How to Prioritize (The First Domino Effect)

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).

June 22, 2022

Recap of Podcast Season 2 Episodes

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Podcast Episodes, Podcast Season 2

We had so much fun recording the second season of our podcast. The topics below create a great foundation for building effective planning strategies, and each episode comes from a perspective of planning that combines personal responsibility with self-compassion, something we are very passionate about! Like all the content we put out, we believe these topics will help you to make intentional living an increasingly intuitive part of our life!

May 25, 2022

Time-Blocking Made Simple – Podcast Ep 15

Posted by By Clari Mercier

Posted in Lifestyle Planning, Planner Tips, Podcast Episodes, Podcast Season 2

Listen to episode 15 on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Time-blocking is a powerful productivity tool for maximizing the amount of time you have available, and for liberating your time to focus on what matters most. Yet over the years of talking to women who use our planner (and others who have a heart for intentional living), we’ve found that many of people are intimidated by the concept of time-blocking, don’t know how to make it work for them, or simply feel like it’s just too structured and stiff.

We totally get this! No one wants to feel pressure to make their intuitive daily rhythms “work” on paper before they’re “allowed” to move forward on them. No one wants to feel like there’s no flexibility for spontaneity, or to feel false-guilt when things don’t go “as planned.”

Thankfully, the way we approach time-blocking feels nothing like putting a straight-jacket on your day.

When you time-block, we encourage you to focus on just one thing:

**Time-blocking is about getting crazy realistic about the time you have available so that you can successfully prioritize the things that matter most.**

When you make space to get realistic about your time, set up habits and rhythms to free up mental bandwidth, thoughtfully organize your tasks, apply prioritization and batching methods, and pad everything with ample margin—both your mental peace and your productivity will increase.