journal

November 26, 2021

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

Posted in Lifestyle Planning, Planner Tips, Podcast Episodes

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

October 27, 2021

How We Plan Our Days – (Podcast Ep. 4)

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Lifestyle Planning, Planner Tips, Podcast Episodes

Listen on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

Before the Evergreen planner system, I (Clari) had never used a true day-planner. I had tried a myriad of different planners when I worked as an executive assistant before having kids, but they were the types that only had a small box, a column, or a couple of lines for each day. I also used a digital calendar to coordinate meetings and make sure nothing was double booked, but other than getting binged with meeting reminders, I didn’t really reference it or use it to effectively plan my days. My thoughts, plans and tasks were scattered among digital notes, emails, sticky notes, a half-used planner and to-do lists written on random pieces of paper.

But then I became a mom and quit my traditional job. It never occurred to me that a planner could be used to plan rest, to form life-giving family rhythms, or to plan intentional time with my kiddos—just as much as it could be used to make sure critical work projects or mundane home tasks were completed. I again wandered through my days doing what was in front of me, and working off one endlessly long to-do list.

Annie Dillard, in her book The Writing Life, wrote, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”

The reality is we have a lot of agency over whether we live our days intentionally, with purpose, or whether we let them pass by, moving from task to task based on emotions or a crushing sense of urgency. But we can just as easily fall into the trap of trying to squeeze every moment of productivity out of each day, neglecting our needs for rest or even the ones we’re called to love. But in order to find that middle way, we have to begin by planning each day.

The beauty of planning each day (especially when you have an entire spread and can plan with the context of your week in view, like you can with our Monthly booklet), is that you are able to plan each day in a way that honors the season you’re in, the ones you’ve been given to love, and the work you’re responsible for.

And planning a lot of days, over several weeks and months, enables you to begin forming life-giving rhythms that work to breathe life into your family and help you make progress on those bigger goals (revisit our Four Rules of Planning and R.O.O.T.E.D. Goals episodes for more on these concepts).

In this episode, we walk through how we each plan our days on the day pages of our Monthly booklet. If you’d like to follow along, you can download our free printable below. This printable has all the major elements of our Day page, enabling you to see exactly what we are talking about as we plan the different elements of our day using the time-blocker, top targets, prompts, etc. Because it’s the tool we each use, we talk about our specific planner throughout this episode. However, the principles we talk about can transfer to a lot of different planners, so whatever planner you use, we believe this will be an episode you find valuable!

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If you haven’t yet, please take a moment to rate and review this podcast or share it with a friend! It’s the best way to help other women find this life-giving content. We’re so thankful for you!

September 22, 2021

Simple Ways to Make Your Planner Beautiful

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Planner Tips, Uncategorized

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!

September 15, 2021

Planner Hack: The Amazing Paperclip

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Planner Tips

One of the biggest pain-points we personally had during the years that we were testing out #alltheplanners was simply this: it was too dang easy to get lost in your own notebook!

The most amazing brainstorming session would get lost in a moment as we moved on to fill out the next prompts and schedules, rarely to be seen again. This was annoying at best, and actually radically complicated our lives at worst when our week’s agenda was inaccessible in the moments when we needed to make quick decisions during the course of our days. We solved this problem in a big way with our innovative dutch door layout.

As we became more skilled in the use of our own planner, we began using a simple tool – a paperclip – to aid us in our ability to navigate, mark and reference various key pages. This one hack put an end to getting lost in our own planner for good, making the navigation of the Evergreen Planner a real dream. Our planner system is minimalistic, yet dynamic. We love that you can effectively use a simple ballpoint pen to get your thoughts organized on paper, or that you can just as well bust out your entire collection of microns and washi tape for beautifully curated designs.

Our paperclip hack follows that same principle that makes our planner system gold—you can go simple or you can go elaborate—either way, the functionality remains.

Here are some ideas on how to leverage the paperclip to up-level your planning game:

Bookmark this Week: A paperclip can also be used to mark the current day on your vertical week’s agenda (and hold old weeks closed).

Bookmark Today: Hold the extra day spreads closed so your Monthly easily opens up to your current day!

Secure Keepsakes: You can paperclip keepsake papers or polaroid photos to the pages of our Monthly or Annual & turn them into memory books.

Flag What’s Important: Ordinary paperclips can be customized using your favorite washi tape and they can be used to flag specific pages.

Maximize Cover Functionality: You can paperclip receipts or other bits of paper you need easily accessible onto the outside of your Cover’s pockets!

Keep Them Close: Paperclips can easily be stored on the back cover of your Monthly, ready to whip out whenever you need one!

The paperclip provides so many great advantages to the planning process. We are constantly grabbing paperclips to use in different ways, which is why we’ve curated a fun and varying collection to include in our subscription boxes.

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