How to Start a Monthly Planning Routine for More Peace in Your Life

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A monthly planning routine can help you create more whitespace and peace in your life. After all, it can help you reduce your struggles with:

• Scrambling to pull together amazing last-minute gifts for constants in life (birthdays, holidays)?
• Keeping up with monthly or annual household maintenance tasks (like changing the air filter, getting your oil changed)?
• Making your cup fillers a priority (and not just the dregs of a frazzled evening)?
• Keeping up with all the other things you ought to do but can’t seem to remember?

You are not the problem.

You can live intentionally with passion and purpose as God’s beloved.

Perhaps the answer isn’t to try to do all-the-things but to live more intentionally with the life you’ve been given. A monthly planning routine can help you reduce the overwhelm and enjoy more of your life.

Curious to learn more? Let’s dig in!

Two Dreamers Who Suck at Adulting Sometimes (Why a monthly planning routine can help!)

For my husband and I, the idea of a monthly touchpoint emerged during one of our DIY marriage retreats.

We had and have so much joy in our life, but we also had an ongoing conundrum:

How can we remember to keep up with the important-but-easy-for-us-to-forget stuff?!

For us, this included:

• Not just buying gifts at the last minute for loved ones (C’mon – their birthdays and the holidays come around every year at the same time – how can we be SO surprised every year??)
• Avoiding/forgetting household maintenance tasks
• Actually using our wonderful health insurance to see doctors
• Consciously being more adventurous – new dishes, new places, new activities
• … you get the idea

As a result, we’d periodically have essentially the same discussions every few months,

• “What are we going to get our family for Christmas this year? It’s three days away!!”
• “Did we change the air filter in January or June? Maybe I’m sneezing so much because of that…”
• … and so forth.

Talk about a waste of our time and energy!

During our marriage retreat, we realized we needed to be more proactive about these kinds of topics. After all, we were both committed to being more intentional and pursuing peace!

Since we both have intuitive and judging preferences (NJs on the MBTI assessment), we realized that we could actually start leveraging those preferences.

We decided to maximize our mutual desires to dream about possibilities, strategize for the future and accomplish goals.

Enter weekly meetings and monthly planning meetings. And they’ve both been so good for our family!

What the heck IS a monthly planning routine?

You’ve probably heard from productivity gurus the value of planning your days and being strategic with your time with your career.

You can also apply this idea to your home life!

Basically, a monthly planning routine is when you intentionally and strategically prepare for your upcoming month.

You can do a monthly planning session by yourself or with someone else. If your monthly planning affects other people (like your spouse), it’d be wise to at least touch base with each other.

Ideally, this routine brings whitespace and peace to your life – not more things on our plate and more stress.

How a monthly planning routine can help you actually reach your goals

If you’re a goal-setter, you probably enjoy the zest of entering a new year or new season with goals in mind.

You also have probably learned that you need more than one day to make those goals happen.

For us, our annual marriage retreat has become a special time for us to dream about who we were and who we wanted to become. But if the discussion just stopped there, we might not actually grow in the direction we’d dreamed of.

Monthly planning meetings became a prime time to touch base about big picture goals, plan for fun, create realistic timelines and build in space for day-to-day life stuff.

How to start monthly planning

Here’s some tips from what we’ve learned along the way. You can find these tips (and a bit more!) in the freebie, too!

Set a date and time for your monthly planning meetings

In our family, we try to have our monthly planning meeting on one of the last two weekends of the month.

We’ve also learned we are far less focused and effective when our tot-tastic son is running around and shouting. So, currently, instead of making a 30 minute discussion into a four-hours long discussion with countless interruptions, we’ve learned to meet when he’s sleeping, in independent play or with family. Win!

How long should a monthly planning meeting be?

The timeframe of your meeting really depends on your needs.

Typically, our meetings have ranged from 15 minutes to an hour and a half – depending on what’s on our plates and on our minds.

For instance, if your kids are starting school again, you might need a bit more time to sketch out your gameplan for the school pick-up/drop-off hustle, scrambling together meals, school supply shopping, homework time, etc.

Get your monthly planning tools

Depending on your planning preferences, they may include any of the following:

• Notebook to jot down ideas, plans, dates, etc.
• Planner and/or calendar (paper or electronic)
• Pens, pencils, markers, sticky notes…

Personally, I’m mostly techie all the way these days, so I like to grab a notebook to jot down ideas we have or things we’re troubleshooting and my phone or laptop to pull up Trello, and our gmail calendars.

Have an agenda for your monthly planning

Most likely, your monthly planning agenda will include some recurring items (like meal planning) and items that are special-to-that month (like Grandma’s birthday or Thanksgiving).

If possible, have a go-to agenda that can help you remember what would most help you to check in on.

