Ahh, prioritization.

"You can do anything you want, but not everything at the same time."

Don't get intimidated by this tab! Once you start using it, you'll find it's super intuitive and useful.

The blank version will contain all your purple boxes, un-prioritized.

The finished version will look something like this —

This isn't as complicated as it looks. Once you start clicking around, it'll go smoothly and easily.

Here's what we're going to look at:

(1) Criticality: Is this essential, important, or urgent — or none of them? It's helpful to think through when choosing what to focus in on.

(2) Certainty: If you tried to do this, would it work? A general recommendation we make is to not have too many items that are uncertain. If you decided you were going to do 30 minutes of walking each day, that's pretty much guaranteed if you do it. Whereas if you're trying to do a business development deal to take your company to the next level, it might or might not happen — a great monthly plan probably shouldn't have multiple different "at-risk" items that aren't certain to happen. If you're doing one risky being thing, make everything else easy and near-certain to help keep yourself sane and your morale high.

(3) Cost: If you did this, how much of your attention would need to spend on it? Now, okay, different people think about this differently. This could be "percent of all waking hours" or "percent of free hours outside of work" or "how much of my spare thinking would this take"... use whatever is intuitive to you when assigning percentages.

(4) Shortlist?: This is where you choose whether you're actually going to do the idea or not. Everything you click "Yes" on will get sent to the last tab for you to operationalize and make it happen; everything you click "No" with is something you're not going to do this coming month.

Important Point: You've Only Got 100% of Your Attention

Okay, maybe this sounds ridiculously obvious... but we consistently see people try to do in excess of 100% of what's possible.

If you look at my example above, I'm at 119% — which makes things very risky, fragile, and dangerous. I left that there when I did a demo round of Monthly Planning to show people that, yes, it happens to all of us.

We've occasionally even seen people have numbers that are 300% — obviously, that sets you up for failure.

The smart thing to do is to get the cost of things you're going to do next month below 100%.

For some reason, people like to be overachievers — they try to push to the limit of what's possible. Well, fair enough, we respect and salute that, but it's much more sane to allocate 70% of next month's attention to some very high-impact stuff than it is to assign 150%+ to a mix of important and non-important stuff.

The spreadsheet will stay a nice and calm purple if you're below 100%, it'll go a yellow warning-type color if you're 101% to 129%, and becomes a "danger danger danger" red color if you go to 130%+.

If you don't take any other advice in this guide, though, do this — get safely below 100% of what's possible.

The more you stack a bunch of stuff over-and-above what's possible, the more likely you'll fail at something important.

You can play with these items here — again, just click "No" on the Shortlist question to remove something from the cost; you can always revisit it next month.

Alright then, once you've sized up all your options, chosen which ones you're going to do, and ensured it's sanely below 100%, head on over to the final Operationalization tab...