Category

Lifestyle Planning

December 29, 2021

How ROOTED Goals Can Help You Thrive This Year

January 1st is only days away. With it will come a massive wave of social pressure to sit down, dream big, map out your future, and then relentlessly hustle and bend every aspect of your life to make those goals happen.

But we’re not falling for that this year. We think there’s a better way.

Unrealistic, untethered, shame-motivated goals are a cultural epidemic. We ourselves know all too well what it’s like to put pen to paper, get our adrenaline pumping, cross our fingers with the hopes that somehow it’ll be different this time—and then have unforeseen higher priorities come in and wash away all of our wishful thinking.

We’re done with goal setting systems that pump you up, introduce massive tension between your goal and your daily responsibilities, and then leave you feeling like a failure.

Time is too precious for that! As home-loving wives, mamas, and entrepreneurs, we needed a goal setting system that was mercifully realistic, embraced our other responsibilities as valid, and was deeply rooted in our broader life callings. The ROOTED Goal Setting System was the fruit of that quest.

For the past two years, we’ve been developing this system to help woman set lasting, sustainable, and life-giving goals. This is an entirely new way of thinking about goal setting (you may remember it was the topic of one of our podcast episodes this past fall).

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December 8, 2021

How to Get the Most Out of Your Annual

If you’ve been hanging around here for long, you know we are all about planning that is simple to implement and customizable to your unique season and lifestyle. Our undated Annual booklet does both of these things beautifully. The design perfectly combines the ideas of absolute simplicity and maximum flexibility into a calendar you can carry with you wherever you go.

The New Year is only a few weeks away, and many of you are busting out a crisp new Annual and dreaming of all 2022 will bring. If you’ve used our Annual in the past, you know it is full of blank bullet pages that you can use in a way that fits your current season and needs. It can be a process figuring out exactly how you want to use the blank pages of your Annual, so this post is full of inspiring ideas (most of these come straight from how team Evergreen has used the Annual this last year).

Before we begin, it’s crucial to remember that above all this is a productivity tool. We love this booklet because – as the bullet journaling community has taught us – a simple notebook can so easily become a beautiful keepsake you’ll look at for years to come. But, it doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing for it to be useful. So if you’re Annual is full of messy handwriting, scribbled dreams and planned events, rest assured you’re using your Annual perfectly. This post is full of ideas on how to maximize the use of your Annual, but don’t let these ideas turn in to a to-do list!! Use what is helpful for your unique season and let the rest fall away.

How to Set up Your Annual for a New Year

Our Annual booklet is undated, enabling you to start it at any time in the year. As January is right around the corner, most will be starting with the New Year, but you’ll still want to sit down first thing and write in each month’s date for the entire year and stick on your botanical month stickers (or your own favorite sticker pack!). Here are two simple tips when it comes to planning dates ahead of time with your Annual:

  • Use pencil when writing in future dates. Writing in pencil enables you to keep events on your radar, while also easily being able to erase and change as plans shift or commitments have to be whittled down. (Clari uses washi tape marked with Sharpie to denote when she’s hosting company. The visual difference helps immediately remind her of the prep work that will be needed to host, and the washi enables it to be easily removed if guests have to adjust plans.)
  • Only write events & holidays relevant to you this year. This is simple, but it can be easy to bust out a new undated Annual, look up standard holidays and be writing in Presidents Day in February before you even realize what you are doing. If you aren’t tied to a school calendar, President’s Day will have little bearing on your year, but it’ll be begging for attention come February and your brain will spend wasted time wondering why it’s there. Write in only events that you need to show up for mentally or physically, and as we mentioned above, use pencil until plans seem absolute.

Keeping your Annual clear and minimal will enable your brain to have absolute clarity when it comes to planning each month. You’ll open a new month and know exactly what events and dates you’re committed to, and be able to plan and purge commitments as needed.

How to maximize the use of the blank bullet pages at the front and back of the Annual:

The front of the Annual has three pages of blank bullet space and the back has one page. Here are some ways we’ve used these blank pages in our booklets:

How to maximize the use of the blank bullet pages that accompany each month spread:

Each month has a simple calendar grid, a blank bullet grid opposite and then a full spread of additional blank bullet space. Here are some ways our team has used this blank space this year:

  • Writing focus points or goals for the month/quarter
  • Listing critical to-do items
  • Charting week rhythms for the month
  • Brainstorming ideas and goals
  • Journaling important events
  • Planning work tasks
  • Tracking monthly reading
  • Capturing highlights from the month
  • Storing any paper mementos (a note from a friend, drawing from a child, photo, etc.)

McCauley loves to write future month goal ideas lightly in pencil as she is brainstorming them, and then going back in with pen once her goals are finalized. Shelby utilizes endless paperclips to store notes or to-do lists for herself in future months, so when she turns to a new month, all her thoughts and ideas are there waiting for her.

As we said at the start, the Annual is not primarily a scrapbooking tool, but if you’re interested in adding a little more fun to your Annual this year check out our blog post that gives simple ways to add some beauty to your planner.

You may find that you use your Annual’s blank space in the same way each month, or you may find that you change it up to fit your needs as they fluctuate. We’ve found that our use of the Annual can ebb and flow quite a bit. In some seasons, we really sink into the beauty and aesthetic possibilities of the Annual, in others we simply jot our critical lists, prioritize tasks and then hit the ground running. At the end of the day, it’s all about what you need for your current season.

November 26, 2021

What Makes Our Planner Different – (Podcast Ep. 8)

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts

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 Monthly 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.

It’s Time to Take Action

Are you ready to get your hands on this amazing tool?

With 15% off storewide Black Friday through Cyber Monday, you take advantage of our biggest sale of the year.

Now is your time to get organized around the things that matter most to you and finally make space to thrive.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts

November 17, 2021

Planning While Postpartum – (Podcast Ep. 7)

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

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!

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.