Mindset

July 14, 2021

Why Make Plans When You Know Plans Change?

Have you ever had this experience? You dive deep into goal setting, chart out a strong schedule, and then start to work the plan.

But then, dun, dun, dunnn.

Life happens.

And after several weeks, you start to realize a lot has changed since you laid your plans, and you’re really making only like 20% of the changes you’d planned to make!

This phenomenon is especially true for goal-oriented mamas. We might be as determined and diligent as the sky is blue, but our kids are always rolling into new phases of need, surprising us with the twists and turns of their own growth journeys, and presenting regular challenges to the best laid plans.

So what’s the point of reverse-engineering goals and setting intentions? Why bother to sketch out your ideal day in a time-blocking planner if you know things will change?

Because even if things change, making a plan is still the bridge between the life you’re living now and the life you want.

Here’s how it works.

**Your planner shows you what’s realistic.**

How many times have you sat down to write a todo list for the day that was—let’s be honest—a total pipe dream? Been there, done that.

Our timeblocked planner equips you with a canvas that guides you to paint a realistic picture with your time.

You write down when you’ll wake up, when you’ll be going to bed. Then you block in things like meal times, kids’ naptimes, homeschooling blocks, quiet time, and time with honey.

Then you can see the ideal pockets of time for shallow administrative work like cleaning the house, making appointments, or answering DMs. But most importantly, you can spot the best times to carve out deep work blocks where you can give 90% or more of your focus to your most important projects.

Then you pad all of this with ample margin. (Think of margin like the lubricant for your schedule. It allows you to breathe and be able to shift things around when needed without stripping any gears.)

When you have a realistic plan that actually can fit in the containers of time that you have available, if something changes, you can just take a minute to rearrange the blocks and pivot with intention, knowing that your bases are covered.

Your planner gives you a platform for seeing how your aspirations might play out in real-time, making your intuition smarter with data.

This is especially important for making progress on huge goals.

You’ve got to be able to imagine how your intentions can play out in the landscape of your lived reality.

Have you ever heard of productivity expert Cal Newport? The man is a raving genius. He teaches all about the vital importance of carving out time for deep work if you want to move the needle forward on the things that matter most. But his advice is tailored to a demographic with dedicated work hours in an office.

When you’re a work from home mama—especially if the kids are home for school—you should still be scheduling in solid deep work blocks.

But let’s face it. You’re gonna need a Plan B in your arsenal for when the 9yo has a nosebleed all over his remote schooling laptop right smack in the middle of your recording session, or for when the kids wake you up three times and the 5am hustle just doesn’t happen.

This is part of why starting out with a realistic plan (with lots of margin) is vital. As work from home mamas, we need a realistic plan, a working memory for what needs to happen next in our goals, and an informed intuition to guide us when we pivot our projects around the adventure that is motherhood.

Our planner gives us a visual guide to all the data we need to become experts on our own priorities.

Your planner cultivates a working memory.

You may expect your brain to just automatically click into gear every time you wake up to greet the day, or sit down at your desk to knock out important projects.

But what happens naturally is that you end up neglecting the 20% of what you could be doing to really move the needle forward on your goals because you somehow defaulted to buzzing around in the 80% of non-essential activity.

This is because, most of the time, the work you need to do to make serious progress is hard work. It’s mentally taxing, and probably pretty overwhelming.

Your brain looks at it and balks, searching wildly for any out. I’d hoped to make progress on my book, but… look, my inbox needs organizing. Don’t mind if I do! Oh, I should post something on instagram stories since my laptop and coffee cup look so cute on my desk. Heyyyy… she’s live right now… I’ve been wanting to catch one of her lives… And boom! Before we know it, naptime is over, and we’re wondering where the time went.

As difficult as it may seem to fight distractions in this modern digital age, it’s actually very simple to overcome the constant temptation toward low-quality activity.

In addition to having strong attention protection habits (such as turning most of the notifications off on your phone), you must cultivate a strong working memory so that every time you arrive at an opportunity to make progress, you can immediately seize that opportunity by prioritizing the next best thing with expert precision.

