Evergreen Planner

Ever feel like no matter how hard you try, even your best routines just seem to unravel?

You're not alone.
 

I used to live in a constant state of randomness, tackling tasks scattershot and leaving things half-finished. Even a routine as simple as making my bed every morning felt like an impossible habit to keep going. 🛏️ I tried all the apps, checklists, and hacks, but once the novelty of a new routine wore off, I would slip back into my old patterns.

But mastering my time-management and productivity was deeply important to me. I wanted to do my part keep the dream my husband and I had alive of earning our income from home as a team, home educating the children together, and pursuing projects family projects that we knew mattered for the Kingdom.

Unwilling to let a lack of self-discipline be the reason we gave up on our most life-giving goals, I’d push myself into frantic bursts of productivity and sacrifice sleep to get caught up. But these sprints always left me completely drained. In 2016, after a 5-week sprint of trying to hold everything together, I nearly ended up in the hospital with an adrenal crash.

(That’s when I knew something seriously needed to change...)

My husband Kyle stood by the coffee pot, resisting the urge to brew a full strength flask of pour over. I stood by the stove making dinner. We were both staring pensively at the kitchen sink, thinking through the new problems we each faced.

We couldn’t have planned for that at the beginning of this week.
 

Thankfully, “that” was not any kind of a crisis—not even close. It was just one of those mundane situations that creates a domino effect in your schedule when you've been given so much abundance to steward. We’ve built plenty of margin into our family’s week rhythms to handle situations like these.
 

But this week was unique: our whole family onboarded with a new chiropractor, I was taking my mom to an out-of-state book sale, and our typical margin day had been committed to helping someone in an extraordinary situation with an all-day project. That meant we needed to run a tighter ship than usual schedule-wise in order to meet our responsibilities to the family business, my husband’s remote day job, homeschooling, and our local community.
 

So the unexpected logistics threw a significant wrench in our confidence that we could pull the rest of the week off without canceling something that was important to us.
 

Standing there in the kitchen, we sidestepped the temptation to put the kids to bed, brew the coffee, and pull a late-nighter to get more work projects done right then and there when we were thinking about them. (That would’ve been canceling sleep, which is also very important to us! Ha ha.)
 

Instead, we engaged in something we’ve come to practice like a lifeline: a fast but wildly effective joint planning session.