We start by looking at how last month went.

Y'know, a lot of people do something funny when they set goals or do planning.

They start by making these lofty aspirational goals without looking at where they're currently at.

In reality, most of the fast gains you'll get from planning are from —

(1) Looking at what's working great and doing more of that, and,

(2) Looking at stupid little things that are going wrong and eliminating those.

We do this on the "Debrief" Tab of Monthly Planning. It starts blank like this —

Once you've filled it out, it will look like this —

Three Things to Do When Debriefing Last Month

On this tab, you'll do three things:

(1) Mark how well each day went. We give three categories that are automatically colored when you select them — Exceptional, Good, Neutral, or Bad. This will give you a good visual view of the day.

(Note: if the wrong month is here, go back to the very first tab and choose the correct months to debrief/plan.)

(2) Note what factually happened that day. As much as possible, try to write "just the facts." Meetings? Calls? Project work? Lots of time surfing the web? Pulled an all-nighter the night before because of a crazy deadline? Mark that down here.

(3) Implications for next month. And here's where the rubber meets the road — whenever you had a particularly great day, you can mark what was great about as something to replicate going forwards. For instance, if you had an exceptional day after you had lunch with a good friend, maybe you ought to try to have more lunches with friends next month? You can also mark down things to try to improve that were bad — my "what could I do to be better prepared for tired/compromised days?" was written after I had a couple let-down days during some crazy flights and travel.

Wait... what the heck did I do last month?

We've run Monthly Planning with a lot of people now, and consistently around half of the attendees don't know how they spent most of their time last month.

Three points worth noting about that —

(1) In and of itself, maybe that should be a little alarming? If you're not spending your days doing things that are really meaningful or really productive or _really _enjoyable, then what the heck are you doing? You might aim to have more noteworthy days next month, eh?

(2) Don't sweat it if you can't get every day down. Some days just aren't that noteworthy or you can't remember what you did. If you can fill out even one-third of your days, you can get a picture of what's working well and poorly for you.

(3) If you want to play detective a bit, you can actually figure out a lot of what you did by checking your calendar and checking your sent emails folder. Obviously, your calendar will have appointments on it that'll jog your memory for what you did on those days. Your sent email is even more useful for detective work — that probably has a history of meetings scheduled, deliverables you sent to other people, the reminder for what day your doctor's appointment was on, or whatever else.

After that, if you sit and think hard, you can probably remember what you did on each of the weekends too, at least if you work a normal Monday-Friday schedule. The spreadsheet is smart in that'll automatically assign each day of the month to the relevant day of the week to make it easier for you to navigate.

Once again — important takeaways need to go in the purple boxes! The good/bad day rankings and "Factually, what happened?" are not carried over; only the purple boxes are carried over.

Also — don't worry if you put too much in the purple boxes. We'll triage and prioritize later. Just get down everything you might do differently next month.

Okay, when you're done debriefing last month, click over to the next tab and continue this guide...