Cultivating a strong working memory is as simple as using your planner on a daily basis. It takes a little bit of time to get into the swing of it, but once you’ve gotten real about how much time you have and the responsibilities on your plate, and you’ve developed goals that deeply compel you forward, then you can begin to use your planner to break down those responsibilities and goals into milestones.

Once you have the big picture sectioned out into milestones, you can take those first essential progress milestone you identified, and you can break them down even further into bite-sized action steps that you can now schedule into your upcoming week. As you work with these bite-sized action steps, fleshing their details out at a granular level, and bringing them into the flow of your real context, taking action on these things begins to form the structure of your working memory for that larger goal or responsibility.

Using your planner daily (especially if you get really still, really real, and really laser-focused on what’s important next) reinforces these intentions, and helps you to feel like an expert on your own priorities. That expertise coupled with strong attention protection habits (and mobilized by diligent action) will automatically launch you onto a whole new level of productivity that you didn’t even know was possible.

Your planner remains ever available for micro-optimization.

Just because, as goal-oriented mamas, we have to be a lot more flexible with our schedule than many other workers, it doesn’t mean we have to throw our hands up and surrender to the chaos.

No. We’re called to be agents of stability and leaders in progress.

Even if having kids, a husband, a church family—and many Providential interruptions for hospitality and ministry—means that we can’t optimize our lives like bachelor Tim Ferris (and I mean, he’s not even living the “Tim Ferris lifestyle” anymore), that doesn’t mean that we can’t leverage the skill of optimization in order to increase our productivity in very specific ways.

Your planner is the perfect tool for spotting opportunities for micro-optimization, and getting really creative about how to organize your resources for better results.

You could optimize your morning routine in order to reduce friction and potential distractions, allowing you up to three hours for deep work before you launch into mom duty.
You could optimize your sleeping schedules and daily rhythms so that everyone’s focused energy peaks at around the same time and the environment is prepared for tranquility, creating the perfect pocket in your day for homeschooling.
You could optimize your use of screen time with kids so that their first inclination is to play outside or help with chores, and then when you really need them to sit still and relax, you know the infrequency of the experience will empower the show to keep their attention (without zombifying their little brains!)
You could optimize your planning sessions so that you can stop wasting time looking for sticky-notes, wading through outdated todo lists for that one detail you can’t lose track of, or getting distracted by notification when you’re trying to use your Google calendar. You can do this by having a single hub for your brain, in a powerful analog format, already optimized to guide your brain quickly into a productive and organized mindset.
You could sit down at the coffee shop with that unexpected free hour and use your planner to micro-optimize your rare alone time for progress on work or for deeply nourishing self-care.
You can micro-optimize anything. And as long as the goal is to support your progress (rather than to put a straight-jacket on your time), micro-optimization is a small investment of upfront organization that pays incredible dividends.

Your planner equips you to see what’s working and what needs to change.

Look at the 20% of your plan that you did implement. It might be the 20% that matters most! There’s nothing wrong with reworking your plan once you realize you over-planned before.

Usually, 20% of everything we could do will get 80% of the results we want. So if you set ten goals, but the only two goals you ended up accomplishing were, for example, (1) getting more sleep, and (2) buying different homeschool curriculum, then it may be that those were the two most important things that needed to change.

You might then be better able to tackle the other eight goals, or you might realize that some of them become irrelevant once you’ve taken care of the other more fundamental issues.

Alternatively, if you went off plan altogether, it might be that using your planner cleared the clutter of your head and let what really was important rise to the surface through your choices. There have been times when I’ve set my quarterly goals, felt very pumped about them, only to see that fresh influx of can-do creativity organically go to accomplish the other, more important issues I finally had the mental bandwidth to deal with.

And, of course, it might be that you simply didn’t follow through with the changes you know you need to make. If you use your planner to keep track of what does happen, you’ll be able to go back and troubleshoot the dynamics of how your goals interact with the realities of your daily life.

