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:
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!
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:
As a result, we’d periodically have essentially the same discussions every few months,
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!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
Depending on your planning preferences, they may include any of the following:
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.
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. |
Our typical meeting agenda covers these highlights:
*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.
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.
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…
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.
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!
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:
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.
Cortney is a Christian life coach and recovering over-achiever who is passionate about helping Christian women embrace who God created them to be so they can confidently step into any season of life with passion, purpose, and peace. She’s also an ENFJ, MBTI® coach, M. Ed in College Student Development, Pilates and Yoga teacher, wife, mama, and entrepreneur. In her pre-kid life, she coordinated programs for, coached, funded, and provided leadership training for more than 60+ student organizations and 100s of university students for 7+ years. (Helping people highlight their inner awesomeness and reach their goals is her jam!)
More importantly, she’s God’s beloved.
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