journal

April 14, 2021

How to Stop Wasting Time on Screens

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 17, 2021

Understanding Social Energy & Communication Styles

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Mindset

Last week, we wrote about productivity personalities, how to feed strengths and compensate for weaknesses, and how these ideas have played out in our Evergreen Team dynamics. In this post, we’re going to look at social energy and communication styles, and the ways doing all this work around who you are and who you’re working with can help you work more compassionately and productively as an individual and on a team.

Social Energy

Way more popular than productivity personalities, is diving into the concept of being “introverted” vs “extroverted.”

Once Shelby realized that she is an extraverted worker, everything changed. At first, she was thrilled at the prospect of working completely alone. The work she was doing at the time was extremely intellectually stimulating, and was exactly the kind of material she’d hide in the closet for hours on end to enjoy in silence.

But after weeks of focusing alone on a project, she felt like she was going insane. Even with plenty of socializing outside of work, it wasn’t enough. Working alone was miserable.

Then, during an inner work journaling exercise something she wrote down hit her like a lightning bolt: if working alone was not life-giving, why not set a boundary to no longer accept projects that would have her alone for hours and hours on end? Why not prioritize work that would connect her with an energizing team?

It was a pivotal moment for Shelby and paved the way for a series of decisions that ultimately resulted in the Evergreen Planner finally getting what it needed to flourish.

So ask yourself: Do you get your energy from working primarily alone or in a team? How can you choose a new path that energizes you instead of one that depletes you?

Communication Styles

Whether you are energized by working solo or in a team, you’ll always need to communicate with others.

It really helps to understand that there are two types of communicators:

The external processor needs to talk it out (or write it out) in order to process something. She will work through issues best during a conversation, and often times the position that she seems to be taking dogmatically at the beginning actually evolves during the conversation, and by the end, can be radically different. This can be very confusing to others, but it’s just because very little processing of information (which is where the consideration of different perspectives, the reasoning, the prioritizing, and the negotiating come into play) happened before the conversation was ever had.
The internal processor operates, in many respects, in just the opposite way. She will be very hesitant to make a decision or give feedback on an idea without first being able to take time alone to think and process. Overall, her communication may seem minimal, which can be confusing to others who want immediate feedback on an idea or project. Her silence may be perceived as negative feedback, when really it is just her hesitancy in offering any opinion before she has considered every angle in silence and solitude.

Ask yourself: Which one resonates most with you? Are you an internal or external processor?

Like most things, being an external or internal processor has it’s strengths and weaknesses. However, there are specific practices and habits that can help you both honor who you have been made to be, while also honoring the needs of others who are different from you.

If you’re an external processor (like Shelby), a trick to stop confusing others or making conflicts worse is to journal out your thought processes before engaging in conversation. Writing can be just as effective as talking something out, but it will help you to objectively look at your own reasoning before someone else has to call you on your own inconsistencies. An effective journaling habit will make your communications with others much more efficient, effective, and persuasive. However, because talking it out is often easier and more enjoyable, it also helps to designate certain (willing) people in your life to be the recipients of your brainstorming sessions. Tell them in advance that you’re calling them specifically to bounce ideas off of them, talk through a problem, or just get thoughts out of your brain where they’re clogging everything up.
If you’re an internal processor (like McCauley), a key to avoiding frustration with others is to give them the assurance that you’re thinking over the things they’ve brought up and that you will get back to them with a conclusion. Then give yourself space to think through the issues in silence. You don’t have to answer them in that moment, even if they’re pressuring you to. You don’t have to go against your gut if you really just need the time to process alone before making a decision. However, keep yourself accountable to doing the work needed to be able to give the feedback that others need from you in a timeline that makes sense for the project or decision. Communicate when they can expect an answer from you.

Do the Inner Work

It can take some journaling and discussions with loved ones in order to figure out some of these things for yourself, but it’s worth the effort.

When you bring other personality dynamics to the table, the discussions for how to understand and mutually support one another deepen in complexity. But we’ve found these musings and discussions to be exceedingly fruitful in our homes, our businesses, and in our communities.

Try pulling out your planner and journaling through these questions:

Are you an extravert in your work, or an introvert? Do you need to spend time with a team in order to be energized? Or do you need to make sure you’re getting a lot of time to work alone?
Are you an external or an internal processor? What about your spouse? Your closest coworker? How can you support them better in their communication needs?
Are you okay with leaning into who God uniquely made you to be? Do you think it’s better to have different personality traits? Why or why not? Are you open to the idea that, as long as you’re within God’s ethical guidelines, your unique working personality is actually a specifically designed blessing for His Kingdom?

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Don’t forget that in addition to taking time to work through the above questions, we also offer an incredibly simple quiz to help you determine your productivity personality!

March 10, 2021

Do You Know Your Productivity Personality?

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Mindset

Despite ourselves, we are pretty big fans of personality research. I think both of us have tried to quit the whole personality-test scene about a dozen times, but we keep coming back to it.

Truth is, we know that God loves diversity, and has built it into His Creation in some pretty astonishing ways. One of the most interesting, delightful, and sometimes confounding ways is the diversity of human personalities.

