too heavily on to-do lists, you end up overwhelmed, executing tasks haphazardly and not feeling like you ever make progress on the things that are most important to you.

In this episode we talk about how to use to-do lists effectively, and how to take a massive to-do list and distill, prune, and prioritize it to the most essential tasks that will fuel your productivity and leave you feeling like a task-crusher. We discuss the power of choosing top-targets for each day and how this practice of daily prioritization can help you make consistent progress on your biggest goals.

(The offer in this episode has ended, but you can still purchase Taming Your Todo List in our shop!)

Read the full episode blog post here.

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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It can be difficult to know where to start when trying to create a personalized time management strategy or learn how to maximize your planner, and it is overwhelming to try and do that while not losing track of everything already on your to-do list. If that tension sounds familiar to you, this episode for you!

In this episode we give you our Quickstart Your Planning Guide based on the acronym PLANS. This process will enable you to simply and effectively begin forming your own personalized time-management strategy, while still executing all those day-to-day responsibilities you can’t let slide while you figure out how to maximize the use of your planner.

Download the Quickstart Your Planning Guide here.

PLANS stands for:

Pencil in what you did.

Leverage the brain dump.

Access your working memory.

Nurture a flexible mindset.

Sharpen your time-management skillset.

The process represented by this acronym is one you can return to again and again in different seasons to help you begin to form a time management strategy that is personalized, simplified, and increasingly intuitive.

Read the full episode blog post here.

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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In this episode, we give you a tour of the Evergreen Planner System.

There are so many planners out there—so did we decide to create another one? What makes our planner different?

We created this system because we couldn’t find a planner that felt intuitive—that brought all the different areas of our lives together. We didn’t want a planner for mom life, and another for our business, and a notebook for our hobbies, and something else for homeschooling. We wanted one tool.

So we created a planner that is minimalistic, intuitive, and extremely versatile. Instead of asking you to change the way you organize your thoughts, this planner was made to change and flex with your evolving needs.

When Shelby tucked her homemade worksheets under her arm on her way to her sister’s house one spring morning, she never would’ve believed that their lives were about to change forever. What she imagined would be a quick, casual chat about these personal-development exercises she’d created for herself actually turned into a flurry of innovation.

McCauley had been feeling pretty overwhelmed with her own attempts at getting organized. Her ideas and tasks were scattered between a cheap planner, two different calendars, and a few random notebooks.

What if the countless hours Shelby had been pouring into time-management research were combined with McCauley’s knack for designing aesthetic products that actually worked the way they were advertised?

The two entrepreneurial sisters went to work at the kitchen table—babies swaddled and strapped on—cutting and pasting together a dream planner. Instead of tweaking the hundreds of existing planners, they threw all convention out the window and started over.

The Evergreen Planner was developed to answer to these industry-disrupting questions:

Shelby and McCauley stopped at nothing to design a system that would effectively answer these questions. Even when it was suggested to them that their booklet designs would be too expensive to even manufacture, they pressed on, knowing that our groundbreaking dutch door layout would be key to planning with real life context.

Before it was even brought to market, this planner underwent a lot of rigorous field-testing. Every bit of feedback our beta testers gave us went into the refinement of this planner through six major prototypes.

The result is our wildly effective three-part system:

The Annual is the doorway to the system. This 12-month calendar booklet provides a birds-eye view of your year with the powerful addition of plenty of flex space to map goals and plan your year. Each month spread is followed by three blank bullet grid pages. Learn more here.

The Classic is the muscle of the system. It’s an undated 5-week planner booklet with weekly and daily spreads. This is the only planner booklet you’ll find on the market with a dutch door layout that allows you to see your day and your week’s agenda simultaneously. Each week spread has a vertical calendar to write dates, habit trackers, and plenty of customizable flex space to write lists, map week goals or brain-dump ideas. Each day spread has a  time blocking section, correlating to-do list, micro-journaling prompts, and plenty of flex bullet space. These booklets come subscription box style every quarter—or in a year bundle—so you never run out of planner. Learn more here.