Your planner leads you through focus-centering prompts and mindset-adjusting reflection habits, giving you daily opportunities to improve your thought-life.

One of the biggest challenges of living in a first-world country in the 21st century is having space to collect your thoughts and set your intentions. Focus has to be curated in order to be harnessed.

The Evergreen Planner has built-in productivity prompts that, if used habitually, work to trigger your mind into a focused state. This state becomes a platform for micro-optimization of your available time resources.

And second only to low-quality distractions, the biggest threat to your productivity is a lack of motivation. Motivation is fueled by hope, and hope is either nurtured or diminished in our thought-lives.

Every day page of the Evergreen Planner includes micro-journaling prompts that lead you to reflect with gratitude, consider personal growth lessons, mentally celebrate your victories, and remember your “why” for your quarterly goals.

The space for filling out each one of these prompts is small—compelling you to take just a moment to respond to each one. But though they be small, these micro-journaling prompts are fiercely effective, allowing you to shift into a growth-mindset in just under five minutes.

After a while, your brain begins to associate your planner with hope, progress, and tremendous motivation. You then have a tool in your aresnal that you can open at any time to trigger your brain to shift immediately into a healthy, passionate, diligent state of mind.

Your planner gives you a solid platform for pivoting with intention.

Take a second to imagine how it feels to have your best-laid plans changed in an instant due to an unexpected turn of events (#momlife).

Now imagine facing that same disruptive experience with all of this under your belt:

A plan that was so realistic and padded with margin that you can simply rearrange it like lego-blocks.
A mental map of what’s happening in your day and your week so that you can make decisions on the fly, leveraging your deeply informed gifts of intuition.
A strong working memory that can immediately bring forth the details of your next right steps so that you can maximize opportunities for administrative or deep work tasks at the best possible times, and then fully relax when you’re focused exclusively on nurturing relationships.
All the data you need to take stock of your upcoming timeblocks and responsibilities so that you can increase your productive output and decrease wasted resources through micro-optimization.
A hub that allows you to see what’s working in your life (and troubleshoot what’s not) while helping you keep what matters most to you top of mind.
A planner that immediately centers your focus and triggers your brain to shift into a growth-mindset.

With that in your toolkit, imagine how you can face Providential interruptions.

With strong mindset habits and a little mental organization, you can keep your heart open to God’s redirections even as you keep making progress on the long-term work He’s called you to do.

And, let’s be honest. The Providential pivot is where the best stuff happens, isn’t it?

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Are you ready to launch into an entirely new way of planning? We created the Evergreen Planner System because we needed a flexible tool that would enable us to both make plans, and pivot when those plans change. The Getting Started Kit is the perfect way to try two of our core products – the Annual and the Monthly. Don’t wait until we launch our next subscription box – get the tools you need today!

April 14, 2021

How to Stop Wasting Time on Screens

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Mindset

Last week, we asked this question:

What are the most overwhelming areas of my life? If I were proactive in these areas (instead of operating in a default, reactionary state), how could I clear the excess and focus on what matters most?

In this post, we’re going to get really practical and tactical.

Understanding the (Designed) Problem

I used to think my life was overwhelming by default, and that I simply didn’t have enough time and mental energy to do everything I believed I was called to do. I didn’t sit around and watch TV, and I’d even turned all of the notifications off on my phone, but I still found the days to be far too short. But I’ll never forget the sucker punch of conviction I felt when I was standing in my kitchen, peeling potatoes, and listening to Greg McKeown (author of Essentialism) tell Allie Casazza in an interview:

“Pick up your phone and don’t get distracted by it…. [Look at your screentime usage]…. Now this is one tiny but factual resource for how people are spending time…. You can’t believe it, can you?…. But you could be above average in today’s world and still, in fact everyone is, still sucked into nonessentialism. This is the power of nonessentialism. It’s everywhere. And it’s not everywhere by default, it’s everywhere by design.”

If you find yourself overwhelmed by the constant stimuli of your electronic devices and yet unable to live without them, you’re taking part in what’s becoming the universal anxiety of the developed world.

