Plan with Me February 2021 || Bullet Journal Layout for Daily Writing

January is a weird month. You're coming off the holidays, you have #NewYearNewMe goals, habits, things that you want to get going, but things are just kind of restarting. We're coming off like a busy season, there's lots of festive feelings, and the weather is bad in a lot of parts of the country. And what I have found is sometimes it takes me, and this year is no exception, it takes me a few weeks to kind of get back into the normal rhythm of work and life. So when you're starting these new goals, these new habits, it's easy to get frustrated, overwhelmed, and feel like right from the beginning that you made bad decisions or you're not good enough. And that's what I want to help you overcome and get clarity, get unstuck on as we enter February with this plan with me bullet journal video. For the past couple of years, I've been saying to myself that February 1st is the new January 1st, because things that may have been a little tough to get started or stick with as you began the new I just say let's turn the page and start fresh on February 1st. The other fun thing about February that I have always liked is it's a perfect month for a 7-day week, except for those, you know, leap, leap years, because, you know, 28 days, 4 weeks, 7 days, it's perfect. And especially this year, 2021, February 1st is on a Monday. So it's really one of the most perfect months for productivity, for kind of planning and getting things done, kicking off new habits, or just kind of keeping the momentum going of something that you may have already successfully been doing at the start of the new year.

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I want to give you a quick overview and just flip through of my February 2021 monthly layout. You also see how I divide up the weeks and the days. It's a very simple, relatively unchanged monthly, weekly, daily layout that I've been using for well over a year right now, but with one specific exception as we go into this new month of February in 2021. And that exception is an expanded and kind of updated habit tracker that I'm going to be using for the two habits that I'm being very, very aware and intentional of in the new year. If you've been following my videos for a while, you'll recognize this as my classic monthly spread. Very minimal, very simple. It is the day of the month, the day of the week, and any big events go into my monthly spread right here. I'm not necessarily using this for appointments or meetings, but just main things that I am doing for the month. So again, big events, birthdays— shout out to my brother Mark. Now the other piece of this monthly layout are the monthly milestones or objectives. Make sure you watch my videos about QMWD goal setting and planning to know more about monthly milestones and objectives if you haven't heard of that before. I do tend to list these based on order of importance or prioritization as well. So a couple of these things like number 4 and number 5, if I don't get to them by the end of the month, and that's okay, they just become the primary projects or milestones as I go into March. If you've watched any of my previous monthly or habit tracking videos, then you know or will recognize that I do a very simple minimalist habit tracker. And the way that I specify this habit has been completed for the day is just to say, did I do it at all? So it's not saying I had to do like this type of workout, or I had to run X number of miles, or work out for a specific number of minutes. It's just Did you exercise today in some way? And if it did, then I would check it off. The big thing that I'm doing differently or in addition to in February is a more expansive habit tracker or progress tracker for my two big challenges for the month. One is breathwork and another is that daily email writing that I mentioned right here, Daily Email Experiment. For breathwork and daily email writing, I'm doing something a little bit different. I'm still only tracking based on did I did I not do it, but I'm doing more of a gradual counting and tracking of my results, which I don't normally do with all of these other habits. I'm not saying that I meditated for X number of minutes. I'm not saying I read X number of pages or wrote a specific number of lines in my journal. But for breathwork and daily email writing, I am really curious how long with breathwork am I holding my breath. I'll get to that in a couple of minutes. And then for daily email writing, how many words Am I writing each day? Each one of these habits has a specific motivating factor behind it. For breathwork, I've noticed that I don't necessarily take a lot of time to just sit or lay down and be with myself. I'm always trying to do something even when I don't necessarily have to do anything. And one of the things that I've noticed over the past couple of years, and especially the past few months, is I tend to hold a lot of tension in my chest. And as I've started doing this type of breathwork, I've noticed that I've just felt a little, you know, a little freer and a little lighter and a little more at ease. And so I'm seeing those tangible benefits. And I know that when I make time for myself, that I'm going to be in a better place for everyone else. A specific type of breathwork that I'm doing, I'll only spend a minute on this, is the Wim Hof breathing method. Now you may have heard of Wim Hof from the ice challenges that he does. He just likes to be cold. And I'm not all the way to that just yet, but I have been taking some cold showers. That's something else. And I've been doing his breathwork most days for the, for the, for the entirety of 2021 right now, not every day, but most days. And what it does is you take 30 deep breaths and then on the 30-ish breath, you just hold your breath for as long as you can. Like, you know, don't pass out or anything, but take 30 breaths, hold your breath as long as you can, exhale, and start over. And you do like 4 or 5 rounds, and I tell you, you'll, you'll feel pretty wild at the end of it. And like, you just feel good. It's pretty, pretty weird for me just to breathe. So I'll talk about that in another video if you are more interested in it. I'm probably going to make a video about it anyway. And then the other piece of this is that I'm doing a daily email writing challenge for myself. And that is, again, just a challenge. I've always thought that I would like to do daily emails, but it always felt very intimidating to me. And so what I'm doing to kind of limit the scope of this without feeling overwhelmed is it's just going to be like a short 2 to 3 minute email that's just about 200 or 300 words to write. And they'll be about the different topics that we talk about. So like Sundays will be about planning and bullet journals, Mondays will be about habits. So if you're interested in signing up to my email newsletter, just go to mattreigling.com/thinkers. That's