How To Do a Monthly Reset Routine: Step By Step Guide

When a new month begins it’s a great time to start fresh with a monthly reset. This is something I’ve been doing in my career and business for a long time, however, I’m not so great at doing a monthly reset in my personal life.

Therefore, lately, I’ve been looking at ways I can do a reset in other areas of life. As it turns out, doing a monthly reset can help get you back on track and help you stay on top of regular tasks.

Below you’ll find details on what a monthly reset includes, and the various ways you can do a reset in life (i.e. home, work, finances, health, and personal growth).  

Let’s get into it.

What is the Meaning of a monthly reset?

A monthly reset is literally like starting the reset button on your life. 

You can create allocated time to do a reset each month which means getting your life back on track so you can refocus on the things that are important to you. 

This might be things at home, work, with your finances, your health and anything that is a priority for you right now.

A reset each month is a great way of feeling in control of your goals and the things that truly matter to you.

Why Do A Monthly Reset?

There are so many reasons to do a monthly reset. The core reason that mainly stands out is a reset helps you keep things going in life so you can reach your goals and feel accomplished.

More specifically, a monthly reset helps you:

• Create a positive fresh start to each month
• Regain focus on important tasks
• Stay on top of things and feel organized
• Improve organization and productivity
• Stay on track with your goals
• Feel motivated at the beginning of the month
• Create new intentions for the upcoming month (aligning to your values and goals)

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1. Determine your areas of focus

Just because you can review multiple areas of life, perhaps you don’t need to or don’t want to. So the first step is to consider what will be included in your monthly reset. 

If you’ve never done a monthly reset before this is important to help you get into the habit of one, and not feel overwhelmed. This is supposed to make your life easier after all.

For example, you can do a monthly reset on:

• Work and health
• Work and home
• Finances and home 
• Personal growth
• Health 

What you choose to focus on really ladders up to your main goals in life today.

2. Review Last Month

To help review how things went the previous month you can use these questions:

• What worked?
• What didn’t work?
• Did you learn anything based on what didn’t work?
• How were you at following new habits?
• What did you have on your to-do list that is still important and you didn’t accomplish?
• How did you feel at the end of the month when you look back? 

Also, look at any data that shows how you performed the previous month. 

A Few Examples:

If you are doing a monthly reset when it comes to your finances, with a goal of spending less money you can look at all credit card transactions, how good you were at tracking all spending, plus the areas you spent less in.

If you are a small business owner, you can review your total revenue, the biggest revenue earners, expenses compared to the previous month and the traffic to your website and from what sources (i.e. Social media, SEO, newsletters).

3. Set Goals + Create Simple Action Plan

Focus on things you’d like to complete this month. You can set new goals or continue with current goals.

Once you know your goals, you can add a small list of tasks to complete to reach these goals. This list is your simple action plan.

For example, if my main focus is to improve my morning routine this month (to support my mental health), I can look at adding 3 new tasks in the morning:

1. Walk around the block first thing
2. Tea while writing in my journal
3. Reading a book for 15 minutes (fiction or non-fiction)

4. Write a to-do list for the month

First, do a brain dump of everything that’s on your mind. There is no need to categorize at this point – just get it all down on paper.

A list might include things like:

• Book vacation
• Spring clean house
• Buy a dress for wedding
• Speak to a financial advisor
• Restock pantry
• Call vets for an appointment
• Print a new habit tracker for the month
• See friend
• The above tasks on your goals action plan

Here are some things I recommend doing a reset on each month.

Finances

• Paying bills
• Look at your budget
• Knowing where your money is going (expenses)
• Having short and long-term financial goals – and checking in on them each month
• Paying down debt
• Puting money into savings

Events & Important Dates

Knowing what’s coming up in a given month will help you keep track of cards and gifts you want to buy and any plans you need to make.

Events can be things like:

• Birthdays
• Family gatherings
• Weddings
• Anniversaries
• Child’s recital
• School events – play, baseball game, etc.

Appointments

Taking note of upcoming appointments.

• Doctors
• Dentist
• Therapy
• Vets
• Parent/teacher interviews

Home Projects

Here are some examples of things to do to maintain a safe and healthy home.

• Changing out the furnace filter
• Replacing batteries in fire alarms and carbon monoxide detectors + testing them
• Turn off outside water/faucets  in winter (in cold climates)
• Clean gutters/eavestroughs

Tidy Up

• Check expiry dates on pantry items
• Deep cleaning kitchen and bathrooms
• Spring clean
• Declutter home items (clothes, kitchen utensils, etc) and sell or donate

6. Add To Your Monthly Calendar

Now it’s time to add items from sections 3, 4, and 5 to your calendar, or if you use a system like Trello or Notion you can create a calendar there.

Events and appointments are easy to add to a specific time and date. For anything else where you want to accomplish something within a given week, you can add in without a deadline – just within the week.

I recommend color-coding different calendar entries so it’s easy to determine whether something is for personal or work purposes.

Here are some categories you can use that might be helpful:

• Personal appointments – orange
• Personal events – green
• Work meetings – blue
• Work schedule (projects) – purple
• Monthly goal – Yellow > For monthly goals I recommend blocking time in your calendar for dedicated time to work on this goal.

7. Take Action

Now that you have everything in your calendar – dates, times and an overall schedule of how things will roll out, you can more easily complete your to-do list. So the last thing to do is to take action.

If you’d like to create a master to-do list for different areas of your life, you can grab the free printable checklist in this post: Monthly Reset Checklist to Simplify Life. It includes 3 to-do lists so you can capture everything.

Self-Care & Personal Development

If you want to practice more self-care and/or personal development in the upcoming month I recommend following the 7 steps above. 

They honestly work great for this, especially when you review your past month, set goals and time block self-care time in your calendar.

Examples of self-care:

• Working out
• Seeing a therapist
• Booking a self care Saturday
• Creating the perfect evening wind down routine
• Spending time with good friends

Examples of Personal Development:

• Doing a 30-day challenge
• Journaling
• Taking an online course
• Listening to a new podcast
• Focusing on new habits & tracking them