Make Space to Thrive

Episode 8: What Makes Our Planner Different

🗓️ Download Free Planner! evergreenplanner.com/free

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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.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

When Shelby tucked her homemade worksheets under her arm on her way to her sister’s house on 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:

• What if you could see your week’s agenda at the same time as you plan your day?
• What if you never felt lost in your own planner?
• What if your planner could lead you through a simple series of prompts that quickly helped you organize your thoughts—but without overwhelming or distracting you?
• What if your planner only contained the things you actually need to get organized and make progress—and nothing that you don’t?
• What if your planner could be so classy that it actually elevated your aesthetic?
• What if your planner could seem so intuitive, personal, and dynamic that it felt like a natural extension of your arm—a fully-functioning hub for your brain?

The Evergreen Planner System

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

Episode 7: Planning While Postpartum

🗓️ Download Free Planner! evergreenplanner.com/free

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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

Episode 6: How We Plan Our Weeks

🗓️ Download Free Planner! evergreenplanner.com/free

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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

Episode 5: The Story Behind “Make Space to Thrive”

🗓️ Download Free Planner! evergreenplanner.com/free

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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.

The story behind the phrase...

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:

• daily space to sit down, breathe deep, drink a hot cup of coffee, and have a strategy meeting with ourselves using the prompts in our planner
• leaving for an appointment (or church or event or party) 15 minutes earlier than needed so that when we hit traffic or forget something or have a driveway adventure with a toddler, we're not melting down ourselves
• taking time to re-write your goals in your best handwriting, allowing you to fully emotionally process them and then display them so they stay top-of-mind
• asking: "what can I say 'no' to, cull, or renegotiate about this week to make it easier and calmer?"
• getting up before the children (whether in the morning, or before naptime is over) and doing essential things so they don't get missed
• taking time to exercise instead of putting off health goals until your workload lightens or the kids hit a magical age
• keeping our homes clean, decluttered, and well-managed so that spontaneity feels fun instead of chaotic
• saying "no" to a stretch goal in the business so we can make a nicer dinner than usual for our family just because we want to
• turning off all of the notifications on our phones (except for calls from our husbands and mama, of course) and limiting social media so that new information isn't constantly taking a toll on our emotions
• using our time-blocker to add 15 minutes of padding to the transitions in the day (meals, commutes, meetings, etc.), so we don't have to feel like insane people to get anything done on time

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

Episode 4: How We Plan Our Days

🗓️ Download Free Planner! evergreenplanner.com/free

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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

Episode 3: How R.O.O.T.E.D. Goals Can Help You Thrive

🗓️ Download Free Planner! evergreenplanner.com/free

📖 Get the ROOTED Goals Workbook: evergreenplanner.com/rooted

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In typical goal setting culture, the mantra often goes something like this… "Girl, it's time to change your LIFE. Close your eyes, imagine what you want your life to be like in five years—the sky's the limit!—and write down your biggest dreams. Now reverse-engineer those dreams into a million baby steps, and do not stop hustling until you make those goals a REALITY. If you really want something, you're going to have to get up crazy early, change your habits, and become a different person. You're going to have to set the people in your life straight, too. They're either going to have to get on board, or get out of the way. Aren't your goals worth it? And if you start feeling discouraged—because those days will come (it is lonely at the top)—you're just going to have to make sure you have a solid "why" to pull you through. So give yourself a kick in the pants, and get to work."

It's.... a lot.

The problem with this? Well, for starters, you can’t fully foresee the future. You cannot comprehend the very real tradeoffs for the goals you create on paper. Oftentimes, you'll get into the thick of it and start to wonder how you can know if your goal is truly worth it. You feel a rising tension between living intuitively and following through on the goals you set.

Here at Evergreen, we believe that this tension is a real problem for women who seek to live intentionally. And we don't think that laziness, lack of motivation, or even poor time-management is really at the root of the problem. We believe the problem is that people are setting goals that don’t line up with their real life.

A bad goal setting system—one that doesn’t take into account the context of your actual lived life—will lead to guilt and frustration because those goals can't be sustained by your daily life.

But creating goals and dreaming about a different future is good. Goal-setting helps us level-up from the realm of wishful thinking and reactionary living, and begin to make the changes (big and small) that empower us and our families to truly thrive. But the key is this: your daily life has to be able to sustain your goals, so your goals can in turn breath life into your daily life.

We believe there is a better way to set goals; goals that are sustainable, produce change, and are life-giving. We call this process setting R.O.O.T.E.D. goals.

ROOTED Goals are:

• Rooted in your core calling Grasping the unique calling of God for your individual life is a process. But leaning into your core calling is an essential part of creating goals that fully resonates over the long-haul, compel you to follow-through in the execution of them, and produce a lot of satisfying fruit along the way. The soil of your core calling forms a rich environment for setting sustainable, healthy goals that actually energize you.
• Organically growing out of your context - You need goals that take your real life context seriously and embrace it. You need goals that connect with where you are right now, and that respect that you’re here for a reason. Recognizing the season you’re in and identifying the contours of your priorities can empower you to identify the next right step—the one that can realistically begin to build the lasting change you want to see.
• **Outlined for clarity **** Clarity is QUEEN when it comes to giving your brain an objective that it can actually process, prioritize, and tackle in the day-to-day. When you break down a goal into tangible action-steps, you are equipped to move past your vague theories about what it will take to make your goal happen. You’re able to see the gaps in your knowledge about the process, which compels you to research until you have concrete and actionable understanding.
• Tailored to your lifestyle - If you want to craft compelling goals that are grounded in your unique calling, then you’ll have to give yourself permission to develop creative solutions that make sense for your particular circumstances. On the flip-side, you’ll also need to make some strategic adjustments to your lifestyle so that it actually supports and fuels your goals. (Having a strong sense of clarity will massively help with this.)
• Etched into your memory - For a goal to be sustained in the long-run, it has to stay top of mind. Writing your goal out daily and keeping it in sight will begin to train your subconscious to recognize the opportunities you have to make progress on it.
• Developed by Providence The R.O.O.T.E.D. Goal-Setting System reminds us that the Kingdom of God does not rise and fall by our efforts—but that we do have the responsibility to do our part, exercise our influence, and steward our resources. When we give our goals back to God, we know we can trust Him to develop them in the best of ways.

