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Although productivity and time-management resources seldom address this reality, different seasons of life significantly affect your productivity in different ways. It can be easy to get caught up into thinking we should be able to plan and execute tasks regardless of what is happening around us, but this simply isn’t the case. Your productivity is going to fluctuate based on the season you find yourself in, and that's not a bad thing.

As we've studied our lives and others', we've come to identify three seasons of our productive lives. Everyone goes through these seasons (and it's possible to be in between seasons), but the key is to recognize each season early, and to understand and embrace the ways your current season will inevitably impact your productivity. In fact, knowing what season you're in and having clarity about the types of goals and tasks you should be focusing on in that season, is a key component to a sustainable time-management strategy. 

A few years ago, I read this crazy statistic that shocked me. It said the average person spends 5,000 hours in their lifetime looking for misplaced items. Ladies, that's over 6 months solid spent feeling totally disorganized, simply trying to unblock your progress. I think the reason this hit me so hard was that I completely identified with this statistic. I knew it had to be accurate based on how I tended to feel in that season of my life. I also knew that this disorganized, fretful overwhelm was seriously holding me back from accomplishing the big goals I deeply cared about.

I realized I needed a hub for my brain—a one-stop home for #allthethings I was trying to juggle. I knew that if I could capture the important details of life in one place, then I could arrange the tasks I needed to do into my schedule, and my brain would have everything it needed to prioritize and stay intentional with my time. The Evergreen Planner was born out of this desire to finally feel truly organized.

Now, when I'm feeling spacey, I have a single place I can come back to in order to know what tasks I need to tackle next. This tool has saved me so much of the precious time that I used to waste spinning my wheels, and empowers me to be more present in my home, stay on top of my daily todos, and weekly make progress on those bigger goals and dreams that motivate me to stay intentional.

Effective yet flexible rhythms are one of the key building blocks in a sustainable and intentional lifestyle. But trying to copy a guru’s routine, whether for work or home life, quickly becomes overwhelming. There are dozens of “best practices” out there, so where do you start? How do you decide what you need in your personal rhythms?

Create a rhythm for your unique lifestyle

In this episode of the podcast, you'll get long look into how each of us approaches our morning and evening rhythms. Although we all have similar values—and we're even in similar stages of life—each of our rhythms look different.

Here's the thing about rhythms: they have to be crafted for your lifestyle, congruent with your season of life, and based on what you and your family value. I remember listening to a podcast years ago that said that "'should' is not a sustainable why." This idea holds true for rhythms. Feeling like you "should" get up before the kids, will not be a strong enough "why" when your alarm goes off at 6am. But if you begin to know in your core—because you've taken the time to reflect on your personal experience—that getting up before the kids sets you up for a better, more peaceful morning, this core knowing can easily become a very strong "why."

When you are in an overwhelming season, it can be hard to know where to even begin. Crazy seasons can come out of nowhere, and often come from things outside of your control. But what we have found is that when you go back to the basics, and gently work on getting back to your life-giving rhythms, that there is always something you can do to relieve some of the pressure.

The steps below aren’t pie-in-the-sky ideas, these are the real steps we have each taken to bring more peace to the chaotic seasons we’ve been through.

We know the to-do list cycle all too well.

You have a hundred things rattling around in your brain, so you write out a massive list out on a piece of paper, and then jump into frenzied action.

But you feel like you're spinning your wheels, like you are working all the time, and still have so much to-do and can't get ahead of the to-do list that grows faster than you can manage.

The Problem with To-Do Lists

To-do lists tend to fragment your focus. Alone, they can never be the time-management strategy you need to organize your tasks within the context of your week. To-do lists encourage you to take action, but it is most often un-prioritized action, meaning you will never make progress on the things that actually matter most to you.

You want to create a personalized time-management strategy and maximize your planner. But you're not sure where to start or how to keep making the space to figure it all out when you're still trying to juggle everything you already have on your to-do list.

