Monthly Reflection Checklist: 12 Questions to Ask Yourself

Most people set their goals once a year and check on them in December. By then the useful details have gone: what worked, what stalled, what you quietly dropped in March and never picked up again.

A month is a better interval. Four weeks is long enough for a habit to prove whether it fits, and short enough that you can still remember why a Tuesday went sideways. A monthly reflection checklist gives that review a shape, so it takes half an hour rather than an hour of staring at a blank page.

These twelve questions are worth returning to month after month. Change the wording if you like. Keep the order.

Set a date and keep it short

When you review matters as much as what you review. Pick a slot you can actually protect: the last Friday afternoon of the month, the first Sunday morning, the train home on the 30th. Put it in your calendar as a repeating event and treat it like any other appointment.

Keep the setup plain:

• Twenty to thirty minutes. Longer than that and it turns into a project you'll avoid next month.
• One notebook, one pen. A dedicated page per month, dated at the top.
• Last month's page within reach. Half the value is in the comparison.
• Phone out of the room. Not face down on the desk. Out of the room.

Write your answers by hand if you can. It slows you down just enough to stop the tidy, automatic answers arriving first.

The twelve questions

Direction and goals

• 1. What did I actually finish this month? Not what you planned, not what you nearly did. Write down the finished things, however small. A list of completed items is more useful than another list of intentions.
• 2. What did I start and quietly abandon? There is usually one. Ask what made it stall rather than assuming you lost discipline. A course needing a laptop and a quiet hour is a different problem from a habit needing ten minutes.
• 3. Which goal no longer feels worth the effort? Dropping something deliberately is not failure. Note why you are letting it go, so you don't sign up to it again in six months.
• 4. What one thing, if it happened next month, would make everything else easier? The honest answer is often dull: a working printer, an hour of admin, a conversation you have been avoiding.

Habits and systems

• 5. Which habit did I keep without negotiating with myself? Study the conditions, not the willpower. Same time, same place, kit ready the night before. That is the pattern worth copying.
• 6. Where did I rely on motivation instead of a system? Motivation turns up late. If something only happened on the days you felt keen, decide what could hold it up instead.
• 7. What did I spend time on that I wouldn't choose again? Check the calendar rather than your memory. The culprits are usually a meeting with no agenda, an app, or a queue of small tasks that could be batched into one sitting.
• 8. What did I learn that is worth keeping? A shortcut, a useful contact, a sentence that explained something clearly. Move it somewhere you will find it again, or it disappears.

Wellbeing and energy

• 9. How did I sleep, eat and move, and what suffered first under pressure? Note the order in which things slipped. Most people have a predictable first casualty, and knowing yours makes it easier to protect. If sleep, appetite or mood have been off for several weeks, that is a conversation for your GP rather than a notebook.
• 10. Who did I make time for, and who have I been meaning to contact? Write the name down and send the message now, while the page is open.
• 11. What drained me most often? Be specific. "Work" is not an answer; "the Monday call with no agenda" is. If money worries keep coming up, a free debt advice service will help you more than another month of circling the same page.
• 12. What did I enjoy that I didn't make time for again? The answers tend to be cheap: a walk before dark, a long phone call, an afternoon with a book.

Turn your answers into three actions

Twelve questions can produce twelve good intentions, which is eleven too many. Before you close the notebook, choose three items:

1. One thing to stop. Cancel it, delete it, reply and decline. A stop is easier to honour than a start.
2. One thing to keep. Name the habit that worked and the condition that made it work. Protect that condition.
3. One thing to try. Small enough to do twice in the next fortnight. "Write for twenty minutes on Tuesdays" beats "write more".

Then do the first step of the third item straight away, while you still have the momentum. Book the room, buy the folder, send the email. Ten minutes now beats a plan you will reread and ignore.

Make the checklist repeatable

Copy the twelve questions onto the first page of a notebook, or keep the list on a card inside the cover. Each month gets one page: the answers at the top, the three actions at the bottom, a tick or a cross beside last month's promises. After three or four months you will see patterns you cannot spot in a single sitting, like the fact that your best weeks follow a Sunday evening plan, or that everything wobbles in the week you travel.

Some months the honest answer will be "not much happened, and that was fine". Record it and move on. A review is a check-in, not a performance. The point is to notice, adjust one or two things, and start the next month with a clearer idea of where you are going.

Photo: Leeloo The First / Pexels