How to Do A Monthly Meeting
Keep reading this post to learn:
⋒ What a Monthly Meeting is and how it can support you and your goals
⋒ The step-by-step process I use for my own Monthly Meeting
⋒ How you can start implementing a Monthly Meeting in your life
Do you ever find yourself saying something like, “How is it already *insert month name*? Last month flew by!”
Now that we all have our hands raised, let me ask you a couple of other questions: most of the time, are you stoked about how the month went as far as where you spent your time and energy OR are you often left wondering how 30ish days managed to pass by and you feel like you’re still standing in the same overwhelmed place that you were at the start of the month – having made no real progress toward your goals and honestly just feeling like managing your life feels like a full-time job that you need a vacation from?
If that second sentence hit a little too close to home, you need a monthly check-in meeting in your life!
What is a monthly check-in meeting?
A monthly check-in meeting is one of the 7 Hustle Sanely Habits that when used together, help you create a peacefully productive life.
Now the idea of a monthly check-in meeting isn’t a groundbreaking idea… it’s time that you spend reflecting on the month that is ending and preparing for the upcoming month.
But preparing for what exactly?
How you spend your time and energy so that you can be intentional with it and not be bummed that another month passed you by while you just basically sat on the sidelines letting life happen to you.
I use my monthly check-in meeting to reflect on my life, my goal progress, my mental health, and my relationships and to create a plan for my monthly Focus Goal for the upcoming month. It’s helped me systemize a lot of recurring things in my life which saves me a lot of time and brain power in the long run.
Don’t worry – I won’t leave you hanging and I’ll get into specifics in a bit!
When is the best time to do a monthly check-in meeting?
This is totally up to you but I tend to do my monthly check-in meeting over the course of a few days of the last week of the previous month.
I used to do my monthly check-in meeting all at once but it kind of started to feel overwhelming, which defeats the purpose, so I split it into 2 days – one day where I focus on the reflecting part and one day where I focus on the prep part.
My monthly check-in meeting, collectively, takes around 45 minutes to do but I cover a lot of ground, which you’ll hear about in a minute.
And it’s so worth it to me which brings us to the next thing I want to talk about which is:
How a monthly check-in meeting can support you?
~ It helps you be more productive.
What I mean by this – you make actual progress on your goals because you’re mapping out action steps for each week of the month that point toward your monthly Focus Goal.
A monthly check-in meeting also saves you time and brain space because you’re keeping a pulse on the big picture consistently so you know what’s going on at all times instead of spending time lost in your thoughts wondering why you’re not making progress toward your goals or living a life that you like.
~ It sets you up to honor your seasons and shift your goals as necessary throughout the year.
When you’re sitting down monthly to reflect as opposed to the normal yearly reflection that most people do, you’re creating the opportunity to edit your goals if necessary. I feel like so many people get trapped in their yearly goals even if they don’t make sense for them anymore mid-year because they set them at the start of the year and then feel pressure to “stick them out” until it’s time to reflect at the end of the year.
Monthly check-in meetings position us to let go of goals that don’t make sense for us anymore that we may have created at the start of the year.
For example – in 2022, I did not know I would get pregnant in March so by having my monthly check-in meeting for April, I was able to really reflect on the goals I had set at the start of the year. I ended up throwing out a bunch of goals because they didn’t align with my new season of pregnancy and motherhood.
If I wouldn’t have had that monthly check-in meeting, I probably would’ve just kept my goals the same and then just felt guilty that I didn’t reach the goals at the end of the year even though they weren’t relevant to my life anymore because of my new season. Our minds are funny that way – we have to actually reflect and let things go in order for them to not bog us down or hold us back anymore.
~ It helps you be more present in your life.
This is true because you’re not stressing out about when things are going to get done. You have a bird’s eye view of the month and can see which weeks are a little more full and which weeks have more margin so you can actually enjoy the margin instead of feeling like you “should” be filling it with something.
So those are 3 ways that a monthly check-in meeting can support you and because I know we all love a good concrete example/specific action steps, I’m going to walk you through what my monthly check-in meetings look like in this season of my life.
When I do my monthly check-in meeting, I take into consideration both the personal and professional sides of my life.
The tools I use to help guide my monthly check-in meetings:
~ My Peacefully Productive Journal™
~ My Peacefully Productive Planner®
~ Google calendar - this is where Adam and I keep track of all of the events for our family so we can both easily see what’s going on at all times
~ Notion - this is where I keep track of all of my “life lists”
~ Year at a Glance Business Google Doc - this is a Google doc that I use to plan out each year in my business (I show this doc in the Peacefully Productive course – there’s a bonus module in there where I show how I plan a year in my business)
What I do:
So I told you earlier that I do my meeting over the course of 2 days – I do my reflecting on the first day and then my prepping on the second day.
First of all, you need to know that I make my meetings a vibe. I make sure my desk is tidy, I have essential oils diffusing (usually Valor + Envision), I have a cozy beverage – either an Olipop, (if you follow me on Instagram then you KNOW the obsession) or iced coffee, and I have a lofi playlist going. Setting up my space like this gets me in the zone and excited for the meeting!
