the Blog

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.

"Do you struggle with consistently using your planner? Do you ever get lost in your planner, and feel like you spend all your energy figuring out how to use it instead of making progress on your actual goals? You need the Evergreen Planner, my friend! This planner was designed by three entrepreneurial stay and home mamas who know what it's like to wear a lot of hats and juggle lots of plates. This system was designed for women like you, who also need to keep track of lots of responsibilities and see how they all interact with each other." - Rachel Tenney

We were so excited to see Rachel's review of the Evergreen Planner on YouTube. Rachel is a dear friend and has been a long-time user of the Evergreen Planner.

Many of you know that the Evergreen Planner system was born from worksheets that Shelby created in one of the most hectic seasons of her life. What is perhaps less well known, is that the beautiful leather cover we sell was born from McCauley's vision for creating a planner that was both beautiful to look at, extremely practical to use, and would last for years to come.

The first leather covers that we used were handmade by McCauley on her living room floor. But we knew that wouldn't be a practical way of getting them into the hands of an entire planner community, so McCauley spent a few years searching for a leathersmith who could take her handmade vision and turn it into a beautifully refined handcrafted leather product we could have available to our dear customers.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.

It’s noisy out there. And that’s affecting your productivity big time. And instead of just talking about it, we decided to do something about it. Starting with our own content.

The Problem with Noise

The noise isn’t just annoying and overwhelming. It’s not just draining your time and attention. It’s also draining your willpower.

Between the 800 million videos on YouTube, 430 million active users on Reddit, and 200 billion Pinterest pins, you already have every single imaginable time-management and productivity fact / idea / strategy / inspiration you could ever hope to need immediately available to you—and in just a few taps, too.

Your problem is not that you just haven’t found the right resource yet...

This is such a delightful post, because it was written by Meeka Malone, mother of the sister-founders of Evergreen Planner, McCauley and Shelby.

Mama has always challenged us to reach for excellence, and to never settle with making excuses for ourselves. It's been so fun to watch our Mama embrace this planner system that we created and gain a whole host of brand new skills in time-management and goal-setting for herself.

She's been a behind-the-scenes secret weapon for the success of our business, from staying up late into the night helping us field test and work out the last kinks on our ROOTED Goals Workbook to watching her very large gaggle of grandkids so we can record the Make Space to Thrive Podcast.

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!)

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.