Monthly Planning Reviews: Seeing Where You’ve Been to Know Where You’re Going

Those of us who enjoy planning will sometimes spend lots of time prepping our next weekly and monthly planner spreads. This can include anything from decorating our planner pages to making sure we’ve transferred all of our to do’s and appointments to our main planners.

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, one habit that will help us better prepare for the month ahead is to look back at how the previous one went. It’s nearing the end of the month, and I’ll be spending a few minutes each day going over my various planners to see how the month went.

I think in the planning community, this is known as a monthly review. But, I’m married to an accountant, so it’s not surprising that I personally call this practice a “month-end review.” If you look up this phrase, lots of budgeting and accounting sites will pop up in your results.

Many goal-setting planners already have monthly reviews built in to their planning systems. I highly recommend the one I’ve been using for the past few years, PowerSheets Planner by Cultivate What Matters, if you are looking for an intentional goal-planning system.

That said, you don’t need a goal-setting planner to do a monthly review. I’ve been doing this for the past few year and have found it really helpful. While I should probably do it more for my budget, I have been performing a monthly review for many aspects of my planning, and here is why:

Why Do a Monthly Review?

There are plenty of reasons to review your monthly planners. Below are some of the ones I think are most important.

• See Your Progress. If you’re using your planners to track habits, write out gratitudes, or keep up with other goals, looking back at the month will show you how you’ve made progress and at what rate. Perhaps you have a goal you want to reach by the end of the year. Seeing the rate at which you’ve been moving toward the goal can help provide you motivation to add some more habits to your weeks or try something new.
• Learn from Your Mistakes. When you review your month, you may see that somethings you were working on did not pan out the way you had hoped. Or, perhaps you didn’t spend the time you needed on something. Reviewing the month helps identify problem areas in your schedule.
• Celebrate Your Wins. On the other hand, seeing what you have accomplished during the month is something to be celebrated. Look back over your planners and identify your wins. Doing so can be a huge motivator and confidence booster.
• Reflect on Your Current Goals. Are you actively engaging in the steps it takes to reach certain goals? Looking back at how you’ve been spending your days can help reveal whether your goal is truly motivating you. You may also notice that you may be more interested in accomplishing other that haven’t officially made your goals list but make up a lot of how you spend your time.
• Help Set the Next Intentions. After reviewing your month, you should have a good idea of how things have been going such as what worked or what didn’t for you. Once you have assessed those, you will be in a better place to plan out your next month. The important thing is to make sure you use that information to set yourself up for a successful month.

Areas to Review at the End of the Month

Unlike the chicken and the egg conundrum, figuring out which comes first- whether to plan or review – should be pretty easy. We need to set up our planners with goals, intentions, and habits that we can look back on and learn from at the end of the month.

So, if you haven’t started a monthly review for your planning system, here are some areas to focus on during your monthly planning set up that you can look back on later. Keep in mind that these are just suggestions- try tracking just a few of these so that you’re not overwhelmed.

• Self-care/Wellness– It doesn’t matter what stage in life you are living right now- whether you are in a down time (as I described in this prior post LINK) or in the midst of a personal busy season- self-care has got to figure in to your planning. I’ve written about this before , and am still committed to spreading the word that making sure you are caring for your self is essential to maintaining your health and well-being. Whether your wellness planning has you setting aside 10-minutes of quiet time a day or starting a new hobby, be sure to include this in your planner.
• Relationships– As humans, we are social beings, which means relationships are important. Your planner can be used to help you foster all manner of relationships– whether it be with a partner, friends, or family members. You can easily keep track of your efforts to cultivate stronger relationships in your planners.
• Family– As I said, we are social creatures who seek out relationships, and our families are probably the most important relationships we have. The atmosphere we foster in our families is often a product of our efforts to relate to one another. As for relationships, our planners can be used to plan out activities and goals for our family.
• Career or School– Depending on the season you are living in, you may want to focus on some aspect of your career or education. Your planner can help with this regardless of whether you are in the midst of working a career and are looking for new opportunities within your field, want to try a side hustle, or simply want to switch gears and start on a new path.
• Fitness/Physical Health – Much like self-care, which focuses on fostering our mental health, fitness and focusing on our physical well-being is also key to living a healthy life. Our planners can be used to keep track of everything from doctor appointments and days at the gym to tracking daily steps and hours of sleep each night.
• Personal Growth– If you are trying to educate yourself in a particular area– perhaps you are listening to motivational podcasts, learning a new language, are engaging in recovery (like I discussed when I reviewed the Happy Planner Recovery Planner), or are trying to learn about anti-racism- you may set some goals and milestones as part of this process. You can use a planner help you keep up with what you’re reading, listening to, and working on for your personal development during the month.
• Faith– Our spiritual health is equally as important as our physical health, and our planners are a great place to remind ourselves throughout the day to track our spiritual well-being. Planners can easily hold our prayer lists, scripture-writing, and gratitude lists, as well as provide space for scheduling in time for group and individual spiritual practices.
• Budgeting– As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, month-end reviews are an accounting term, so it makes sense to apply it to financial planning. Planners are useful for tracking income, spending, and regular bills. They are equally helpful to those who are looking to reduce their debt or increase their savings, as those numbers can be added to the planner on a weekly or monthly basis.

Setting Up Your Planner for a Monthly Review

So that you do not have to go hunting through your planner to see your progress in it, you will want to set it up in such a way that a monthly review is an easy task. Here are some easy ways to set up a planner that’s easy to review:

• Habit Trackers– whether you create your own, add a habit-tracking sticker, or use one that is already included in your planner, habit trackers are the easiest way to track progress. They have daily spaces for checking off whether you have completed a particular habit. I find it best to use different colors (red ink for what I didn’t do) and symbols (check mark for completed and X for anything I didn’t do) so that my progress really stands out. You can easily look back at your habit trackers and see how many boxes show completed tasks or habits.