going to be the best place to sign up. You can also sign up at 3keys.fyi, but they're going to be links to those in the description as well. So this is where I put those top goals for the week and then my regular daily layout. Now, what I normally do for a month, I'll say, and this is a departure from some of the, like, do your daily bullet journal and do daily only that maybe I've talked about for beginners, but since I've done this type of layout for a long time, then I know this is what works best for me. This allows me to lay out the entire month really easily, and even though I'm still going into these on a daily basis, as you can see, obviously they're all blank right now for the most part. I still, as things come up, like if I know something is going to happen on Saturday—this is a Saturday, February 13th—like I mentioned here, so I can pre-plan things in and do a little bit of an early layout. And I've formatted all the different days and weeks for the month. And then I would start planning out March right here. The reason that I'm trying to strike this healthy balance between making and taking time for myself while still challenging myself is because I'm learning that part of peak productivity when you're running your own business is taking time for yourself and creating margin in your life. When you create margin in your life, then you are giving yourself space and permission. It's really easy. It was really easy for me that when I was doing this all as a side hustle, whenever I was done with my main job, or like before I was expected to be online for like ConvertKit or Podia, I was like, okay, well, I know what I have to do. I have to put out the YouTube video, I have to, you know, get this course ready, I have to write the email newsletter, this like kind of always-on go, go, go, like I have to fill in every, like, every slice and sliver of time that I have for the side hustle that I'm building. And it's been really hard, harder than I expected to shift away from that mindset. And what Shawn was telling me is that now is the time to take a deep breath. Even that felt good right there. I'm not going to hold my breath on you, but taking a deep breath, looking over this and deciding what kind of business and what kind of life do you want to be intentional about building right now. Because if I just take all of my bad habits from what I was doing before and bring them into this new work, then the work is going to change, but the person that I am and the life that I'm living is not going to change that much. And I know that if I keep myself— and it's really easy for me to default to this level of intensity— that again, if I don't like kind of take myself a step back from it and look at it and say, Okay, how do I build a long-term sustainable career out of this so that I don't like totally burn myself out in the very first year of doing it and then have to put back together the pieces of everything that kind of fell apart because I wasn't paying enough attention to the pace that I was putting myself through. So how does this apply to you and how you are planning out your own February 2021? What I want you to think about as you're going into this month is what kind of pace have you set and are you setting for this year? It's really easy to start the new year with a lot of energy, a lot of excitement. It's also really easy, because I've worked with hundreds of people about this, it's also really easy to get discouraged, to get off track, to like fall off the wagon with your habits, your goals, the things that you intended to be doing at the beginning of this year, and feel like, ah, well, I guess, I guess this isn't the year for me. But it's only February 1st. We're still in the very early stages of 2021. And if you've noticed in the past that you've gotten to February and thought like, I guess this isn't going to be the year, then I want you to like with me treat February 1st as the new January 1st and just think like, okay, January is kind of a weird month. Weather's not great. There's a lot of, you know, holiday excitement, you know, festive feelings and let's just say like January is kind of a margin month is the way that I think about it a lot of times. And let's just start February 1st with the kind of intention and pace that we intend to keep for the rest of the year. As a part of the breathwork on Monday the 1st, if I have a total breath hold of 6 minutes, that's not at once, but as a, in a number of rounds that I have done, and then let's say just I wrote 300 words, What I'm going to do is just keep adding those up, and then in the following week right here, I might say if I did 5 or 6 minutes throughout the week, then I'm going to have 35 minutes of total breath hold. The layout for this is really simple on the Bullet Journal. It's— it took a little bit of time to put together, and there are 8 columns and 3 rows, 2 dot spaces in between each one. I accidentally gave myself 3 right here, but you know, as Bob Ross says, happy accidents, no big deal. But it makes for a really, a really good-looking crisp table. Pentel EnerGel pen and this nice 6-inch Baron Fig and a flat ruler. Really easy to do, just a matter of taking the time to do it. Now one other thing that you can do is give yourself a good test for the month of February. Like I said, it's a perfect month for productivity and planning because it's 28 days, it's 4 perfect weeks. Even February 1st is a Monday. And so even if you just take February, like I am for daily emails, as a month to experiment, to test, to see how everything goes. And that's what I'm doing with my daily email challenge. Like, I'm going to write an email or publish an email every day for the month of February, and then I'm just going to take a step back and be like, okay, is this really what I want to be doing for the foreseeable future? Is this another thing that I want to add on? Is there something that I need to take away in order to add this in? And so February is a really good month to run a test for yourself because, you know, no one, no one really notices or minds if you stop doing, you know, some habits after February. That's okay. You just need to give your— give permission to yourself to test something new that you've been interested in doing for a really long time and see what the results are after. I'd love to hear from you in the comments with what you are starting, stopping, or sticking with in the month of February. It's a perfect time to test, and I hope you take advantage of it. So let me know in the comments what you are starting, stopping, or sticking with in the month of February. Thank you so much for watching this video, and thank you so much to Morning Brew for sponsoring it. Remember, you can sign up in as little as 15 seconds, totally for free, and get the best news delivered to your inbox on business, finance, and tech. Thank you for watching this video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye!