Monthly reset routine for minimalists at heart

What is a monthly reset routine?

A monthly reset routine is a form of practicing self-care to recuperate from the daily hustle and bustle of life. 

One of the best ways to reset as a minimalist is to do so on the first or last day of every month. 

To keep things simple, you may even use a monthly reset checklist to ensure you’re intentional about resetting several areas of your minimalist lifestyle.

The best way to approach creating a monthly reset routine is to determine what needs to be changed specifically. This will make your monthly reset checklist more practical and manageable. 

There are buckets of your life that may need more improvement than others. A great way to start a monthly reset routine is to identify categories or aspects of your life where you feel the most fulfilled and unfulfilled.

Reflection questions or using an activity like the wheel of life graphic organizer is an active way to organize your thoughts and reconfigure your mindset for a fresh start in the upcoming month.

If you need a step-by-step guide on how to develop your own monthly reset routine, I’ve got you covered goal-friend!

How do you reset at the beginning of the month?

Life assessment

Of course, assessing where you are in life, and giving yourself grace to meet yourself where you are, is the first step to resetting your life at the top of the month.

A monthly reset routine will look quite different from the reset you conduct at the beginning of a full year or at the end of a week. 

With at least 30 days of life experience gained, including but not limited to mistakes, losses, and wins, you have enough things to reflect upon to recalibrate where you’d like to be a month from now. 

Your life assessment allows you to check-in with yourself mentally. 

• How are you feeling?
• What overwhelmed you last month?
• What goals did you reach?
• What things can you do differently for a better outcome?
• In what ways did you grow on a personal level?

While the questions above are pretty broad, they’re a simple way to get your mind to think critically about your personal development. 

Use a whiteboard, journaling exercises, or a video capsule to record where you are and where you’re headed in life. It’s essentially a different way of decluttering your mind, all while keeping the assessment activity simple and easy to follow. 

Detox

Once your mind is clear, the next practical and logical step to focus on as a minimalist may be the body.

 If my mental health is up to par, I’d like my physical health to be just as strong as well. 

The foods we nourish our bodies with can affect our productivity, ability to learn, cope with stress, and either lower or increase our energy levels throughout the day. 

It’s important to be intentional about the meals we eat. 

Some ways you can determine if your body needs to detox from toxins are by assessing the way your skin looks and feels; weighing yourself on a scale; taking your blood pressure and regulating your digestive system.

Doing a juice cleanse with various vegetable recipes, fixing a smoothie every morning, or intermittent fasting are several ways you can detox your body.

Detoxing is now a staple in my monthly reset routine. My skin always looks amazing and I feel more confident in my appearance afterwards. 

In addition, meal prepping at the beginning of the week is a habit you can gradually build into your monthly reset routine as a minimalist. 

It’s one less decision you have to make when you’re craving something nutritious and delicious to eat!

Clutter-free capsule wardrobe

Decluttering a capsule wardrobe may seem like overkill, but accumulating clothing items from gifts or seasonal pieces overtime can be a lot to handle.

Why not use the beginning of the month to donate old clothes that are out of season and staples in your wardrobe you know you’ll never wear again? 

Reorganize your drawers by clothing type and put away any items you’ll no longer need for the change in weather. Switch out your coats, scarves, boots for jackets, caps, and casual shoes as winter ends.

Try dividing your closet by color, style, and season and pack away the rest of your clothes into storage cube boxes or put them away to be laundered.

Incorporating this practice into your monthly reset routine will have you more organized than ever when you’re searching for work clothes or a cute ensemble for a night on  the town.

Digital declutter

I recently added digital decluttering to my monthly reset routine and I haven’t been happier.

We all know the clutter on our phones, email, and desktops tend to either be distractions or eyesores. But when we’re working or in a rush to get through the day, organizing documents into file folders, deleting excess junk mail, or unused apps on our laptops and gadgets are more than likely not a priority.

Taking time out of each month to do so is certainly worth it, believe me.

As a minimalist, I like to use only a handful of basic apps on my phone, such as text messages, Google maps, the calculator, SpotHero, and TikTok, for entertainment. 

Before using the digital declutter hack, I had over 100 unused apps on my phone. They were running down my battery and sending me countless notifications throughout the night. 

Any laptop I owned for personal use or work never remained organized. I’d open up several documents, download and save random photos and documents to my desktop, and I never monitored the number of emails in my inbox. 

I had a poor habit of letting the numbers go up and up. This is until I discovered that keeping all this clutter on devices eats away at the storage and battery, including the cloud. 

My digital gadgets started performing poorly because I had way too much mess on them.

Now that I conduct digital decluttering monthly, I don’t have to worry about running out of gigabytes, paying for more cloud storage, losing personal pictures, or taking hours to locate certain documents. 

I designate a few hours the first week of my monthly reset routine to get my digital life under control.

Product purge

Are there any makeup minimalists out there? Sephora makeup addicts? Hair junkies? 

Okay, anyone who has to try out the latest products from their favorite brands?

C’mon guys, I know I’m not the only one. 

Once I developed a habit of taking care of my hair and skin, my obsession with toners, facial wash, moisturizers, serums, shampoo and conditioners skyrocketed. 

But, so did my monthly expenses, and now my bathroom cabinets overflow with samples and half-empty bottles of products.

Some of which I haven’t even touched. 

The girls that get it, get it – a product purge is a must in your monthly reset routine!

At the end of each month, I do inventory of all my beauty, hair, and skincare products in my bathroom by looking at dates and deciding if there are products I care to finish or never use again. 

Some of them get thrown away, or I donate them to friends and family members to get the product clutter out of my life.

Personal finance audit

Consider adding a spending habit review to your weekly reset checklist and include it in your monthly reset routine, too. 

If you plan to meet any financial or savings goals, a monthly budget is good to have. 

Have you allocated money for your monthly bills, entertainment, savings, food, and personal items?

It’s important to review your credit and/or bank statements to see if you’re staying on track with your expenses.

Business owners and homeowners may have the additional task of tracking their taxes or maintenance fees. Checking balance reviews and credit limit management are crucial because of this.

There may be financial strategies you’ve implemented, such as the 50/30/20 percent budget rule or maybe you’ve invested in the stock market and would like to see how they have performed.

What’s a better time to conduct a personal finance audit than on the first of the month?

Deep clean your home

Minimalists love a tidy, nice, clean home. During the month, we keep our living spaces clutter free and well-organized, mostly.

But a deep cleaning of every crack and crevice of the house needs to happen at least once or twice a month.

I prefer to keep things simple by outsourcing this task when it’s fiscally possible or following a basic cleaning routine. 

Only 2-3 cleaning products get used, which I like to keep eco-friendly. 

I despise odors, dust, dirt and an accumulation of things I don’t need in my home, so I never skip deep cleaning during my monthly reset routine.

If you need a few tips on how to prevent and declutter a messy house, click here!

Create a monthly bucket list

What are some things you’d like to get out and do within the next 30 days? 

Creating a monthly bucket list shouldn’t feel overwhelming. It also doesn’t require an elaborate list of life milestones you’d like to meet. 

If the items you add to your monthly bucket list feel daunting or are just outright unrealistic to accomplish in the limited time frame, leave them off.

Monthly bucket lists for minimalists should be simple and relatively easy to complete, like purchasing a concert ticket online or sending out a few invites by text message or email.

Your personal bucket list for the month should include activities, personal goals, or experiences you’d like to achieve. 

For some, it’s hosting an intimate dinner with family and friends; attending an event or class; shedding a few pounds; or booking reservations at a new swanky hotel for a staycation in their hometown.

The monthly bucket list is practical and short for minimalists. It’s a fun way to reset for the month while taking your social adventures into your own hands.

Self-care check in

Reflect on how many self-care activities you have completed in the past month. 

Did you check off all the things on your daily self-care checklist?

Or did you prioritize the needs of everyone else before your own?

Your health and well-being should always come first. 

Checking in on your self-care as a part of your monthly reset routine will ensure you’re doing what brings you joy in life.

Maybe you set a goal to read 1-3 short books per month, would like to plan a bi-weekly girls’ night, or spend an entire weekend with family.

One of my practical self-care activities was leaving work on time and not checking emails on the weekend. 

Your self-care check in doesn’t have to feel like a chore.

As a minimalist, imagine there’s a short list of boundaries you’ve set to enforce over the past 30 days. The self-care review will help you assess your progress.

Don’t forget to take care of you!

Intentional goal setting  

Goals are awesome, but when we make them intentional, they’re even better. 

Minimalists may not have a ton of lofty goals to achieve, but reviewing them monthly is necessary for success.

Your monthly reset routine is the perfect time to set brand new goals as well.

Let’s say you met your personal and professional goals for the month. What would you like to achieve in the next thirty days?

I always advocate for creating SMART goals, they aren’t too ambitious, and they’re realistic enough to accomplish within a short period. 

They’re a minimalist’s dream.

If you ever wonder why minimalists are so successful at reaching their goals each year, it’s because they are intentional about everything!

What is a reset routine?

A reset routine is a collection of tasks and activities that individuals have curated to start over in a particular area of their life that needs improvement.

Goals are usually at the forefront of the reset routine. They drive the type of tasks and activities that need to be completed in order to reach them. 

For example, you can create a reset routine for fitness, career, business, personal development, and relationship goals ‌for a fresh start. 

Reset routines are a grand strategy to implement when you’re unsatisfied with your progress, need to ditch your current plan, or begin again.

For the minimalists at heart, start your minimalist lifestyle journey today by taking the 31-day simple living challenge. 

Download your FREE copy here!