How To Plan And Organize Your Month Ahead Of Time
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Feeling overwhelmed by the tasks you have to complete the upcoming month? Struggling to plan your goals and to-do list because you don’t know where to start?
When you need to plan and organize your month, it can feel daunting and overwhelming at times. It can even be frustrating when the end of the month comes around and we wonder if we actually got anything done.
I’m someone who easily gets overwhelmed if I don’t plan. I’ll tend to procrastinate on things that are important (such as writing blog posts lol), which affects my productivity flow and long-term goals. When I started planning my months earlier, I became more focused, driven, and productive.
Monthly planning will change the way you approach your goals, productivity, and time.
In this article, I’ll teach you my detailed monthly planning process, my favorite planning tools, and tips that will help teach you how to plan and organize your month ahead of time.
The Benefits of Monthly Planning
If you’re more of a go-with-the-flow type of gal when it comes to planning, maybe you haven’t really given monthly planning a second thought. But if you’ve been on the fence about it and aren’t really sure why you should, here are 3 benefits to monthly planning:
1. Planning your month will get you to where you want to be.
It keeps you focused on the direction of your short-term and long-term goals. Monthly planning helps you to prioritize what matters and create goals that are focused on those priorities.
2. You won’t feel as overwhelmed or stressed.
Because you know what you have to get done, your mind isn’t all over the place. Your monthly goals are visually laid out for you to see what action steps are required to reach those goals.
3. A monthly plan gives you direction, clarity, and momentum.
Whether it’s 1 year, 3 year or 5 year goal, you need a plan to gain momentum towards that goal. Naturally, our brains are wired to think short-term about our future in general. That’s why it’s so important to set yearly and monthly goals that force us to pause and rethink about the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis.
My Favorite Planning Tools
Before we jump into planning out your month, it’s always important to have the right tools when it comes to organizing and planning. Here are a few of my favorite tools and resources to help you get started:
- If you prefer writing out your goals, use a helpful undated monthly planner to keep you focused and brain dump your goals.
- If you prefer digital planning, I highly recommend using Notion (what I use). I use Notion for managing my goals, projects, and deadlines (basically everything).
- If you would like a visual monthly layout, I recommend using a whiteboard calendar so that you can see a general overview of the tasks, events, and deadlines for that month.
These are my favorite planning tools that have helped me stay organized and productive. With that said, let’s jump right into the good stuff!
Tips to plan and organize your month
1. Review your short-term and long-term goals
What are your short-term and long-term goals? Do you know where you want to be in a year?
These are important questions to ask yourself because essentially, the first step to monthly planning is knowing why you’re setting goals in the first place. The way to do that is by looking at the trajectory of where you want your life to be (in a year or more) and aligning your monthly goals to get to that destination.
If you haven’t already, now’s the time to create those short-term and long-term goals, so that you can have a sense of direction of where you want to go.
Reviewing my goals allows me to focus on what really matters and helps me to set my priorities straight. If you want to know more about how I plan out my goals step-by-step, check out this post.
2. Keep It Simple
Once you’ve figured out what your short-term and long-term goals are, now you can start creating your monthly goals. The key to achieving your monthly goals is keeping it simple.
What does that look like? Personally, for me, I would tend to get really ambitious about how much I can achieve within a month that I ended up creating too many goals at once. In the past, I would do this so often that I would end up procrastinating on a lot of things. I’m talking about wanting to setting 10 goals within a month.
Now, I’ve learned that it’s smarter and definitely less overwhelming to set 2-3 monthly goals. If anything, I recommend starting with 2-3 monthly goals you want to accomplish by the end of the month. These goals could be focused on different areas of your life such as personal development, career, or finance.
If you don’t know where to start, look at your long-term goals and see how you can take the first step to reach that goal. For more inspiration, here are 57 monthly goals ideas to get you started.
3. Break Down Your Goals
After I’ve created 2-3 monthly goals that I can focus on, I’ll brainstorm any action steps, as many as I can think of, for each monthly goal. This is important because these action steps will help you create weekly goals, which will help you create your daily to-do lists.
I highly recommend giving this blog post a read because I go in depth with exactly how to break down your yearly, monthly, and weekly goals into actionable steps.
After you’ve brainstormed your action steps, see if you can choose 4-5 action steps that will help you get to your monthly goals. These action steps could be separated into weekly goals.
4. Review Your Monthly Goals Regularly
At the end of every week (specifically every Sunday), I like to take a look at my monthly goals to make sure I’m still on track. This helps me to check-in with whether or not my weekly goals are aligned with my monthly goals.
Because if not, I’ll make some changes to my weekly and daily goals that will align with my priorities. It’s important to adjust accordingly if you find yourself unable to meet your weekly and monthly goals.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say my monthly career goal is to gain 100 email subscribers by the end of the month. Here are my weekly goals:
- Week 1: Create a high-traffic freebie
- Week 2: Promote freebie and hit 25 subscribers
- Week 3: Reach 75 subscribers
- Week 4: Reach 100 subscribers
These are attractive goals and definitely achievable goals, but let’s just say hypothetically, I was unable to meet these number goals. Instead, I only gained 10 email subscribers. So what went wrong in the process? Absolutely nothing. It just means that we need to adjust our goals accordingly so that they can become less overwhelming and more achievable.
This is how I would redefine my monthly goals (either for the upcoming month or in the middle of the month if I realize that I’m not hitting my goals):
My updated monthly goal: Create a high-traffic freebie that people will want to sign up for (p.s. this freebie gained me 250+ subscribers)
- Week 1: Brainstorm 5 different freebie ideas
- Week 2: Create 2-3 freebies and promote on Pinterest
- Week 3: Keep experimenting
- Week 4: Reflect on which ones worked and didn’t
See the difference? Instead of focusing on how many email subscribers I want to get, I changed the focus to create a high-traffic freebie. Ultimately, freebies are what helps grow your business and gain email subscribers.
So remember to regularly review your monthly goals and adjust them accordingly that will align with your bigger priorities.
Frequently Asked Questions
The last thing you need to know about monthly planning
Monthly planning takes time and patience. Carve out intentional time one day at the end of the month to reflect on your goals and start setting new ones to achieve! You got this.
I hope this post encouraged you to get a head start with monthly planning. These tips have been so helpful for my productivity, so I hope sharing them will help you, too. I’d love to know your monthly planning process or if you have any favorite planning tools you use. Comment down below!
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