Every month, whether it's a New Year or not, I sit down and plan out my goals for the month as well as the year. I think it is super important to do this every month as you can not only look back and see what you have accomplished but you can also see what you need to do to improve or reach your future goals.
So I have a brand new planner at the ready and would love to take you on my planning journey for January 2021.
At the start of each month I feel it is important to reflect. Reflect on the year just gone or the month just pasted, what you achieved, what you need to improve on, what you found good, what you found negative etc.
By having a few moments of self reflection will enable you to acknowledge what you can do better to reach your goals. If you don't acknowledge what you have done in the past, it is difficult to know what to change in order to help you improve.
Once you have done your self reflection, now is time to dream. Dream of all the things that you want to do in life no matter how big or small. Write them all down along with your life goals in a mind map. Don't worry about it being messy or untidy or maybe not even making sense as we can tidy this up later. The general categories you could focus on could be:
- Health and Fitness
- Career and Business
- Finance and New Worth
- Personal Development
- Family and Friends
- Romance and Relationships
- Fun, Recreation and Hobbies
- Spiritual
Following on from the above, now would be a good opportunity to design your vision board. This will enable you to see your dreams and life goals visually so you can help manifest your wildest of dreams into existence.
Now you have both your mind map and vision board to hand, it's time to narrow down what goals you want to focus on for the year or months ahead. You can have as many goals in one of the above categories as you want or if you would rather focus on one or two categories rather than 8 throughout the month / year than that's fine too!
So now you have your goals for the year / month ahead, it's time to do some more reflection. Think about what your current routine is for both morning and night and ask yourself if you need to take away or add in anything to them to improve. Similarly, perhaps do a reflection on your habits, what are some habits that you are good at sticking to and what habits do you know you need to stop doing.
Moving back to your goals, now whittle them down to a 3 month projection. Choose 3 goals to focus on for 3 months. You could do this as 1 goal a month or focusing on all 3 goals over 3 months - it's up to you. When you are doing this process also think about why you want to achieve this goal along with what actions you will do to get there and what reward you will give yourself once your goal is complete.
Breaking this down even further, now let's look at a month layout. This is a good opportunity for you to write down all your to-do's for the month, any events that are taking place as well as any appointments you may have. Having a monthly view enables you to have a good projection on what will be taking place throughout the month so you can plan.
Last but not least, breaking down your goals and to do's into a weekly projection is a great way to reduce overwhelm and for you to have a clear layout and plan for the week ahead. Within this you could include: your to-do's (personal and work), habits, your main goal for the week as well as a weekly review/reflection on what went well and what could have been better/need to work on for the upcoming week.
And there we have it! This is the planning process that I did when planning for January as well as for 2021. I hope you have found it useful and if you would like to purchase the planner that I have been using then you can buy it here (*affiliate link)
To help you you start your planning journey, I have attached a free, downloadable template here for you so you can write out your goals and write down the relevant steps to smashing them
This is Day 2 of the January Series where I am posting 31 blog posts to get you set up for the New Year. To check out the other posts I have done in January head back to my home page!
Let me know in the comments any future blog posts you would like me to do
See you tomorrow for a new blog post!
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