Life is a giant juggling act. Without a bigger picture view of what’s ahead it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day rush of a busy life.
The Benefits of The Monthly Layout
- Keep a visual timeline of your time constraints and deadlines.
- Maintain balance by monitoring how you’re spending your time and where you need to make adjustments.
- Create a collection of all the things that you want to get done which are not so time-sensitive, but shouldn’t be put off until later.
The Monthly Layout Process
The Monthly Layout gives us an important snapshot of the bigger picture.
Collect information from all your sources, such as electronic and family calendars to keep on top of your life.
The Monthly Layout is located at the beginning of each month in the planner.
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Calendar Overview
- The calendar is usually the first place people start with a new planner. The desire to fill in the blank spaces with birthdays, holidays and other special dates and appointments is almost irresistable.
- Create an overview of what the month ahead looks like to make sure that you’re ready for everything and don’t bite off more than you can chew!
Dotted Grid
- This is likely the space you’ll use to record the month and year.
- The light Dotted Grid helps to keep lines straight, but they don’t have to restrict you. You can illustrate this space as much as you would like.
- Keep yourself inspired with a favourite quote or reminder of your why.
This Month’s Goals
- Every month is a new opportunity to improve on the last.
- Break down the goals from your Lemonade Dreaming, Big Lemonade Brew, or This Month’s Lemonade Recipe to make constant progress towards your ultimate aim.
- Review them at the end of the month to see which ones you’ve achieved, which are no longer relevant, and which you’ll need to break down further to succeed in.
Priorities
- Remind yourself of your main priorities. You can’t be everything to everyone, so you need to keep what’s most important to you at the moment in the forefront of your mind.
- Conflicting needs can be assessed against your priorities to work out what you time is best spent on.
Projects
- Projects come in all shapes and sizes. With the number of them that we might have going on at any given time, they can be easy to leave unfinished without even realising it.
- Tick completed projects off and transfer unfinished ones to the next month.
- If you no longer want to complete a project find a way to finalise it so it no longer takes up your brain or shelf space.
To-do this month
- Here is the spot for the tasks that you would like to achieve before the end of the month, but aren’t yet prepared to commit an exact week or day to yet.
- Use this list to pull out the weekly to-dos, and tick off the ones you’ve completed each week.
- At the end of the month, transfer the unfinished to-dos to the next month.
Buy your Lemonade Planner or download your free copy of the Monthly Layout digital download list to give it a go. Next week we'll be going through some of the different planning methods and routines you can use to use your work time more productively and make sure you have some down time for yourself to recharge.
The Monthly Layout is really important to help you break down and make enormous progress with your goals. It's not too late to book into our next Goal Planning Workshop on May 16. You don't need to have a Lemonade Planner to join us. We'll provide the individual pages on the day for anyone who requires them.
Introduction To The Monthly Layout