Part 1: How should I plan one month?

If you are often jumping from task to task or you are unsure of where to start, test something different and book time with yourself to create a monthly plan.

There are many advice out there, and I personally love testing different productivity tips. If you want something simple, you can try this 3-Step Plan which I follow each month and it takes me about 25min to make. As a result, you will know what to focus on and where to begin.

STEP 1. Define focus areas

Decide what to focus on based on my quarterly and yearly business plan. How many areas/goals should you have? Over time, I have learned to work on a maximum of four focus areas. Of course, the fewer they are, the more in-depth you can go. For instance, this March one of my focus areas is to develop accountability partners' products for remote teams.

STEP 2. Define simple KPIs.

Why? These will guide you when you set weekly tasks and should help you track your progress at the end of the month. I revisit and review these at the end of each month. Depending on your objective these can be simple as: ‘done’ or ‘not done’ OR they need a measurement eg. create 3 reels weekly.

STEP 3. Outline weekly priorities

Breaking down monthly objectives into weekly priorities will help you ensure that each week's focus aligns with the larger monthly goals. Some focus areas will be ongoing such as ‘content creation’ whereas others are one-off eg. creating 1 Yearly Business plan. From here, you create a list of tasks necessary to complete each week.

Notebook or an App?

These steps are simple and applicable to both a notebook and any task-managing app. I personally like Trello, because it's very visual and simple. You can see what mine looks like in this reel on Playground's Instagram here. If you want access to my Trello template, email me at hello@enterplayground.com P.S. If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it 👇