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:

This Week: What we’re doing this week, materials we need prepared, and finished work needing to be assessed.
Upcoming: Where we’re headed, how options and opportunities may fit into the bigger picture, and the resources I need to still acquire.
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.

September 7, 2022

Realistic Systems for an Amazing Homeschool Year – Part 1

Posted by By Shelby Shepherd

Posted in Homeschooling, Planner Tips

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

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.

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).