Items you might discuss during a monthly planning discussion include:

Area of life	Description/Context
Setting your top priorities/focus for the month	YOU have the unique privilege of living your life as God’s beloved. No one else is living YOUR life. So be intentional about how you choose to live it.
Goal check: assessment and strategizing next steps	If you’ve set goals, how are you doing on them? What steps do you need to take to start reaching them? Do you need to set goals for the month?
Upcoming scheduled activities and deadlines	See what’s coming up, what needs to be scheduled and give yourself whitespace to meet necessary deadlines. Do you need to schedule doctor’s appointments or other type of appointments?
Tasks or projects you’re working on (or want to pursue)	What recurring tasks do you have on your plate? Beyond the norm? House, car or other maintenance you need to do? Can you designate which days you’ll pursue certain tasks? Get it out of your head and a home on your calendar.
Funtivities or cup-fillers	This could include family fun days, dates, family get-togethers, things you want to try, etc.
Continuing education, passion projects or hobbies	This might fall into the cup-filling territory for you, but I’ll say it anyway. If you’ve got a hobby or something you really enjoy doing that takes some time, build it into your month!
Meal planning	Figure out what works best for you to get nourished and satisfied with meals. How to Make Meal Planning and a Food Inventory that Actually Works.
High energy and low energy times	For instance, if you know you’re probably going to have less energy during certain parts of the month, be proactive about that time by reducing what you can. That could include making less social commitments, easier prep meals, good-for-you comfort foods, etc. On the other hand, if you know you’ll have more whitespace during the month, maybe that’s a great time to pursue a project, get together with others or other higher energy things!
Budget check or review	Got a budget? This could be a good time to set your budget for the month and see where you can be more strategic with your funds.
Family/child dynamics	A big caveat – people are not projects. It’s about relationships. May we not get so caught up in wanting to change the world around us that we forget that! (Preaching to myself!) Sometimes in the hustle and bustle of day-to-day living, we don’t always tune into what’s going on with each other. That can also apply to our children. This time could be a good time to touch base about how it’s going with your children and if it’s time to make changes in your family flow. For instance, we touched base regularly about when to start potty learning with our son. We knew it’d be a big shift for our family and wanted to be mutually confident that our family was ready to do it.

Example: Our go-to month planning agenda

Our typical meeting agenda covers these highlights:

• Family fun day: Park/outing/adventure
• Special date of the month – what, when, how
• Monthly fun list – food to make, things to do, to try
• Big tasks/projects
• Continuing education/passion projects – Do we need more whitespace to do it? Brainstorming?
• Upcoming celebrations
• Doctor appointments
• House/car/life maintenance
• Family dynamics, especially involving our son (Questions like: Is he ready for potty learning? Do we need to adjust our approach to annoying things he’s doing?)
• *Budget review

*Since we briefly review our budget weekly, we’ve bumped this portion to that time. When we were just getting started, the monthly touchpoint was a must.

Decide when you’ll take action

As you go through your agenda, you need to set dates or make a list of tasks with assigned deadlines to revisit and/or do them.

Otherwise… what’s the point of doing this? Keeping all this information in your head isn’t realistic or sustainable.

Not so sure about this idea?

Here’s more information about managing meeting tasks and action items.

How a monthly planning routine has blessed our family

We’re still figuring out what works best for us for monthly planning. It certainly hasn’t solved all of our problems, but it HAS helped us…

• Be more intentional about celebrations and birthdays, including not scrambling to get gifts and discussing our mutual expectations for the events
• Prioritize quality time as a family and couple with family fun days and date times
• Proactively meet with doctors and track health concerns (mostly my own struggle…)
• Thoughtfully pursue funtivities, like making chocolate drizzled pretzels, watching a holiday movie, or trying new recipes
• Do or hire out “adulting” activities we don’t like doing – like yard work, changing the air filter, etc.
• Get on the same page about the days to come
• Create more whitespace so we can enjoy our present more than scrabbling to keep up

Two resources to help you start incorporating these tips in your life

1. Download your FREE Embrace Your Potential Playbook

It’ll help you zoom in on your God-given personality and give you practical tips to be more intentional, passionate, and purposeful as God’s beloved.

2. Buy the Intentional Life Planning Toolkit

The Intentional Life Planning Toolkit is the perfect resource to help you move from being overwhelmed by your distractions and demands to living life on purpose.

You’ll determine what an intentional life would look like for you and learn how to leverage your God-given personality, so you can thrive in your life, including your faith, priorities, schedule, responsibilities, meals, relationships, adventures, and more.

The Intentional Life Planning Toolkit may be just what you’re looking for!

P.S. Coffee Chats and Yoga Mats email subscribers get a discounted price!

Articles related to how to start a monthly planning routine

• What Happened When I Chose to Be Intentional + Pursue Peace
• 4 Simple Straightforward Tips to Succeed with Weekly Planning
• How to DIY Your Own Sexy, Fun Marriage Retreat at Home
• How to Make Meal Planning and a Food Inventory that Actually Works

Wrapping up how to start planning for the month

Unfortunately, monthly planning won’t magically help you remember ALL THE THINGS.

It may, however, help you be more on top of all those things.

A monthly planning routine has helped me keep track of the things that I all too easily forget, prioritize fun, and create more whitespace in my life.

Here’s how you’ll want to get started with this peace-giving routine:

• Set a date and time for your monthly planning meetings
• Get your monthly planning tools
• Have an agenda for your monthly planning
• Decide when you’ll take action

By the way, I use a monthly review to prioritize passion pursuits – like Coffee Chats and Yoga Mats! It’s so life-giving!)

If you’re feeling frazzled and like you keep dropping balls, give monthly planning a shot. It may set you on a path to feeling less overwhelmed and more peaceful!

You can live intentionally with passion and purpose as God’s beloved.

What would a monthly planning routine look like for YOU? Let’s talk in the comments!

P.S. Want some crazy simple steps to start living intentionally? Grab the Embrace Your Potential Playbook. It’ll help you zoom in on your God-gifted personality and give you practical tips to be more intentional, passionate, and purposeful as God’s beloved so you can become the best version of yourself.