Setting a ROOTED Goal is all about creating a symbiotic relationship between your daily life and your goals. It’s about creating space for personal growth, and channeling your productivity in a way that cultivated peace. With this system, you can start to craft a lifestyle that not only sustains but actually fuels the vision that God is growing in your heart.

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

Episode 2: The Four Rules of Planning, Part 2

🗓️ Download Free Planner! evergreenplanner.com/free

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Our "Four Rules of Planning" —

1. Write down what you did. For several days or weeks, use your planner to record what you did. By starting with the rhythms and habits you already operate in, you can recognize patterns, and evaluate what’s working and what’s not. You can then design incremental change that serves your family, makes sense for the season you’re in, and builds into a sustainable lifestyle.
2. Build your repertoire of planning skills. Think about it like becoming a skilled cook in a kitchen. You must build your planning and productivity skills over time, as you come upon new challenges. Learn as you go, practice patiently, and you’ll soon feel equipped to adapt your new skills to fit any given situation. Just as a skilled cook would not feel the pressure to use every technique they know every time they prepare a dish, you shouldn’t feel the pressure to exercise every single time-management or efficiency muscle you have every single moment of every day. You simply build your repertoire of skills for when you need them.
3. Train your subconscious. The more you write down your goals and priorities, the more you are teaching your brain to focus on what is important to you. This builds a “working memory” around your priorities, enabling you to waste less energy on deciding what you need to do next in the day-to-day, so you can give more brain space to bigger goals and projects.
4. Maintain a flexible mindset. Even with the best planning, life still throws punches and things play out in ways you could’ve never anticipated. Instead of mislabeling yourself as “failures” because of circumstances out of your control, you have the choice to strengthen your positive influence in any given situation. You can take a proactive approach to these challenges—whether big or small—by adopting a mindset that inspires you to pivot and handle the inevitable changes to your plans in creative and life-giving ways.

Remember, these rules are not a once-and-done process, they are a cycle that you can move through again and again. The truth about intentional living is that it has to be adaptable, because your life will change constantly. The schedule rhythms you were following in January are likely not the ones that will work well in September. These four rules will help you to constantly adapt, change and perfect your planning processes, while doing it in a way that is unique to your lifestyle, season and needs.

Note: These 4 Rules evolved into our PLANS acronym. You can hear about the development of the PLANS acronym on Episode 09 - Quickstart Your Planning. You can also download the free Quickstart Your Planning Guide we created here!

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew

Episode 1: The Four Rules of Planning, Part 1

🗓️ Download Free Planner! evergreenplanner.com/free

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You want to start getting organized around the things that matter most to you. But where do you even begin?

In our first episode, we offer an effective shortcut for diving into the world of time-management and productivity—without getting overwhelmed.

Our "Four Rules of Planning" —

1. Write down what you did. For several days or weeks, use your planner to record what you did. By starting with the rhythms and habits you already operate in, you can recognize patterns, and evaluate what’s working and what’s not. You can then design incremental change that serves your family, makes sense for the season you’re in, and builds into a sustainable lifestyle.
2. Build your repertoire of planning skills. Think about it like becoming a skilled cook in a kitchen. You must build your planning and productivity skills over time, as you come upon new challenges. Learn as you go, practice patiently, and you’ll soon feel equipped to adapt your new skills to fit any given situation. Just as a skilled cook would not feel the pressure to use every technique they know every time they prepare a dish, you shouldn’t feel the pressure to exercise every single time-management or efficiency muscle you have every single moment of every day. You simply build your repertoire of skills for when you need them.
3. Train your subconscious. The more you write down your goals and priorities, the more you are teaching your brain to focus on what is important to you. This builds a “working memory” around your priorities, enabling you to waste less energy on deciding what you need to do next in the day-to-day, so you can give more brain space to bigger goals and projects.
4. Maintain a flexible mindset. Even with the best planning, life still throws punches and things play out in ways you could’ve never anticipated. Instead of mislabeling yourself as “failures” because of circumstances out of your control, you have the choice to strengthen your positive influence in any given situation. You can take a proactive approach to these challenges—whether big or small—by adopting a mindset that inspires you to pivot and handle the inevitable changes to your plans in creative and life-giving ways.

Cozy up with this first episode, & you'll hear:

• A little about team Evergreen and our heart behind starting this podcast
• Our shortcut for understanding and getting organized around your unique dynamics
• A practical tip that helps you shift your mindset from never feeling like you're doing enough
• How planning is a lot like cooking—and how learning on the go is a super-effective approach

We'll be back with The Four Rules of Planning - Part 2 next week!

Note: These 4 Rules evolved into our PLANS acronym. You can hear about the development of the PLANS acronym on Episode 09 - Quickstart Your Planning. You can also download the free Quickstart Your Planning Guide we created here!

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Web: evergreenplanner.com

Instagram: @EvergreenPlanner

Learn the Evergreen Planning Method: evergreenplanner.com/renew