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September 22, 2021

Simple Ways to Make Your Planner Beautiful

We’ve always admired the way the bullet journaling community lives in the junction of practical and stunning. A simple Pinterest search will show you the many ways habit trackers can turn into full blown works of art, and how monthly spreads can become masterpieces. Don’t let these searches overwhelm you: you don’t actually have to sink your life’s savings into art supplies. In fact, when we first began forming layouts, we copied what we saw others doing and used the scrap paper and supplies we already owned.

The key to making your planner lovely is to keep it fun and to keep it YOU. Below are seven tips that will help you do just this.

1. Embrace YOUR handwriting.

Don’t waste time hating something that is a part of who you are. If you need to, slow down and focus a tad more to increase tidiness and readability. Paying attention to spacing and line height (our bullet grid can help with this!), or giving a little extra thought to particular letterforms can go a long way.

2. Two words: WASHI TAPE

The uses for this magical art supply are truly endless. Edge your daily or weekly spreads to quickly add a splash of decoration. Divide notes on your bullet flex space, create headers, or chart out space on your time-blocker. {Pro tip: start with rolls of solid colors with muted tones, and then choose one or two patterns that coordinate.}

3. Highlighters

Your favorite pastel highlighters can be used in many of the same ways washi tape can. Edge your planner pages, box out a quote or list, or create a colorful system of time-blocking. If your ink is smudging, try highlighting before writing.

4. Boxes

Utilize boxes to create a visual representation of different categories of notes (errands, work tasks, grocery lists, etc). These boxes can be outlined with highlighters, washi tape, or a thick pen. Add an over-sized sticker in the corner of a box as a simple way to spice it up.

5. When you “mess up” your planner

A glue stick is great for those times you feel like you’ve “messed up your planner.” Simply grab a piece of paper (brown paper grocery bags work great) and layer it over whatever you want to cover. By tearing the edges of the paper, you can add a little texture to your spread. Now take a deep breath, and start again.

6. Paper, paper, paper

Grab a piece of scrapbook paper, graph paper, a paper grocery bag—really anything (no joke—we scour junk mail regularly for interesting colors or patterns)! Glued to your spread, you can create an interesting header or special background for an important list, adding a bit of layering fun at the same time.

7. Getting Fancy

Want to up-level your spreads? Use a label maker for quick headers or inspirational messages. If you have a printer at home, you can also print custom headers or list titles, especially for those lists you make over and over again.

Interested in our favorite planner accessories? Check out our accessory inspiration page here. And don’t forget to check out our Pinterest page full of beautiful spreads!

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The Evergreen Planner system is comprised of three unique pieces: the Cover, the Annual and the Monthly. Here at Evergreen we believe in self-compassionate planning and want to inspire women to craft a lifestyle that both fuels their dreams and serves their daily rhythms. Learn more about our system here!

July 7, 2021

July 2021 Team Update

Hey dear ones, today’s blog post is going to be a bit different! We’re coming at you with a personal update, since so much has happened in the lives of Team Evergreen this year! 

The first big adjustments came when McCauley moved out of her little white house—and Shelby moved into it! Fun fact: McCauley and Shelby actually used to share the master bedroom of that little white house as sisters before they each married! After their mom moved out, Shelby’s family lived in it for a few months, and then when they had to move a few hours away, McCauley’s family moved into it! Now that McCauley’s family has moved into their more long-term home, Shelby’s family was able to slide back into that darling little house that she felt they had to leave all too soon. 

So, yes, we’ve definitely been playing a bit of musical houses over here. 😉

While Shelby was neck-deep in moving, Clari gave birth to her baby! Her third son, Stellan was born on April 15, at 9 lbs and 9oz. He’s basically a copy-and-paste of his two big brothers, with the fluffy blonde hair and big blue eyes. He’s in the 99th percentile in basically every category, is already sharing his baby-chattering opinion on things at the team meetings, and has a smile that will absolutely melt your heart! He’s going to get to take his first beach trip with his family shortly, and the rest of the team may be more than a bit jealous of that fact. With the way Clari holds together all the backend processes at Team Evergreen while rocking her boy mom life (while starting in on preschool with her oldest!), she definitely deserves a coastal vacation!

