Taming Your To-Do List

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.

September 21, 2022

Realistic Systems for an Amazing Homeschool Year – Part 3

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Homeschooling, Planner Tips

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.

If you missed the first two posts in this series, you can read about my two most effective ways for using my planner and how I use life-giving rhythms to support our homeschool day. Today’s post is all about keeping things real, leaning into your own unique vision and goals for homeschooling, and how to troubleshoot problem areas. This post is full of easily applied practical advice you will want to use again and again!

Check in Every Morning to Create Realistic Lessons for That Unique Day

Homeschool mamas have to self-manage—and it’s really easy to let the day get away from you.

Taking just 5 minutes in the morning to timeblock your day can really come in clutch to prevent this from happening.

The Day Spread on the Evergreen Planner has the todo list space nestled right up to the timeblocker, allowing you to write task lists to accompany each section of your day. This keeps these tasks realistic, well-defined, and within visually obvious boundaries.

As a working homeschool mom, it really helps me transition out of the deep work I need to do for my business in the mornings and don my teacher hat for morning lessons. I’ve found that planning my deep work session the night before helps me to maximize that 5:30-7:30am block, and then using my planner to timeblock the rest of the day afterwards helps me to shift my emotional-orientation away from my work and towards jumping in whole-heartedly with my students. I also know that I have their nap/quiet time to close any loops from the morning and catch up on shallower administrative tasks.

September 14, 2022

Realistic Systems for an Amazing Homeschool Year – Part 2

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Homeschooling, Planner Tips

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

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.