Category

Goal Setting

July 20, 2022

How to Prioritize (The First Domino Effect)

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Posted in Goal Setting, Lifestyle Planning

If you’ve been in our community for long, you know that I (Shelby) have often shared that I am not a natural at prioritization. It was watching my younger sister McCauley live her ordinary (and yet remarkable) life that propelled me into the time-management space. She’s a queen at getting the right things done, the right way, at the right time, and in the right amount of time. I’m the late bloomer in that area.

When I’d complain about how much better her life was than mine (just keeping it real here), she’d always go back to the same thing: prioritization.

That answer really used to annoy me because I didn’t have a clue about how to prioritize. I’d try to get her to explain to me how she figured out what she needed to do next—and she didn’t know how to explain it to me! She’d just kind of look at everything she had on her plate and then…know. It honestly seemed like magic to me.

It took me reading stacks of time-management books and articles, binging podcasts, and enrolling into workshops and webinars to start to get a sense for how this prioritization thing worked. From that research, I hobbled together some planning worksheets that applied the 80/20 rule to the Eisenhower Matrix, and helped me translate all of that into a time-blocked plan for my day. (It was actually in showing those worksheets to McCauley that the idea for the Evergreen Planner was sparked in the first place!)

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February 16, 2022

Setting ROOTED Goals: Developed by Providence

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Posted in Goal Setting, Lifestyle Planning, Mindset

Sustainable, Lasting, and Life-Giving Goals Are:

Recap:

Last week, we talked about the secret sauce for making progress on your important goals— even when things change —by writing your goals down frequently, even daily, so you train your brain to care about your goal. This week, we’re wrapping up the entire ROOTED goals system by talking about the most critical mindset you can have when setting and executing your goals.

Your goals must be Developed by Providence, the final step in the ROOTED goal setting system.

The Kingdom of God does not rise and fall by the successes and failures of our written goals. Knowing this gives us an incredible amount of liberty to simply follow the Lord’s leading through the messy middle. Leading our lives with integrity and excellence is a deeply meaningful endeavor, and God loves to give us the grace to do that. Having a Christian growth-mindset allows us to set our goals with an “amen” posture towards God’s unknown plans for the future, knowing that when we give our goals back to God, we can trust Him to develop them in the best of ways.

How Can You Set Strong Goals When You Know You’re Not in Control of Tomorrow?

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February 9, 2022

Setting ROOTED Goals: Etched in Your Memory

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Posted in Goal Setting, Lifestyle Planning, Mindset

​Sustainable, Lasting, and Life-Giving Goals Are:

Recap:

Last week, we talked about how to create a symbiotic relationship between your goals and your lifestyle so they mutually support each other over the long-haul. This week we’re going to talk about the secret sauce for making progress on your important goals— even when things change. When you train your brain to care about your goals, your subconscious joins the team and starts looking for every reasonable opportunity for you to make progress.

We call this “etching” your goals into your memory, and it’s step 5 in the ROOTED goals process.

Why People Don’t Accomplish Their Goals

92% of people don’t accomplish their New Years Resolutions. The world gets super pumped about goal-setting on New Years day, vows flying left and right that we’ll cut refined sugar, increase our incomes, or start reading to our kids every day. But then, around January 17th (which has been officially dubbed as ‘Ditch Your Resolution Day’), goals begin dropping like flies.

Why is this?

Life picks up steam, the obstacles start mounting, and the habits start slipping. After a few days of falling off the bandwagon, many people honestly just begin to question why their goals mattered to them so much in the first place. And after a few weeks of lapsing, their goals are left in the dust of the first quarter, forgotten.

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February 2, 2022

Setting ROOTED Goals: Tailored to Your Lifestyle

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Posted in Goal Setting, Lifestyle Planning, Mindset, Our Story

Sustainable, Lasting, and Life-Giving Goals Are:

Recap:

Last week, we talked about how to make sure your goals are clear and actionable, so that you can make significant progress whenever you have the time. Today, we’re going to talk about that time, about how to create a symbiotic relationship between your goals and your lifestyle so they mutually support each other over the long-haul.

Step 4 is all about how to Tailor Goals to Your Lifestyle.

Other goal setting systems might show you how to reverse-engineer your goal (what we talked about last week), but then they end there and wish you good luck. This system shows you how to look at your goal in the context of your daily life, and then make strategic shifts in your schedule in order to make space for this goal.

Learning From Experience

When I (Shelby) was seven months pregnant with my first, my husband and I decided that I would work from home. At the time, designing a planner was nowhere on my radar. I had a complex system of to-do lists and digital calendars that makes my head spin to think back on. But what was worse than my lack of a cohesive system of organization was my total lack of understanding about the concept of trade-offs.

That’s why, at seven months pregnant with my first baby, I signed the biggest freelancing contract I’d ever seen. Without fully realizing what I was doing, and with one tiny digital stroke of the pen, I had committed the next two years of my life to the completion of a very rigorous and mentally straining project that would teach me the concept of trade-offs through the hard knocks of experience.

On top of it all, I had a severe deficit in my personal time-management skills. Unsurprisingly, this turned into a years-long season of overwhelm that bubbled into every area of my life.

Even so, I have to admit that I am thankful for that insane season of life. It was genuinely good work (a dream project, really), and I learned SO, SO much from it.

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