Shortly before Clari returned to work, McCauley went into labor. Shelby was turning in for the night after an evening work session when the call came from Philip that it was showtime! Shelby hopped into the car and tried not to cut the six minute drive to McCauley’s house in half from speeding. McCauley labors like a true pro, and it wasn’t long before Nancy Ro came into the world at 1:42 a.m. on April 30th, at 8 lbs and 10 oz, 21” long. She’s behaved and stayed looking like a snuggly newborn for a bit longer than her big siblings seemed to. You could stare at her perfect rosy cheeks and long dark eyelashes for hours. Some of us certainly have been.

And because life always seems to work out this way, Shelby spent the next few days following her new niece’s birth juggling night-nanny duties _and_ helping to get her family fully moved into the little white house (which had to first get a fresh coat of paint on the walls). Thankfully, due to her family’s minimalistic tendencies, the packing and unpacking process wasn’t too intense, but she is very glad to finally be settled in—besides all of the bookcases she still needs to paint. Now she’s in full swing with preparations for the upcoming homeschooling year, and her mama heart couldn’t be more full.

So, Team Evergreen has finally and fully emerged from our maternity leave season, and is digging into all the things that need to be done for the third quarter of the year. We were able to have one of our full-day, mega-productive, in-person team meetings in June. As always, we ended the day marveling at how, when we all three get together, we can pour over finance details and project plans for hours on end without it even feeling like work!

The feeling of being a part of this team is golden. And from the bottom of our hearts, we also want to thank you for being a part of the Evergreen Planner story. 

We each have our own unique life circumstances and callings, but what a fun thing to unite with you through the passion we share for living intentionally and making space to really thrive. 

We do hope you’re having a super delightful Summer, gang.

xx,

Team Evergreen

April 28, 2021

Taking a Break From Your Planner

Your planner is a hub for your brain. 

But is there ever a right time to take a break from your planner?

From the hearts of three fellow busy women, let us offer you some solace with a resounding YES.

The planner is absolutely incredible for charting out rhythms, decluttering your mind, storing tasks and reminders, housing the flexible structures you want to build into your days, providing real-life context for your goals and plans, and helping you get laser-focused on the things that matter most in just minutes

But sometimes life happens in such a way that trying to dive into our planners feels heavy, out-of-context, or forced.

Has this ever happened to you?

If so, here’s a word of advice: don’t force it.

It’s 100% okay to take a break from your planner, or from parts of it. It’s okay if you never touch your planner on the weekends, or if you go several days only jotting down your top targets. It’s okay if you only timeblock on the days when you need to, or if you only use the habit tracker when you feel inspired.

Here are examples from our own lives that we’ve found taking a break from our own planners makes sense:

  • Periods of extreme growth. Sometimes, amazing new things come along that legit break our rhythms and flow. It’s simply one of the risks of serious personal and lifestyle growth—and it’s a good thing! It allows us to mentally go back to the drawing board and re-engage our creativity, rather than going through the motions of old habits that no longer serve our purposes.
  • Postpartum. Those sweet, first weeks with baby are not the time to stress about all the things. When the little love comes, your job is to get to know her (and find pockets of time to sleep—something that can rarely be timeblocked ahead of time with a newborn!) Do not stress about “needing” to rush back to your flexible structures. The itch to get organized will come back naturally, and then your planner will be there, ready for you to start tracking all the good stuff (feeding schedules, sleeping schedules, questions to ask your healthcare provider, etc.) as well as giving you a way to ease back into your broader goals. But until then, remember that staring at your baby’s little fingers and toes for an hour is a phenomenal use of your time.
  • Family days, trips, vacations, and holidays. When it comes to dedicated family time, our approach is to leverage our planners to proactively prepare things to go as smoothly as possible so that we don’t have to be tied down to our paper lists and schedules. This looks like using our week grid to make sure we’re getting the tasks done we need in order to make ample space for relaxation later, (such as working our way through work deadlines, and all the packing, shopping, cleaning, and food prep lists). You can also exclusively use your planner as a journal while you’re on vacation so that you have a lovely record of what happened (I guarantee you’ll treasure it later!)
  • Weekends. Whether or not you use the planner on the weekends is a deeply personal decision. We certainly use ours when it makes sense (for instance, Shelby is off mom-duty on Saturday morning, allowing her a dedicated half-day for work). You might use your Sunday page to record sermon notes. Many people also enjoy planning out their upcoming week on Sunday afternoons—experiment to figure out what works best and feels best for you!
  • Crisis times. When there’s an emergency, unless it has to do with serious scheduling issues, typically your planner is not even on your radar. Depending on how emotionally upsetting the emergency is, it might take you some time to get back into a flow or to even have the wherewithal to approach getting mentally organized again. That’s okay. Our planner is designed to reinforce a working memory, reminding you over and over again (due to our dutch-door feature and the overall simplicity of the design) about the things that need to be top-of-mind. During low-key emergencies, these things will likely be available in your memory for quick recall (easing your dependence on your planner). The planner is also a tool that helps you adopt healthy habits quickly when life is stable—which means you’ll have the internal structure needed to weather seasons of crises with increasing intentionality.
  • When we just plain don’t feel like it. Now, we have to be careful with this one. All too often, the right decision is to open our planner and at least look at our goals and schedule—but something in us feels resistant to doing so. When this happens, it’s good to go ahead and spend at least five minutes reading through key sections of your planner before deciding not to plan your day. A few things could happen when you do this: (1) you’ll get really inspired and dive back to your intentional living goals; (2) you’ll recognize that your brain really does just need a break, and will decide to come back to your planner later; or, (3), you’ll recognize that your resistance comes from the attempt to avoid some difficult and important decisions. Just remember: the longer your break from your planner, the more things will pile up to track down and sort out later!

How to Jump Back In

After a season of not using your planner, it can feel a little overwhelming to pick it back up. 

Here’s a tip that we use in our own lives to make the transition back into getting organized a whole lot easier: Start by simply writing down what has been happening.

You can use your timeblocker to do this. Jot down the time you woke up this morning (or yesterday morning) beside the top line of your timeblocker, and continue your timestamps from there. Then try to fill in a play-by-play of how your day went. This will help your efficiency juices start flowing again, and allow you to see what rhythm tweaks make sense in this season of life.

After this, we recommend starting with filling out your agenda for the rest of the week, identifying your three top targets for the day, and writing down your seasonal goals (and why they matter!) 

The micro-journaling prompts can come later as a simple way to rebuild a healthy reflection habit. The self-care section, habit tracker, and week grid are all bonus features that will feel vital in some seasons and optional in others. 

Don’t let blank space intimidate you: remember that it’s actually really healthy for your brain. And don’t be a perfectionist! The Evergreen Planner was designed to be a place for brain-dumping so that you can operate with a decluttered mind. Cover mistakes with washi tape or glued-on paper, or use a pencil if it makes you feel better, but stay focused on what matters most. 

More than being Pinterest-perfect or Instagram-worthy, your planner is there to empower you to obtain clarity, feel organized, craft a lifestyle that supports your goals, and get focused on your next right step.

You’ve got wildly important things to do. 

Leverage your planner to fuel your fire.

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We created the Evergreen Planner System because we needed a flexible tool that would be a hub for our brains – both for those seasons of intense goal setting and for those slower seasons, when we need a tool to help us step back from the grind, re-set and jump back into planning at the right time.

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!

February 24, 2021

You’ve Got Wildly Important Things to Do

Pretend we’re at a coffee shop together. 

I’m your best friend, and you’re pouring out your heart.

You’re telling me you don’t have enough time to do the things that are really important. 

You feel stuck.

So I do what any good best friend would do. I lean in real close and I say, “You know what? You’re in control of how you spend your time because you’re an adult.”

(Just a little tough love—and then I buy you another coffee with extra whipped cream on top because I’m a 2 and you’re my person.)

But here’s the thing. The passions that burn inside of you—the things God put at the core of who you are—they matter. You should be investing your time into those wildly important things.

And I can’t just sit here without putting a hard stop to all those excuses.

I want to see you living out your truest priorities as the strong woman God has created you to be. The tyranny of the urgent, vague feelings of inadequacy, and lack of boundaries should not have a monopoly on your bandwidth.