“People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable…. we seem to have stumbled backwards into a digital life we didn’t sign up for…. it’s probably more accurate to say that we were pushed into it by the high-end device companies and attention economy conglomerates who discovered there are vast fortunes to be made in a culture dominated by gadgets and apps.” — Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Here’s the thing about technology and our precious time: our devices are amazing tools that can be used in powerful ways to help us become time-efficiency-ninjas. But every screen you own is also battlefield for your time and attention. The tech industry has invested untold amounts of cash into consulting with brain scientists to take advantage of user psychology and break down the natural mental boundaries that protect our intention and our focus. This is not a conspiracy theory—it’s a well-documented fact. Many popular apps interact with your brain’s dopamine loop, delivering unpredictable rewards and duds at just the right balance, so that it addicts you in much the same way playing slot machines would. Their #1 objective is to keep you on their app, and to keep your focus fragmented enough that you keep scrolling and tapping, consuming more information, and depositing your own data into the app so they can track your interests and optimize your advertisements.

“You have a business model designed to engage you and get you to basically suck as much time out of your life as possible and then selling that attention to advertisers.” — Sandy Parakilas, former Facebook employee

And that’s the key right there—the advertisements. This digital battlefield is called “the attention economy,” and these companies who are deliberately engineering medically addictive apps are coming under a lot of fire, even in mainstream conversations.

And while solutions to the unethical aspects of all of this ought to be found, I want to zero-in on the one thing you absolutely can control: your personal responsibility as a consumer in the attention economy.

A New Approach to Technology

Here are some enduring principles and strategies to empower you as you navigate this uncharted territory:

You have personal responsibility and power over how you spend your time. You may have been pushed into an addiction because you never realized the way these apps were engineered to monopolize your time, but now that you have the power of knowledge, you have the responsibility to take your time and attention back. You don’t have to give into impulses, you can decide how much of your mental bandwidth you’re willing to sell to these platforms, you can set up strong boundaries, and you can take charge of your days.
You don’t have to believe that all technology is evil to become more intentional. Anyone could recite a hundred ways that technology (and even social media) have benefited them. There’s a lot to be gained from being connected to a global marketplace, having immediate channels of communication, and enjoying open access to quality information. Technology is an incredible toolkit. But each tool in the kit must be used with intention.
Your approach to technology should always support your overarching goals and never distract from them. Your overarching goals need to be clear to you (journal them out!), and each technological habit and activity needs to be carefully evaluated for how well it supports those goals. Even slower, long-form media like podcasts can be overwhelming you with information and giving your brain zero bandwidth to process the information that’s already loading it down. Taking an extended break from social media, video streaming, email lists and loops, and other non-essential screentime habits can help bring a lot of clarity to what is actually advancing your goals (especially if it’s long enough to break addiction cycles and detox effectively—Cal Newport recommends 30 days.)
You should trade techno-maximalism for an essentialist approach when it comes to technology. Digital Minimalism, a critical book by Cal Newport, radically changed the culture of our home (for the better) in under a week. My husband has this section underlined: “[After the digital declutter], for each technology that you’re considering reintroducing into your life, you must first ask: Does this technology directly support something I deeply value? This is the only condition on which you should let one of these tools back into your life. The fact that it offers some value is irrelevant—the digital minimalist deploys technology to serve the things they find most important in their life, and is happy missing out on everything else.” Start by turning off all notifications (banners, badges, and popups) and setting aside time in your day and week to be completely unplugged (e.g. charge your phone in a different room when you sleep, consider taking a break from social media on Sundays, stop sharing homeschooling photos on Instagram during school hours, etc).
You don’t owe your friends and extended family anything via social media. Healthy relationships have healthy boundaries, and personal growth is mutually supported. If you want to take a step back so you can become radically intentional about your social media usage, you’re not harming anyone by no longer sharing your thoughts digitally, by missing the life updates delivered publicly, or by foregoing posting your children’s photos so that they show up in your family members’ feeds. Your friends and family members may react in a confused or negative way, but you can gently communicate that you’re taking a break from social media to reevaluate your priorities.