Reflect Day:
The reflect day is honestly pretty simple. On the reflect day, I grab my My Peacefully Productive Journal™ and work through the monthly reflection spread – I love using this journal because I don’t have to think about what to reflect on. I can just open the journal and get to it.
Spoiler alert, I’ve been using the updated version of the journal that is coming out for 2024 and it is AMAZING! Here are the prompts I use to reflect on the month – again, these are right from my Peacefully Productive Journal™:
~ I rate each of these life categories on a 1-5 scale to see which areas of my life need more attention in the coming month: Relationships & Family, Health & Wellness, Personal Growth & Self-Care, Work & Education, Finances & Giving, and Home & Living Spaces
~ I jot down my 3 most memorable wins from the past month
~ I reflect on whether or not I made rest a priority the past month
~ I jot down what progress I made on my Focus Goals the past month
~ I brainstorm any changes I want to make the next month based on my reflections and habits that will help me with these changes
~ I reflect on any lessons I learned the past month
~ And then I reflect on a relationship I’m grateful for from the past month, my favorite memory from the month, and anything I read or listened to that impacted me and I don’t want to forget from the past month
Intentionally reflecting like this is so powerful because it really puts you in a headspace of gratitude – at least it does for me!
Then I do go ahead and fill out my prep page for the next month in my journal – I know most people would think this would happen on the prep day but I like to do it on the reflect day and spend the prep day creating action steps for the goals and intentions I set on the reflect day. You can find what works best for you!
This spread in my journal prompts me to come up with my affirmation for the next month – which I create based on an area that I want to be healthier about the next month. So for example, in January I struggled quite a bit with anxious thoughts so my February affirmation was: I have authority over my thoughts.
Then I jot down my monthly Focus Goals – I choose one personal and one professional. I choose the goals I’m focusing on each month during my quarterly check-in meetings so I typically already know what these are. Of course, I adjust them if necessary based on my season.
Then I brainstorm intentions and habits I want to focus on during that month and I also write out my family vision statements and personal vision statements every month just to keep them front of mind. I can do a whole episode on that another time!
Again, all of this is done in my Peacefully Productive Journal™ – I don’t have to start from scratch every month because the prompts are right there in the journal.
Prep Day:
The prep day is the one that is more time-consuming.
I grab my planner and have Google calendar, Notion, and that business doc I mentioned earlier pulled up on my laptop.
I fill out the monthly prep page in my planner with the monthly affirmation and Focus Goals that I determined in my journal during the reflect day.
Then I go to the Hustle Sanely S.W.I.T.C.H. Goal Mapping page in my planner and create a specific plan of action for my Focus Goals that month. This helps me to know what my weekly priorities are based on my monthly goals.
I don’t always fill this out for every single goal but if it’s a bigger goal that requires a detailed plan in order for me to make it happen, I do fill it out to help me chunk the goal into doable action steps.
Once I’ve mapped out my monthly plan to make progress on my goals, I take inventory of all of the events we have coming up that month by skimming through Google Calendar and transferring important events over to the monthly calendar page in my planner. I like being able to open to that page and just seeing major events coming up that month because our Google calendar has every little thing – like my daily workout classes and Adam’s weekly work shifts – I don’t like seeing those in my monthly view. I only like to see things like appointments, meetings, and events.
Then I take a peek at my yearly business planning doc to see what all I have coming up in my business for the month – like launches, deadlines, and things like that
Being able to look at our personal events and my business events helps me to see how my energy is going to be spread out. I go into each month knowing which weeks are fuller and which ones have more margin and that keeps me from hitting burnout because I can make adjustments if certain weeks feel too full.
The last part of my monthly check-in meeting on my prep day is doing all of my monthly recurring tasks. Now I keep track of these in the notes section of my planner right now – I literally have a list of what needs to be done in my business each month and in my life each month but ANOTHER spoiler alert: in the 2024 planners, I added a space where you can keep a list of recurring tasks by time category – so whether they need to be done yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, etc.
If you aren’t on the waitlist for the 2024 products, you can join that here!
To give you an idea of some of these recurring tasks that I do during my monthly check-in meeting:
Personal:
Schedule deep cleaning
Pay all bills that aren’t automatic
Clean out phone pictures
Plan a day to wash the dogs
Create Young Living and 1st Phorm orders
Professional:
Plan next month’s content (IG, BFF FB posts, all important dates)
Pay taxes/payroll
Schedule what day to write the monthly email
Balance Quickbooks
BFF list
And then the last thing I do to wrap up my monthly check-in meeting is small but one of my favorite parts – I have a little whiteboard in my office where I write my monthly affirmation. So I grab that board and update it with the new month’s affirmation.
So there you have it – a detailed look into how my monthly check-in meetings go down!
I think y’all know this by now but everything that I teach you here is meant to be a foundation that you build on. If part of a system that I use doesn’t work for you, tweak it so that it does! That’s the cool thing about The 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely and creating a peacefully productive life – you get to decide how to walk out each key and you get to tweak them to fit your current season of life! ✨
Are you ready to create a peacefully productive schedule and routines for the year, quarter, month, week, and day to help you ditch overwhelm for good?
Loved this blog post? Tune into the full podcast episode below!