Yes. You do have a boatload of roles to manage. Yes, there’s a pandemic, and, yes, the world is crazy, and, yes, there’s a lot going on. We all have a lot to manage right now.

But you also have so much more agency than you often like to admit. (That’ll preach—we’re also stepping on our own toes here…) You have time. You have choice. You can set healthy boundaries. You can ask for help. You can seize our moments as opportunities to lean into the future with intention, and set your future self up for success. 

You just have to choose to become an owner in how you spend your time. 

Manage Your Time, Manage Your Life

There’s so much that can be done to make your life a lot more manageable. With the right tools and mindset, you can introduce more peace and stability into your days than you previously imagined possible. You can make new space to breathe, think, and solve problems in a way that infuses confidence and growth into your lifestyle. ⠀⠀⠀⠀

You can open up time and mental energy you forgot you ever had. You can become the rested and creative version of yourself you know is trapped inside. You can dream and set goals—and achieve them. Starting now.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

And we want to help you.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Imagine sitting down every morning with a hot cup of coffee to an ever-relevant, powerfully clarifying, and deliciously addictive strategy session with yourself. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Imagine a planner that intuitively guides you through a series of highly effective time management techniques and reflection habits. Imagine a subscription box that delivers motivation right to your door, making sure you never run out of the gorgeous little booklets that empower you to bring order to your chaos.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Imagine a planner system that feels like a second brain, a cozy home for all of your creative brainstorming, and an aesthetic addition to your lifestyle collection, all rolled into one delightfully portable unit. A system that makes your craaaazy life simpler, saner, and more beautiful—almost effortlessly. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

You could be unboxing a system just like that in a matter of days

Dear one, it’s no secret—as co-founder of the Evergreen Planner—that I have a vested interest in you diving into this planner system. But what you might not know is that getting this product to market was one of the hardest roads to having a successful business that my sister and I could take. In a world where downloadables are created once and then sold countless times with relatively low overhead, this planner wasn’t born out of asking ourselves how we could start a business that would be profitable and fun.

Evergreen Planner was born out of our own desperate needs to get our lives sorted.

The earliest prototypes of this planner system quickly became a vital part of our own personal strategies for balancing home, hustle, and heart. We would use up our prototypes and then go a few weeks without our planner, and slowly watch our productivity systems begin to shudder and grind to a halt. We began to understand, on a deep level, how much we needed this planner to be a hub for our brains—a place to store and organize all of our details, rhythms, tasks, and calendars so that we could continue to uplevel in the things that mattered most. 

What started out as a fun planner project quickly grew into a core conviction—especially for McCauley. Though she was a mentally organized person by nature, she found the planner to be key for massive personal and lifestyle growth. She pressed forward—against all odds, despite me moving hours away, through five pregnancies and a handful of serious health events, overcoming one manufacturing tangle after another—and she would not stop pressing forward until she knew that this planner system was made available for you to purchase.

Why the passion?

Because you’ve got wildly important things to do.

What if this planner can help you reach PAST the mountain of wet laundry reeking of ongoing potty training sessions and draw from the abundant giftings God has given you? 

What if this planner can empower you craft your own unique and dynamic lifestyle that fuels the goals that Providence has implanted into your core?

What if this one simple (but powerful) approach to productivity can help unleash your family’s distinct potential—and your distinct potential as an individual—to help change the world?

Dear friend, hear us.

We really do believe you have a place to serve that only you can fill. God has given you a combination of life experiences, particular skills, relationships, interests, and personality traist that make you uniquely able to serve in God’s kingdom in ways that neither of us ever will. 

We want you to figure out the most essential work for your life, and get busy serving in those deeply powerful ways that no one but you can.

We believe in what God is planning to do through you, and we are humbled to offer the Evergreen Planner system as a powerful tool to help you get organized around your vitally important work.

xx,

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It’s time to finally make space to thrive. Do your future self a favor and SUBSCRIBE before the doors close for this quarter’s shipment! (Our sub box won’t open again until June!)

We invested countless hours of research into uncovering the best time management practices in the world. We wove them into one intuitive, minimalistic system that can be used daily.

✨⏳ TIME IS RUNNING out. This is your opportunity to get set up with EVERYTHING you need to take control of your time.

This one habit can CHANGE your life.