When it comes to streamlining your business, work or home tasks, and releasing unnecessary stress, planning ahead is crucial. Especially in business, it is beneficial to have an overview of your upcoming months so that you don’t feel stressed about what is potentially coming up or confused for the first few days, feeling like a fish out of water or a chicken with it's head cut off at the start of a new month. Let’s dive into how to streamline your month for success!

Step 1: The Quarterly “Macro” Overview 

The first step in “how to streamline your month for success” is all about the BIG picture!! We start big, go visionary, and then narrow it down as we go.

I always suggest breaking your planning down into the quarters of the year, so you can get clear on your goals for three month blocks.

Action: For each of the three months that you are currently planning for, determine your one main goal or area of focus.

When you plan your months like this, you prevent yourself from entering into a new month with a lack of clarity in regards to what needs to be done and what will move your business forward. You also ensure that you are really creating momentum towards one focused goal, rather than trying to do all the things. This also is what leaves you feeling overwhelmed and living in time scarcity. 

The idea is that each month will have one main clear goal that will be your focus for those 30 days.

Let me just repeat that, one more time for the back: ONE goal. ONE focus. That’s it.

I know, I know. You probably want to throw a few more things in there but I highly encourage you to narrow it down as much as possible. See this as an experiment, so test it out, see how it goes, and watch what shifts.

Step 2: Monthly Goal Tied to Vital Tasks

"Vital tasks" are something I teach my clients.  Basically, it simply helps you organize all the tasks on your to do list into primary and secondary priority levels. The vital tasks are your primary focus because they entail the actions that are directly tied to your next level goal (your focus or area of desired growth). Therefore, your monthly goal should be related to growth goals. For instance, a focus for the month of July can be to sign on 3 new clients or launch your group program. For your job or career, there might be one big project or area to prioritize. Of course, you might also have a personal goal or health related goal that you can tie in there, but what we are really focusing on in this post is structuring your month as it relates to work and getting shit done!

Based on what you have determined as your monthly focus, you will then reverse engineer the vital tasks that you need to do on a daily or consistent basis to help you work towards or achieve that goal.

Action: Your vital tasks then encompass your needle moving activities. 

When you have clarity on your main monthly focus, you can create clarity for yourself surrounding the daily actions you need to take to achieve that overall goal.

The idea is that when you know the main actions you need to be doing, you know the minimum amount of work you need to do to still achieve your goals.

This approach allows you to streamline your business and work tasks and responsibilities, and create time in your schedule for other projects or things that are important to you outside your business or job. You can identify how you want to balance the rest of your life when you have a benchmark for the “minimum amount” of work that  actually needs to get done and in turn create boundaries so you know when you have done “enough.”

I know that was A LOT of information in a few short paragraphs, so please drop your questions in the comments below or click here to chat with me more and I can clarify it in greater detail and in relation to your specific situation.

Step 3: The “Micro” Month Breakdown 

This is when I dive into the upcoming month (before the new month starts), and determine what my actions are to help me achieve my monthly goal and get into the nitty gritty.

If you are a business or entrepreneur, this can include your content arc, marketing and/or launch focuses. If I am launching a new offer (or reopening an offer), then I want to make sure I set up my messaging in a way that warms people up to the topics within my offer, emphasises their pain points related to my offer as a solution, and inspires them to take action.

If you are a working professional, this may be guided by your company and what plans the company has for the upcoming month. How does this relate to your specific responsibilities and  what actually requires your immediate attention this month versus what can wait for now. 

If you are a parent (working or not) or you simply want to make your personal growth or health your focus, what are the main aligned action steps you need to be taking this month. If you have a health goal or want to cook more homemade healthy meals, meal prep might be the way you plan for this goal. Again, this post is focused around work and business, but I want to throw this in here as well so that you can see how it can carry over.

Here are aligned action steps to create your monthly success strategy:

Use the Time Expander Planner free gift, that outlines the exact steps and strategies for setting this up. Additionally, you can use a paper calendar or print-out calendar to get a full month overview. (I usually like to see my month in a few different ways so that I feel really solidified in the fact that these steps will be the steps that create this success).

Some other things to weave in to setting up monthly success: 

• Is there anything special coming up in work or personal life, such as birthdays, events, travels? These are super important to note and potentially even tie into your main focus, because as we know, rest and fun are crucial for your success.
• Cycle sync with your menstrual cycle or with the moon. This is a whole other topics (that I break down on the Youtube Channel in far more depth) but it's a very powerful way to identify the timing of when you should focus on what type of work.
• Use this structure to guide you, not confine you. This statement is something I say to clients about a million times and it's something I live by. Take the time to plan out your upcoming quarter and then your month. Get as specific as you want to, as long as it feels good to you. I often like to go as far as to map out my focuses of each week, so do whatever floats your boat here. But then, the key is to release the plan from needing to happen exactly as you laid it out. This structure is meant to help you, not make you even more stressed and overwhelmed. Hence the streamlining focus. 

Download the Time Expander Planner that gives you the tools to plan all your tasks and lay out your upcoming month, in order to streamlining and show up to your business with ease. 

How do you plan for the upcoming month? Share with me in the comments below!