Using habit tracker stickers is an easy way to add habit tracking to your planner. Here is an entire accessory pack of habit trackers by the Happy Planner  (#Ad)

A more simplified option is this set, which has 52 trackers and reward stickers for meeting your goals (#Ad)

• Mood Trackers– Beyond tracking habits, tracking your mood can provide you insight later into how your month went for you emotionally. You can use stickers for this, a habit tracker (with different colors or symbols for basic moods), or just draw in faces that relate to your emotions.

If you’d rather use a sticker system to track your mood, these are an easy way to add your mood to each day (#Ad)

• Reward Stickers– Remember getting gold stars for good work in school? You can use the same, childhood rewards system for tracking your progress in your planner. Whether in a monthly calendar, weekly spread or daily planning page, keep up with your progress with this visual cue.

Here are some gold stars that are glammed up enough to be considered grown up reward stickers (#Ad)-

• Monthly Spreads– Since I use several planners, but only my weekly planner to coordinate my entire schedule, I end up with lots of monthly spreads in my other planners that could go unused. That said, I don’t have a single blank monthly page. Monthly calendar pages are the best way to get a big-picture view of the month. I use the one in my daily planner to keep up with the work my students are doing, and my Happy Planner monthly spread is where I plan out my housekeeping chores. However, my PowerSheets monthly layout is where I track my “wins”—whatever progress I have made toward a goal gets listed there. My monthly planner that I use for my content is where I’m tracking the analytics for social media and this blog. They have endless uses, so if you have any available, use them for tracking.
• Sidebars in Monthly or Weekly Layouts– That skinny column of lined notes space in monthly and weekly planning spreads is the perfect place to track anything you’re keeping up with. Simply write out what you want to keep track of and fill it in as you go throughout the month. The benefit to using this space is that it’s so easy to find. There’s only one on each page, so no need to hunt around for the information.

Ideas for Monthly Planner Reviews

After you have identified some areas in your life that you’d like to track and set up your planner to keep up with them, you should have some information that can be reviewed at the end of the month. There are countless ways to review how the month went.

Choose one or two from the list below to gain some insight into your planning and intentions. Think about them and consider journaling about them as well. Remember, you’re looking to celebrate your progress, identify problem areas, and use this to help you set yourself up for the next month:

• What Went Well. This can be anything that was a positive for the month. The way to determine it is whether you moved forward in an area of your life or experienced happiness as a result of what happened. For next month- how can you replicate this success or improve on it?
• What Didn’t Go Well. This can be anything that you consider to be a negative outcome that month. You’ll know what didn’t go well if you tried something that failed or brought you a feeling of regret. For next month- how can you avoid this situation going forward?
• What Worked. Similar to “What Went Well,” you need to see which things you did that were successful during the month. Identify what you did and see if there is a way to repeat the habits or actions that brought it about. Also ask yourself if what you did is sustainable or is there a better, more efficient way to perform this task.
• What Didn’t Work. Determine what you did during the month that either brought about a negative result or no result at all. If you found yourself frustrated or experiencing a setback, break down what happened to root out what did not work. Then, set yourself up for next month to try something new.
• Lessons Learned. After looking back on all you did during the month and the results you attained, what have you learned? These can be lessons about yourself (perhaps you get easily frustrated in certain scenarios) or others (some individuals in your life may not be reliable in some situations). List these out and see how you can learn from them for the next month’s setup.
• Things to Try. After assessing things like what did and didn’t work or lessons learned, you may want to include ways to improve how you’re doing things for the next month. Brainstorm a few changes and tweaks to your system, and then include one or two in your next month’s plan.
• Insights into Situations/Relationships/Goals. This requires you to move beyond looking for lessons and simply reflect on your month. What came to light this month? Do you understand certain situations better? What have you discovered about yourself?
• Gratitude. One way to keep a positive perspective moving forward is to look back with gratitude for what you have. Don’t just limit your review to just the obvious happenings that would lead to thankfulness (positive events) but also see how certain obstacles or challenges may have benefited you in some way.
• Patterns. Depending on what you are tracking in your planner, you may gain some significant insight about yourself, your goals, and your progress by looking for patterns. Does your mood tracker show a particular mood during days with the same types of events? Perhaps your daily self-care habits tend to fall by the wayside on the weekends when your days are less structured. By finding the patterns revealed in your various monthly trackers, you can start to arrange your days and weeks to produce different results.
• Wins. Look for the victories- whether big or small- throughout your month. There is no better way to see your progress in a positive light and to keep yourself motivated than to celebrate your wins.
• Answered Prayers. If you are keeping a prayer list in your planner (remember the lined side bar?), one interesting thing to do is to keep up with which prayer concerns have been answered in some way. Sometimes our life’s problems seem huge, but looking back and seeing how things have worked out can help us to know that our lives are in good hands.

I was so excited to find a sticker pack to help with everything from habit and mood tracking to a monthly review. I’ll be getting this soon and cannot wait to use this as part of my planning system! (#Ad)

A monthly review does not have to take hours, and if you have set up your planner to easily identify the progress you are making, it should be a simple process. Reviewing how your month went is a great way to see your progress and provide you with the incentive to keep going, even when life is challenging.

Do you perform a monthly review? If so, what are the areas that you look back on? Leave a comment below!

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** Image of planner with lavender flowers found on Pixabay. Images of bullet journal, habit tracker, and woman celebrating found on Unsplash.

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