Plan with me | Notion Series

We’ve now reached the final week of May. Did I do well? I’d like to think so.. Instead of feeling nervous about the future, I find myself excited and hopeful. I’ve done everything I could, given our situation. I’ve worked on my health the past 2 months and did not take people’s concern for granted. I genuinely feel happier than I’ve ever been before.

May 25, 2021

It’s the end of another month. Can you believe that we are nearly halfway through the year? It seems so unreal, but here we are, all entering June.

As a person who revels in constant improvement, I always take each month’s beginning as an opportunity to restart. Here, I’ll be sharing the four tasks I like to get done in order to enter the new month feeling completely reset.

1. Monthly Accounting

One of the most essential and basic areas I track monthly are my finances. Some key things I keep track of are:

• How much I spent during the month
• Approximately how much I earned
• Whether I stuck to my budget for that month or not (I use a simple budget tracker called Money Manager)
• The amount I invested in (i.e. bonds, stocks, business, etc)
• Approximate amount of my liquid funds

Knowing these financial information helps me plan and set my goals and budget for the next month. It also helps keep myself accountable for my overall expenses. At the end of the year, my monthly comparison also helps me identify my spending habits, and whether I am reaching my set financial goals for the year.

2. Monthly Spring Cleaning (my space and my devices)

As the day to day increasingly becomes busier, my space piles up with unnecessary mess, my devices start to collect unnecessary junk. This monthly spring cleaning I do takes at most two hours.

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• Removing clothes I don’t use anymore from my wardrobe
• Tidying up my work desk
• Rearranging the files and folders of my laptop
• Removing unwanted files or photos from my different devices (I use CleanMyMac X for my macbook) to make more space
• Physically cleaning up my space and my devices

Organizing the space around me and my devices has its way of lightening my mind.

3. Monthly Reflection

I spend at least 30 minutes reflecting on how my month went.

Here are major areas that I reflect on:

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• How I feel about six areas of my life (personal, social, home, health, work, and financial)
• My personal and work accomplishments
• My biggest realisations and learnings for the month
• What I was most grateful for and what made me happiest
• Opportunities to improve on or goals I was not able to accomplish (and how I can do better)

If you’ll notice, this type of retrospective focuses a lot on celebrating each achievement, whether big or small. As somebody who is both a big people pleaser and struggles with imposter syndrome – I find that this type of self-affirmation encourages me that I am on the right track, and drives me to keep doing even better.

I’ve been doing this for the past 3 years, but in 2021 I transferred all my reflections on to Notion, which is a productivity application that anyone can use to store information. It’s handy, easy to use and I’d say its best feature is its collectivity and one-stop-glance on all the information I need to remember.

4. Monthly Planning

To completely end my reset, I plan carefully for the next month, again with Notion.

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• I set my intention for the month aka what I want to focus on becoming or achieving (i.e. for June, my intention is: Independence)
• I design my system, routine and habits. I realized that, while I am a creature of routine, I keep an open mind of what parts of my ‘system’ can still be improved. For example, for June I will:
  • Continue waking up at 6:00am, play tennis, and time-block
  • Start meditating early morning for 10 minutes
  • Stop spending above my budget
• Project & Goal Setting – finally, I set my goals for the month on the following: health, personal growth, self-care, career, spiritual, and relational. The importance is to be very specific with what you want to achieve, and make sure the goals are quantifiable.

Some sample goals I set for this June are:

• Post at least 3-4 new entries on my blog
• Have Doogie (my dog) vaccinated 2x
• Meditate at least 15x this month
• Tennis at least 4x this month

With that, I am set for the month ahead. May had so many unexpected surprises that I am grateful for.