Yesterday’s post was all about effectively getting things done on a day-to-day basis. That’s a great start, but the art of planning goes much deeper than a simple daily to-do list. 

The higher planning level we’ll discuss today is there to help you write mostly fun and inspiring stuff on your daily list. Without it, your days can easily become chaotic and draining. 

Let’s set this up.

The three aims of monthly planning

Monthly planning comes in three flavors:

1. Coordination with other people. This is essential for running any successful team project. 
2. Coordination over time. This allows you to construct a coherent story over a longer time frame. 
3. Getting ideas out of your head. When you transcend from work to creation, you’ll need this to keep your head from exploding with cool ideas. 

As a practical example, I use item 1 for streamlining my contribution to our research projects, number 2 for planning this blog, and number 3 for storing all my ideas for scientific papers, popular science articles and longer personal development articles.  

The Gantt chart 

Gantt charts are the gold standard in project planning. They allow you to easily visualize the planned execution of a set of tasks. This is particularly useful when tasks depend on each other. 

There are all sorts of advanced features for serious project management, but we just need the basics.

Let me present the three easy steps to your very own Gantt chart:

1. Open a new document in MS Excel or Google Sheets.
2. List the months of the year in the first two rows and the key tasks that need to happen in the first column.
3. Color the cells to indicate when each task should be happening and to show its progress.

The finished product should look something like this, maybe just with slightly more realistic tasks 😉

Sometimes a simple list is fine

When you’re dealing with tasks that must occur on a fixed schedule, you can simply work with a list. 

My content calendar for this blog works in this way. I know I must produce four coherent posts each week that fit into a broader narrative, so all I need is a list with four related titles for each week.

Updating your plan

Plans change… that’s what they do. 

You should update your monthly plan whenever some external factor forces a rethink or you get some bright idea for a better strategy. 

In addition, going over your plan at the start of each month is essential.

This overview allows you to 1) spot any potential issues before they get serious or 2) identify valuable synergies that can greatly accelerate progress. 

Integration with you to-do list

The great thing about using Google Tasks for to-do listing (discussed yesterday) is that it is well integrated with Google Sheets. 

That means that you can always have your to-do list sitting conveniently next to your monthly plan, allowing you to put all the right tasks on your daily to-do list. 

You can either work on Google Sheets directly or sync an Excel file on your PC to display and automatically update any changes on Google Sheets. 

Then simply set the URL of your Google Sheets Gantt chart as your home page in your browser. Google Tasks will always be conveniently available to the right of your spreadsheet.

Tomorrow we’ll add the final layer to this planning philosophy. See you then!