Within the boundaries of healthy ethics is a vast array of valid differences in which individuals perceive, engage, and respond to the world around them. Observing these differences, naming and cataloguing them, and then discussing them in light of God’s Word is work that seems to fall along the same lines as what Adam started doing with the animals in the garden. Only, unlike animals, God has put eternity in our hearts, and so our psyche is impossible for humans to fully comprehend and define. But to us, that truth only serves to magnify the intrigue of personality science. So we keep on discussing all of these significant differences in order to cultivate understanding, cooperation, and fruitfulness across the board.

We also research these things in order to better understand our own tendencies, identify any needs we’ve been ignoring, address personal weaknesses, tap into our core motivations, and better leverage our strengths.

Just like learning your top Love Languages can help you build into your marriage, or pegging Enneagram numbers can help you better respect your friends, learning your Productivity Personality can really help you begin to develop the most effective conditions in your home, office, and team systems for getting things done.

Working Personality

In his immensely practical book, The Synergist, Les McKeown outlines three types of people on your average working team:

the Visionary: this is the person who is constantly imagining ways to get to the next level
the Operator: this is the person who is consistently getting things done
the Processor: this is the person who obsesses over the systems that make everything work sustainably

Most of us have a dominant trait, and then a secondary one. And, like anything else, every type has strengths and weaknesses.

For instance, Shelby is a Visionary-Processor. She is always seeing the bigger picture, and then feeling the urge to create some kind of list or calendar or habit to get the team from A-Z. The problem is, all the ideas and systems she produces aren’t always super realistic without a lot of healthy feedback to tame them into something doable. It’s also easy for her to feel irritated that the letters B-Y are full of a lot of minutiae that distract from the initial burst of inspiration or the ending triumph of accomplishment.

McCauley is an Operator-Visionary. Getting stuff done and then dreaming about the next big goal are both her native language, but she can often feel overwhelmed by not being able to see how everything is working together to a single strong end. She never questions the amazing possibilities, but she does tend to tame Shelby’s chomping-at-the-bit to up-level with the same serious question: “But have you finished this other vital task?”

McKeown’s book urges the reader to identify their own working personality and the personalities of the other influential people on their team, and to understand the various strengths and weaknesses, and the ways that each personality can clash. The goal of all of this inner-work is to become what he calls a Synergist: someone who is realistic about the team’s dynamics, can patch personality holes when hiring, can work to resolve conflict, and can weave the team’s various strengths into a singularly powerful force.

After Shelby read this book in 2019 and we examined the Evergreen team dynamics, we began praying that we could find a Processor-Operator to join the team. We knew that pulling another Visionary on the team could serve to drown out McCauley’s common-sense approach that wanted to see the results that come from consistency before jumping into a new strategy. We also knew that my hankering for organization and sustainability would solve the overwhelm problem—so long as the systems we created were actually practical. We also knew that a mere Processor (without an Operator wing) would bog us down a bit too much with systems, without having that can-do, problem-solving spirit that our tiny startup needed from every single member on our founding team.

Not too long after, Shelby was having a conversation with Clari at a family reunion (fun fact: she’s my husband’s cousin by marriage), and she mentioned that she was a Virtual Assistant. Something was seriously clicking. After an interview and trial run, we quickly realized that she was the Processor-Operator we’d been praying for.

Knowing your working personality is useful for so much beyond just hiring. It can be useful in any working relationship. Knowing that McCauley is an Operator has helped Shelby make sure that she included progress updates in team meetings. Knowing that Shelby is a Visionary has helped McCauley understand that Shelby’s not flaking out on the here and now—but that she’s hardwired to be envisioning what’s next. She also has learned that I’m a well of ideas that can be tapped at any time with a single question—and McCauley is always there to help Shelby prioritize the next best idea.

Knowing your working personality can also help you identify your personal weaknesses so that you can stop spinning your wheels.

Shelby was able to identify that she didn’t have many Operator tendencies. This meant that while she was a natural at reverse-engineering huge goals, it was really tempting for her to try to skip the consistent effort necessary to turn those goals into a reality. So she started to create planning habits that helped her focus on action over more strategizing. She started to use her planner to record “tada lists” (things that I got done) instead of just todo lists, as a way to spur herself into doing what she knew was needed. She also started to be honest about her tendencies to procrastinate follow-up and project completion, to eliminate distractions that limited significant progress, and to reach out to others for accountability.

But even while building these essential habits, Shelby also fed her inner Visionary-Processor by listening to podcasts that stretched her imagination, externally-processing dreams with certain designated people, and giving herself permission to flesh out new ideas for the future when the time was right.

So how about you? Take this incredibly simple quiz to gain more insight on your productivity personality.

Then, take time to journal through the following prompts:

How can you mitigate weaknesses through intentional planning habits?
How can you feed your strengths?
What strengths does your team have? Who do you need to hire?

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Today is the last day to purchase our Q2 subscription box! We ship our sub boxes four times a year and they contain 3 Monthly booklets along with curated planning accessories. The Monthly is the muscle of our planning system. It’s a five-week undated day planner featuring week spreads, habit trackers, timeblocked day pages, and plenty of bullet grid flex space to make the planner completely yours. We can’t wait to see what you do with the right tools in hand!