My Favorite Time-Management Hack for Managing the Mundane as a Creative

The Pomodoro Method

Tonight, I (Shelby) am using what’s called The Pomodoro Method—but with my own twist (which I’ll get to in a minute).

The method was developed by a university student who had a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato (pomodoro means tomato in Italian). With his original time-management technique, you use a kitchen timer to discipline yourself to short, focused bursts of work, with short breaks in between.

Typically, the breakdown is four rounds of 25 minutes working with 5 minute breaks in between (which equals about 2 hours of focused work). Then after the four rounds you get a longer break (around 25 minutes) before repeating the process. My shorthand for this particular application of the technique is 25-5 x4.

I used this technique a lot when I was freelancing. The work I was doing would often get very granular and repetitive. Sometimes the monotony would make me throw in the towel—especially when I thought about needing to do eight hours of the same tasks. The Pomodoro Method kept me on track, while also legitimizing the need for breaks.

How This Hack Came in Clutch Today

I mentioned at the beginning that I’m using this hack right now—with a twist. Here’s what’s happening: I ended up unexpectedly having a free night. The kids are at the grands, the husband is working late, and the house is blissfully quiet.

It’s also a royal mess. Shortly before being ushered out the door, mine were just two of the nine kiddos running around the place. The “event” wasn’t planned—we just live in a tight-knit community with a lot of cousins. I typically do not let my children leave behind a mess for others to clean up (and neither do the other parents involved), but I happily prioritized more time for a leisurely visit over our normal habits this time.

I figured I could whip the place back into shape as soon as they were out the door.

But as I was tying on my apron and rolling up my sleeves, inspiration struck. I wanted to write more than I wanted to clean my house. (I know there are other creatives out there who resonate with this dilemma.)

October 5, 2022

Taming Your To-Do List

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Lifestyle Planning

A Season of Chaos

Earlier this summer I (Clari) was about ready to call it quits with this whole intentional living thing. We had moved to a new town, went through weeks of delayed home renovations, dealt with the whole family getting sick, travelled a bunch, and then came back to a place that felt anything like home. All our normal rhythms that we had built in our old home to sustain our daily habits and responsibilities had fallen apart, and I just didn’t even know where to begin to pick up the pieces.

Every time I had a spurt of energy to do something about my situation, I found myself contemplating the chaos without a clue as to where I should begin.

About that same time, a dear friend text me requesting tips on how to best maximize her Evergreen planner and I couldn’t decide if I should just laugh or cry. There I was as a co-owner of a company who sells a planner that is supposed to make intentional living intuitive and I couldn’t get my life in order. She had asked me how I was using my planner, and the truth was I was hardly using it at all. Like all my habits, the habit of daily planning had fallen to the wayside after so many months of not having a lot of control over my days (anyone who has gone through a slew of home rennovations knows precisely what I’m talking about here).

Taming My To-Do List

So I let the text sit there for about 24 hours until I could come up with a response that was both honest, but would also help and encourage my friend in her own time-management journey. And suddenly I remembered that Shelby (co-owner & creator of the Evergreen Planner), had written an amazing resource titled Taming Your To-Do List. I knew that’s exactly what my friend needed. And as I typed out that text, I realized that it was also exactly what I needed. Not even bothering to search for it among the many files on my computer, I went straight to our website and downloaded the guide.

July 20, 2022

How to Prioritize (The First Domino Effect)

Posted by By Shelby Shepherd

Posted in Goal Setting, Lifestyle Planning

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!)

July 6, 2022

The Brain That Organizes Itself

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Lifestyle Planning, Mindset

Several years ago I read a book titled The House that Cleans Itself by Mindy Starns Clark. The topic of the book was home organization, but the author took an approach that was entirely new to me. The gist of it was this: instead of spending so much time cleaning up your house as is, take the time to set up your home in a way that it will clean itself.

She recommended you take time to really evaluate your home, including taking pictures to give yourself a new perspective, keeping an eye out for messy spots in the home, and to get really, really specific about the types of things you were always cleaning (be it toy blocks, laundry, shoes, school bags, etc.). Once you knew what was causing most of the cleaning issues, you could brainstorm extremely specific solutions for those issues.

She shared one story of how her kids’ backpacks would always get dumped in the hallway after school, meaning the entrance to their home was always cluttered looking. Instead of trying to train her kids to walk their backpacks to their rooms, she thrifted a thin chest she could keep in her hallway and voila, the cleaning issue went away. Her kids could just as easily plop their backpacks in the chest as they could the ground, and suddenly the home looked nicer, with practically no effort given to “cleaning” in the way we typically think about it. The author even admitted that the chest would have never been a piece of furniture she would have chosen for it’s aesthetic qualities, but it was far nicer looking than the consistent clump of backpacks that were previously in her entryway. A little investigation, a little brainstorming to find a solution, and a thrifted piece enabled her to have a hallway that “cleaned itself”.

How Mental Organization is Like Home Organization

By now you might be wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about a cleaning book, when we’re a company that focuses on planners and productivity. The reason is that it occurred to me this week that our planner does for your brain exactly what this book encouraged you to do for your home… it teaches your brain to organize itself, in a way that becomes increasingly intuitive (in other words, in a way that will take a lot less work once established).