The Cover is the glue that binds the whole system together into one unit. Handcrafted locally in genuine leather and designed in a traveler’s journal style, it protects your planner booklets with class. It has six pockets in varying sizes to carry loose papers and lists, extra spine elastics for additional booklets, and two elastic loops to hold pens or washi tape. It’s enduring, and incredibly stunning. It is a piece you will use and treasure for years. Learn more here.

This planner has become an integral part of our intentional lifestyles. It helps us bring our goals into context with the realities of our lives, and translate our long-term intentions into daily choices.

We dive more into this in today's episode, and share the impact that this innovative system has had on each of our lives. We also invite you to imagine how it might change the game for you.

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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Planning while postpartum? At first glance it sounds over-the-top, almost an oxymoron. In the past we've even written about how the postpartum season can be an excellent time to take a break from your planner. So why did we choose to do an entire podcast episode on planning while postpartum?

You have to remember that when we say "planning", we are talking about self-compassionate planning. And perhaps there is not a better time to practice self-compassion than when you are in a season of recovery like the postpartum season. When we say planning while postpartum, we aren't talking about planning our biggest goals, or mapping our business' trajectory for the next year; we are talking about the simple, but extremely useful, form of day-to-day planning that helps us get out of our heads, sort our priorities, and let the non-essentials fall away.

Postpartum should be a season of rest. One where we focus on healing and soaking in those newborn days that pass so quickly. It should be a season where family and friends rally around to bring meals, help with other children, and take over housework. And even when this ideal can't happen, we can still choose how we will approach our season of recovery. We can choose to set expectations for ourselves a little lower so we are able to focus on what matters most.

But it's incredibly hard to rest when you have a smattering of to-do's rattling around in your brain. It's hard to know what's essential and what can be left for another day (or dropped completely), when you're foggy from sleep deprivation. It's hard to track how well you're healing physically, mentally and emotionally, if you try to do it all in your head.

And that's where a planner begins to make a lot of sense.

In this episode, we talk about the unique ways we (Clari & McCauley both had babies this past spring, so navigating the postpartum season is fresh!) and other mamas have used the planner while postpartum.

If you're pregnant or in the postpartum season, give it a listen. We believe you'll find it both encouraging, and also inspiring as you navigate the postpartum time. And if you have any friends who are in that season, we'd love it if you'd share it with them!

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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Every Monday is a fresh start.

You have an entire week before you, a clean slate, and it can seem like the possibilities for productivity are endless!

But then you move through each day and it can be easy to slip back into dealing with whatever seems most necessary in each moment, and you find you’re only taking care of the small details, rather than making progress in the most significant areas.

Or maybe you make significant progress on your big goals, but meal planning and laundry is falling off your radar. How do you balance it all? How do you create week rhythms that serve your long term goals, your weekly work needs, and your family?

In this episode, you’ll get a peek into how we (as business owners running a growing company with nine kids under the age of six between us!) plan our weeks. You’ll get to hear how we each approach week planning, and get ideas you can apply in your own unique way. As we say in this episode, we are all about flexible planning that is individual for each person.

Our spreads aren't always beautiful, and they aren't always full to the max, but they are always utilized for exactly what we need each week.

That is the beauty of a flexible planning system; it serves you each season you are in, exactly how you need it to.

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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If you've been following us for long, you are familiar with our favorite hashtag: #makespacetothrive. In a world full of hashtags, this may seem like nothing more than a snippet of motivation, a pithy phrase, or something fun to add on on top of photos. But for us, #makespacetothrive is a reminder of a key practice that moves us from overwhelm—to intentional living. It's become such a core phrase, that when we were brainstorming names for our podcast, it easily made its way to the top of our list.

Back in 2016, Shelby was living in a non-stop, head-down, shoulder-to-the-grindstone hustle. She and her husband supported their tiny family with a home business and were always behind on deadlines. Every moment taken to just sit down and breathe—even just to eat dinner together without multitasking work—invited a crushing air of guilt into the atmosphere.

But there seemed to be no way to simply hustle more. After brain-dumping a giant todo list that took up seven sheets of paper, Shelby realized she was going to have to upgrade her productivity strategy, or she and her husband would never get ahead of the train.