A Practical Approach

You can leverage the power of habit to reverse the negative effects of hyperconnectivity starting today.

Here’s my personal strategy for beating screen addiction and cultivating a technological space that drives my goals forward instead of distracting me from them.

Firstly, I engage in technology fasts frequently. I clear the mental and emotional clutter by avoiding every single digital tool and platform that isn’t necessary for me to do my job (and then I put strict time limits on when I can engage the tools I am required to use for work).
Secondly, I optimize my digital work landscape in order to streamline and protect my focus. I use the power of habit to do so. Habits are a three-part automation: the cue, the activity, and the reward. (Engineers use this to addict you to their apps: a notification is the cue, the social interaction on their platform is the activity, and the dopamine response is the reward.) I often set a timer for five minutes and engage in this cycle—but I use it to the advantage of my future focus. Here’s how: I open my work environment and let the first thing that catches my eye (the cue) direct my attention. Then I skim the content and ask Cal Newport’s question: “does this [content] directly support something I deeply value [in my business]?” If the answer is not a resounding “YES!!,” then I immediately unsubscribe or unfollow (the activity). Then I visualize all of the mental bandwidth I just freed up to focus on things that do matter to me and lean into the empowered feeling that comes along with exercising self-control (the reward). Using this strategy, I’ve found that decluttering itself can become addictive. But unlike the overwhelm that comes with maximalism, an essentialist approach vastly improves your quality of life by putting you back in charge of your time and attention. Once my timer goes off (it’s important that it’s only five minutes long so I don’t start experiencing decision-fatigue), my intention-muscles feel stronger and I can dive into the task I sat down to do.

Use your planner to timeblock the following things: your responsibilities, space for engaging in the deep work needed to advance your most important goals, ample time for in-person relationships, adequate rest and self-care, and then pad everything with margin. Then see how much time you have leftover for optional tech habits. When I did this exercise, I found that I had about four hours per week that could even reasonably go to social media. And then I thought about what else I could do with four hours per week: I could write more, read more, or spend more time outside. The allure of social media dampened considerably as I imagined how it felt to use all of my discretionary time scrolling versus getting out to hike with my kids or curling up next to my husband with a good book.

You may have unwittingly been a target of the engineers of technology in the past, but now that you understand what’s happening, you have a choice to make. You will never get back the minutes and hours spent in a mindless scroll. Become ruthlessly honest with yourself. Get Cal Newport’s book. Fast from social media for a season and deeply relish the time with your family. Ask the Lord to help you overcome any addictions that strip you of your power to be intentional. Connect to your core calling and show up as a leader in your own life. You got this.

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Are you ready to launch into an entirely new way of planning? We created the Evergreen Planner System because we needed a tool that would help us use the time we’ve been given intentionally, and it has become something we can’t live without. The Getting Started Kit is the perfect way to try two of our core products – the Annual and the Monthly. Don’t wait until we launch our next subscription box – get the tools you need today!

April 7, 2021

How to Stop Wasting Time by Taking a Second to THINK

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Mindset

Last week, we wrote about the importance of having the proper perspective when it comes to valuing time. If you haven’t had a chance, it’s worth reading right now.

For many of us, time-wasting doesn’t look like one would expect. We’re not laying around on the couch all day every day, eating Cheetos and watching reruns. We’re actually really busy—always going, doing, hustling, and racing from one thing to the other. That’s how we feel, anyway, and the result all too often does look like Cheetos-and-reruns-on-the-couch for a lot longer than we think is healthy, because we feel too worn out to do anything else with our pockets of free time.

It’s the typical song and dance of our busy culture.

But what if a large amount of our busy-ness itself is the drain on our time? What if we’re needing to say “no” more often, so that our “yes”-es have the space to breathe and really flourish? How do we gauge the quality of our busy?

Each of us will have to answer this question individually, and each of our templates for evaluating will look a little differently. That’s because we each have different giftings to edify the Body, and different areas of the garden that we’re called to cultivate.

