Tag

hub for your brain

October 19, 2022

Turning your planner into a hub for your brain

Many of you know that the Evergreen Planner system was born from worksheets that Shelby created in one of the most hectic seasons of her life. What is perhaps less well known, is that the beautiful leather cover we sell was born from McCauley’s vision for creating a planner that was both beautiful to look at, extremely practical to use, and would last for years to come.

The first leather covers that we used (pictured above) were handmade by McCauley on her living room floor. But we knew that wouldn’t be a practical way of getting them into the hands of an entire planner community, so McCauley spent a few years searching for a leathersmith who could take her handmade vision and turn it into a beautifully refined handcrafted leather product we could have available to our dear customers.

How the Cover Creates a Hub for Your Brain

Our Annual and Classic planner booklets can be used powerfully on their own, but when bound together in our Cover along with anything* else you need, the booklets are transformed into a personalized system that can stand up to the demands of constant use.

*When we say anything… we mean it. We stuff our covers with stamps, sticky note pads, washi tape, pens, small scissors, etc. Our Covers contain everything we need to braindump, sort and plan on the go! In a purse or loose in your car, this would feel like absolute chaos, but when it’s bound nicely in your leather Cover you can take all these implements on the go without a second thought!

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September 14, 2022

Realistic Systems for an Amazing Homeschool Year – Part 2

By default, the homeschool life is full of the unexpected.

So how can you, as a home educating Mama, leverage your foresight, creativity, and problem-solving genius to set up easy-to-maintain systems for an amazing homeschool year? Having a strong planner that operates as a dynamic hub for your brain really helps.

In the last post, I wrote about the best ways to optimize your planner for looking at your month as a whole, and also how to utilize your planner when getting into the details of each day and week. Today, we’re diving into how life-giving rhythms can support your homeschool day!

Use Rhythms and Visual Cues to Keep Things Going—Not Just Your Planner

Once upon a time, I tried to write down every bit of information relevant to our homeschool somewhere in my planner. After a few weeks of that, I realized I was duplicating my work and crowding my planner with notes I didn’t really need it to hold.

This also meant that the reminders in my planner that needed to jump out to me were lost in a sea of detail.

I was trying to force my planner to hold a ton of information that I didn’t really need it to.

As a homeschooling mama, there are three groups of information I need to keep up with:

  1. This Week: What we’re doing this week, materials we need prepared, and finished work needing to be assessed.
  2. Upcoming: Where we’re headed, how options and opportunities may fit into the bigger picture, and the resources I need to still acquire.
  3. Past Records: What we’ve already done, and examples of the progress that my students are making

I really only use my planner to support me in two of these categories:

  • to keep up with key tasks for this week,
  • and to brainstorm ideas for upcoming educational pursuits,
  • —oh, and to develop and maintain rhythms and habits that strongly support and nourish our homeschooling as an entrepreneurial family lifestyle.

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September 7, 2022

Realistic Systems for an Amazing Homeschool Year – Part 1

By default, the homeschool life is full of the unexpected.

So how can you, as a home educating Mama, leverage your foresight, creativity, and problem-solving genius to set up easy-to-maintain systems for an amazing homeschool year? Having a strong planner that operates as a dynamic hub for your brain really helps.

Over the next three posts, I (Shelby, the residential homeschool nerd) am sharing my best tips, planning strategies, and proven systems for providing my children a consistent and rich homeschooling experience—even when life keeps on throwing the curveballs.

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July 20, 2022

How to Prioritize (The First Domino Effect)

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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