If that sounds like you, then you're our people.

And you need the Quickstart Your Planning Guide.

About This Episode

If you listened to the first season of our podcast, you’ll remember our Four Rules of Planning. Those rules were a helpful start, but in the months after publishing those episodes we realized a couple of things...

First, we don’t like rules. We like planning strategies that are personalized to each individual, and rules can rarely accomplish that level of customization.

Second, we couldn’t easily remember the four rules… and we wrote them. We knew that wasn't going to work; we needed something easy to grasp that was memorable.

At the end of January, we spent several days together as a team batch recording episodes for the second season of our podcast, Make Space to Thrive. We're so, so excited about the content coming your way. It's encouraging and practical, and we believe it will help you continue to make intentional living an intuitive part of your life. Our first episode of season 2 will drop on March 2nd, 2022 and we can't wait!

Here is a quick recap of all our episodes from Season 1, which aired this past fall. The topics of these episodes are so foundational, and a great place to start!

Planning while postpartum? At first glance it sounds over-the-top, almost an oxymoron. In the past we've even written about how the postpartum season can be an excellent time to take a break from your planner. So why did we choose to do an entire podcast episode on planning while postpartum?

You have to remember that when we say "planning", we are talking about self-compassionate planning. And perhaps there is not a better time to practice self-compassion than when you are in a season of recovery like the postpartum season. When we say planning while postpartum, we aren't talking about planning our biggest goals, or mapping our business' trajectory for the next year; we are talking about the simple, but extremely useful, form of day-to-day planning that helps us get out of our heads, sort our priorities, and let the non-essentials fall away.

Every Monday is a fresh start.

You have an entire week before you, a clean slate, and it can seem like the possibilities for productivity are endless!

But then you move through each day and it can be easy to slip back into dealing with whatever seems most necessary in each moment, and you find you’re only taking care of the small details, rather than making progress in the most significant areas.

Or maybe you make significant progress on your big goals, but meal planning and laundry is falling off your radar. How do you balance it all? How do you create week rhythms that serve your long term goals, your weekly work needs, and your family?

Before the Evergreen planner system, I (Clari) had never used a true day-planner. I had tried a myriad of different planners when I worked as an executive assistant before having kids, but they were the types that only had a small box, a column, or a couple of lines for each day. I also used a digital calendar to coordinate meetings and make sure nothing was double booked, but other than getting binged with meeting reminders, I didn’t really reference it or use it to effectively plan my days. My thoughts, plans and tasks were scattered among digital notes, emails, sticky notes, a half-used planner and to-do lists written on random pieces of paper.

But then I became a mom and quit my traditional job. It never occurred to me that a planner could be used to plan rest, to form life-giving family rhythms, or to plan intentional time with my kiddos—just as much as it could be used to make sure critical work projects or mundane home tasks were completed. I again wandered through my days doing what was in front of me, and working off one endlessly long to-do list.

In typical goal setting culture, the mantra often goes something like this… "Girl, it's time to change your LIFE. Close your eyes, imagine what you want your life to be like in five years—the sky's the limit!—and write down your biggest dreams. Now reverse-engineer those dreams into a million baby steps, and do not stop hustling until you make those goals a REALITY. If you really want something, you're going to have to get up crazy early, change your habits, and become a different person. You're going to have to set the people in your life straight, too. They're either going to have to get on board, or get out of the way. Aren't your goals worth it? And if you start feeling discouraged—because those days will come (it is lonely at the top)—you're just going to have to make sure you have a solid "why" to pull you through. So give yourself a kick in the pants, and get to work."

It's.... a lot.

The problem with this? Well, for starters, you can’t fully foresee the future. You cannot comprehend the very real tradeoffs for the goals you create on paper. Oftentimes, you'll get into the thick of it and start to wonder how you can know if your goal is truly worth it. You feel a rising tension between living intuitively and following through on the goals you set.