Planner Tips

May 25, 2022

Time-Blocking Made Simple – Podcast Ep 15

Posted in Lifestyle Planning, Planner Tips, Podcast Episodes, Podcast Season 2

Listen to episode 15 on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Time-blocking is a powerful productivity tool for maximizing the amount of time you have available, and for liberating your time to focus on what matters most. Yet over the years of talking to women who use our planner (and others who have a heart for intentional living), we’ve found that many of people are intimidated by the concept of time-blocking, don’t know how to make it work for them, or simply feel like it’s just too structured and stiff.

We totally get this! No one wants to feel pressure to make their intuitive daily rhythms “work” on paper before they’re “allowed” to move forward on them. No one wants to feel like there’s no flexibility for spontaneity, or to feel false-guilt when things don’t go “as planned.”

Thankfully, the way we approach time-blocking feels nothing like putting a straight-jacket on your day.

When you time-block, we encourage you to focus on just one thing:

**Time-blocking is about getting crazy realistic about the time you have available so that you can successfully prioritize the things that matter most.**

When you make space to get realistic about your time, set up habits and rhythms to free up mental bandwidth, thoughtfully organize your tasks, apply prioritization and batching methods, and pad everything with ample margin—both your mental peace and your productivity will increase.

April 13, 2022

How to Build a Morning & Evening Rhythm – Podcast Ep 12

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Lifestyle Planning, Planner Tips, Podcast Episodes, Podcast Season 2

Listen to episode 12 on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

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?

Create a rhythm for your unique lifestyle

In this episode of the podcast, you’ll get long look into how each of us approaches our morning and evening rhythms. Although we all have similar values—and we’re even in similar stages of life—each of our rhythms look different.

Here’s the thing about rhythms: they have to be crafted for your lifestyle, congruent with your season of life, and based on what you and your family value. I remember listening to a podcast years ago that said that “‘should‘ is not a sustainable why.” This idea holds true for rhythms. Feeling like you “should” get up before the kids, will not be a strong enough “why” when your alarm goes off at 6am. But if you begin to know in your core—because you’ve taken the time to reflect on your personal experience—that getting up before the kids sets you up for a better, more peaceful morning, this core knowing can easily become a very strong “why.”

March 16, 2022

How Todo Lists Hinder Your Productivity – Podcast Ep 10

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Lifestyle Planning, Planner Tips, Podcast Episodes, Podcast Season 2

Listen to episode 10 on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

We know the todo list cycle all too well.

You have a hundred things rattling around in your brain, so you write out a massive list out on a piece of paper, and then jump into frenzied action.

But you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, like you are working all the time, and still have so much to do and can’t get ahead of the todo list that grows faster than you can manage.

The Problem with Todo Lists

Todo lists tend to fragment your focus. Alone, they can never be the time-management strategy you need to organize your tasks within the context of your week. Todo lists encourage you to take action, but it is most often un-prioritized action, meaning you will never make progress on the things that actually matter most to you.

Todo lists also don’t enable you to see the greater context of your productivity. When you look at a todo list, you see that you’ve either completed a task or you haven’t. Your todo list can’t tell you why your task is still unfinished. All it can offer is that sense of deflation as you contemplate that another day has passed and it’s still sitting on your list.

March 2, 2022

Quickstart Your Planning – Podcast Ep 9

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Lifestyle Planning, Planner Tips, Podcast Episodes, Podcast Season 2

Listen to episode 10 on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

You want to create a personalized time-management strategy and maximize your planner. But you’re not sure where to start or how to keep making the space to figure it all out when you’re still trying to juggle everything you already have on your to-do list.

If that sounds like you, then you’re our people.

And you need the Quickstart Your Planning Guide.

About This Episode

If you listened to the first season of our podcast, you’ll remember our Four Rules of Planning. Those rules were a helpful start, but in the months after publishing those episodes we realized a couple of things…

First, we don’t like rules. We like planning strategies that are personalized to each individual, and rules can rarely accomplish that level of customization.

Second, we couldn’t easily remember the four rules… and we wrote them. We knew that wasn’t going to work; we needed something easy to grasp that was memorable.

Lastly, we realized there was a crucial element missing (spoiler alert: it was the brain-dump!).

So we went back to the drawing board with a goal to make this process simple and memorable. Enter the PLANS Acronym. Once you know this acronym, you will be equipped to execute a process that will be easy to come back to again and again. The steps listed below are foundational for creating an effective, personalized, and simplified planning 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.