We need to take a second to ask these questions:

What are the most overwhelming areas of my life? If I were proactive in these areas (instead of operating in a default, reactionary state), how could I clear the excess and focus on what matters most?
What are my top priorities—the “non-negotiables” on my plate? Who and what must I show up for with commitment and thoughtfulness, even if it means other things have to go unmanaged
What work has God given me to do in His world? He’s ‘got the whole world in His hands, and He doesn’t need me to have every last detail figured out. So what is the unique role He created me to fill—the space where I’d be the hardest to replace?

Your life is too precious to let it drain away in the exhausting hamster wheel of reactionary living. Use the flex space of your planner to get still and think deeply. There’s a lot of joy to be found in your corner of the garden.

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March 31, 2021

How to Stop Wasting Time: Perspective

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Mindset

Stop for just a second and ask yourself: what is a week of your life actually worth?

We only have 4,452 weeks from the moment we’re born until our 85th birthday (if we’re given that many years).

Just…let that sink in. We have fewer than 5k weeks in an entire (generous) lifespan, and yet, sometimes we just let a “bad” or “off” week (or several) slip away without seriously evaluating underlying causes and lessons we could be learning.

Now, don’t misunderstand: sometimes a week that’s way more heavy on rest, fun, or flexibility is needed. Sometimes, crises (internal and external) endow a week with a heavenly purpose that we cannot immediately grasp from our point of view in the moment.

But are we really grasping that there are only 936 weeks from the moment our child takes her first breath to the day she’s graduating highschool? That we have only 156 weeks we get to invest into the hungry mind of our toddler before his little brain networks solidify? That in just 520 weeks an entire decade of marriage is in the books?

Are we really grasping the fact that this upcoming week is either laying another brick in the foundations of the future we’re called to help build—or that it’s stuffing the foundations with wood, hay, and stubble, and all manner of things that (thankfully) will not last in the refining fires of God’s redemption?

How quickly the weeks just tick away on our calendars.

This post is in no way designed to inspire fear: we cannot attack time with a death grip and try to slow it down or expect it to develop our personal histories exactly as we wish. However, we are called to accept the reality that time is the most precious resource we are called to steward. Unlike money or energy (two things we tend to be wayyyy more careful about spending), time is not renewable. A week that passes can never be brought back again. This week, once lived, becomes part of our personal (and family) history.

While we have eternity in Christ to explore His creation, expressing ourselves creatively as an amen to His Image in us, and basking in the goodness of communion with and in Him—our time on this side of glory is much more limited (and yet endowed with eternal purpose).

We have a finite number of weeks to walk the earth and advance the oasis of Christ’s joy into the desert, to invest rare love into hungry hearts, and to respond to temporal needs with creativity. We have a finite number of weeks to advance the cause of Christ to a world in such desperate need of His mercies.

In our modern world, being “short on time” seems to be an unquestioned constant. But we are not any shorter on time than in any other era of history. Instead, our life expectancy is better than it’s been for millennia. Our homes and garages are stocked with machines that save so much time that it would absolutely boggle the minds of our ancestors. Speed of transportation is unprecedented, and speed of communication is immediate.

Our problem is not a shortness of time, but a confusion of our priorities.

Evaluating Your Time Exercise & Worksheet

Take some time to journal through the following questions & complete this worksheet.

How exactly are you investing our weeks?
If we were to map out an average week, what areas of life get most of our attention?
Is our schedule packed to the gills with extra drive time?
Are we devoting the majority of our time dropping everything and responding to the boundary-less “emergencies” of others?
Does mindless scrolling get the best hours of our week?
Are our current priorities, events, projects, screentime activities and conversations worth the precious time out of our week that they’re claiming?
Are more important things consistently being de-prioritized in response to the tyranny of the urgent, digital distractions, or a reactive lifestyle that’s been slapped together haphazardly?

It can be difficult to honestly evaluate how we have spent our time, but it can also be the exact catalyst needed to make us make the necessary changes. How you spend your moments is how you spend your life. Make sure you’re truly making space to thrive.

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