In her typical style, Shelby turned to Google to help her figure it out. Her husband gave her a couple of books he thought were relevant. They scheduled a meeting with a business mentor. Something, anything had to give. But every tip and tool she found seemed to yield a mere 1% improvement to their current situation. It just wasn't enough to move the needle.

But then she found it. The missing piece. Shelby will tell you that learning this strategy radically altered how she approached her life in that season, and continues to be a practice she benefits from today. This is the element that has proved over and over again to be THE #1 strategy to consistent achievement and success in her life, and it's one she's found so many people completely miss.

And what was this missing ingredient? MARGIN.

Margin is planned white-space for your day, your week, your home, your brain—space to breathe in #allthethings.

In other words, margin gives you SPACE to thrive.

Margin looks like many simple things in our lives:

Margin transforms your schedule from a never-ending endurance race to a strategic agenda filled with life-giving rest periods. Margin helps you focus on what's essential, and then protects your intention, so that you can truly show up in the things that matter most. Margin allows you time to process stuff instead of letting it build up and eat away at your mental bandwidth. With a lightened schedule, opportunities to be flexible, and a decluttered mind, margin exponentially reduces your stress—which in turn empowers you to be more creative, make more thoughtful decisions, and tackle complex problems with confidence and energy.

If you've been living a life based on hustling as much as you can from when you wake in the morning to when you crash at night, planning margin into your life will feel like a breath of fresh air. Slowing down is one of the easiest ways you can move yourself from a place of overwhelm, to a place of peace. When you begin by ensuring you're well rested, well nourished (physically + otherwise), and you've distilled your commitments to the things that matter most, you are able to show up for the people and responsibilities in your life with zeal. You will bring a life-filled energy that simply cannot exist when you are run down by a never ending to-do list.

When you build margin into your days and weeks, you are giving yourself (+ your family) the space to truly thrive.

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

✨ Overwhelmed? Knowing your productivity personality makes all the difference: https://form.typeform.com/to/X1h33hT5

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Before the Evergreen planner system, I (Clari) had never used a true day-planner. I had tried a myriad of different planners when I worked as an executive assistant before having kids, but they were the types that only had a small box, a column, or a couple of lines for each day. I also used a digital calendar to coordinate meetings and make sure nothing was double booked, but other than getting binged with meeting reminders, I didn’t really reference it or use it to effectively plan my days. My thoughts, plans and tasks were scattered among digital notes, emails, sticky notes, a half-used planner and to-do lists written on random pieces of paper.

But then I became a mom and quit my traditional job. It never occurred to me that a planner could be used to plan rest, to form life-giving family rhythms, or to plan intentional time with my kiddos—just as much as it could be used to make sure critical work projects or mundane home tasks were completed. I again wandered through my days doing what was in front of me, and working off one endlessly long to-do list.

Annie Dillard, in her book The Writing Life, wrote, "How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing."

The reality is we have a lot of agency over whether we live our days intentionally, with purpose, or whether we let them pass by, moving from task to task based on emotions or a crushing sense of urgency. But we can just as easily fall into the trap of trying to squeeze every moment of productivity out of each day, neglecting our needs for rest or even the ones we're called to love. But in order to find that middle way, we have to begin by planning each day.

The beauty of planning each day (especially when you have an entire spread and can plan with the context of your week in view, like you can with our Classic booklet), is that you are able to plan each day in a way that honors the season you're in, the ones you've been given to love, and the work you're responsible for.

And planning a lot of days, over several weeks and months, enables you to begin forming life-giving rhythms that work to breathe life into your family and help you make progress on those bigger goals (revisit our Four Rules of Planning and ROOTED Goals episodes for more on these concepts).

In this episode, we walk through how we each plan our days on the day pages of our Classic booklet. If you’d like to follow along, you can download our free printable below. This printable has all the major elements of our Day page, enabling you to see exactly what we are talking about as we plan the different elements of our day using the time-blocker, top targets, prompts, etc. Because it’s the tool we each use, we talk about our specific planner throughout this episode. However, the principles we talk about can transfer to a lot of different planners, so whatever planner you use, we believe this will be an episode you find valuable!

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew