“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. ~Stephen Covey
It's a New Month Already? Plan Your Month With Me!
I’ve recently shifted from my basic, functional, nuts and bolts planning process to add a little personality to the design. Of course, it helps me to feel organized with my upcoming plans, but I’m also finding that it is an essential part of my creative outlet.
Maybe planning is frustrating for you, and you don’t know where to start. And when you do, you wish it could be a little more reflective of the organized, stylish life you want instead of a jumbled mess of to-do’s.
You're in the right place!
I’ll be sharing how to work through your upcoming month and how to add an element of style to the process. This monthly two-page spread only requires a few extra items added to your basics (a journal and a pen) to take it to the next level of aesthetically planning.
Let's get started! Plan your month with me!
MONTHLY LAYOUT
The monthly pages in your planner are an easy place to pull in all of your upcoming events, holidays, birthdays, tasks, and projects into one central location as a visual reference for the whole month.
I personally don’t manage routine items or specific appointment times here. Still, from here, you can easily migrate the necessary items to your weekly and daily pages with more specific details when the time comes.
How you organize your monthly spread depends on your preferences and needs. Do you prefer to utilize one planner for your whole life, or do you like to have separate spaces for each area of life? Home, family, professional, or possibly personal. I prefer to keep things in one planner. I can better maintain a realistic view of what I can manage as one person.
Here are the functional items I like to place into my monthly double page spread:
- Month Title
- My Monthly Three – goals & projects
- My Intention This Month
- My Mission
- My Milestones This Month – broken up into four week intervals to stay on track for my larger 12-week goals.
- Inspirational Quote – related to my monthly intention.
- Holidays, anniversaries, birthdays
- Reminders – such as bills due.
- Deadlines – projects, meetings, travel, events, launches, etc.
I use the Plan to GRO journal that I designed specifically to be ONE journal planner that is uncomplicated and encompasses your entire life. No matter what planner you use, the above items are easily incorporated into your monthly plan. Having these items on the monthly spread will give you a metric to evaluate how effectively you used your time at the end of the month. Not only are you tracking what’s coming up, but you’re keeping in front of your eyes what all the activity is about.. you’re reminding yourself of ‘what matters most.’
DAILY HABIT TRACKER - Along with a BONUS "Month of Love Tracker"
Planners aren’t just great for keeping track of your schedule. In fact, it’s almost my secondary reason for utilizing a journal planner. I love to track my goals, ideas, what I’ve learned, and my habits. Primarily I journal and plan to grow. That’s why I love to set up my habit tracker each month. I find that choosing new habits that support my ability to reach my overarching goals is fun. Setting up a habit-tracking system will make it a little more real and give you accountability by having this simple way to measure whether or not you did the habit. Here are some quick and easy steps when planning your upcoming month.
Determine Up To Ten New Habits
Check out this basic habit tracking layout in the Plan to GRO journal and grab yours here or simply grab a blank sheet of paper and mimic the layout. Determine 10 habits that you want to implement into your life, and that can be directly connected to becoming the person you desire to be (especially driving you toward the goals you are currently working on).
I enjoy placing a few icon stickers and possibly washi tape just to add a little fun. Sometimes I’ll add a motivational quote to encourage my journey.
There are a lot of ways to fill in the space as you track each day. You can use a check mark, an x, shade in the blanks, stickers or, my personal new favorite, utilize dots. Now, these dots are not just any dots. I found a new (to me) dot marker. They come in so many different colors, and you can use a different marker for each new habit or simply use one color, as I do, that matches your aesthetics.
Be sure to flip over to your daily tracker page each day, maybe during your planning & journaling time each morning or before bed. Below are a few shots of my February personal habit tracking page.
BONUS HABIT TRACKING IDEA - Couple's Goals for the Month of Love
One last little BONUS idea: Each February during “the month of love,” my husband Shannon and I decided to pick a few “couple’s daily habits” that we wanted to track to strengthen and grow our relationship. Here are the three we decided on:
daily prayer together
a daily kiss
AND
tell one another one thing we love about one another each day.
How fun, right? And he’s on board and excited, so that’s a bonus. I don’t recommend doing this if you feel like you’re dragging them along. LOL, you might wind up with the opposite results of what you want to accomplish.
SUPPLIES NEEDED
A few weeks ago, I posted How to Set Up Your Journal Planner. Check it out for an extensive list of items you may want to consider when starting aesthetic journaling/planning.
For our purposes here, all you really need is a simple monthly spread that you love and a pen. However, if you want to try your hand at adding aesthetics grab these items:
Favorite pen
Ruler
Washi Tape
Markers
Dot Marker
Whiteout
Icon Stickers (I must warn you…stickers have sent me down a deep hole. I don’t have time for them, but I am obsessed already. I love the simple icon stickers and want all of them. I especially love katplans_ (find her on IG here) because they have the extra dot layer that adds a tiny touch of color.
Scissors
Tweezers
PRO TIP:
If you find yourself going down a hole of unrealistic expectations with aesthetic planning and needing color or stickers for everything, try to stick with functional planning for your daily planning and then reward yourself with doing all the things for your monthly and weekly plans only. I find doing this is such a fun, relaxing outlet on the weekends, and it’s also a great motivator to carry out your goals and plans daily. Also, it breaks up the monotony and possibility of planning and journaling becoming a job because it this makes it feel more like a creative outlet.
NOW, MAKE IT YOUR OWN!
I bet you already have some ideas that you would add or items I shared that you don’t need. Hopefully, this has started the process for you and gets you going in the right direction to make a monthly layout of your very own!
Check out how my pages turned out in the images below! Then send me a shot of yours!
Happy GRO-ing!
