What are you looking to achieve this month? Is there a learning goal? Perhaps, a Taekwondo lesson? A nice retreat at month end? Setting aside a sum, after expenses for the month, for the big holiday at the end of the year?

Whatever your goals are, you are right at setting them. Monthly goal setting is graded higher among the most effective individuals. When you consistently achieve your monthly personal and professional goals, you tend to do better in your life. If you think about life like this, you are someone who likes your life to follow some structure. All you need to do is execute according to your analysis of how much of each goal you can do in a given day.

But, that’s easier said than done.

A monthly goal needs daily and weekly trajectories of simpler goals. You need to have worked on at least five things in a day—3 of them personally, 2 of them professionally. A list of activities: like washing the dishes, mopping floors, correcting those emails, creating customer-facing copies and so on.

When you get these five things done in a day, you are steadily moving towards your weekly and monthly goals.

On some days, you just lay in bed and do nothing. Be prepared for those days. You don’t ask for these days. They come to you because you are sick or injured or something. It is important to try to get on your feet during those days and do at least one task. So that you don’t check-out at the end of the day with zero tasks accomplished. Just do one task that helps you move, even if at snail’s pace, towards your monthly goal.

Formula 1 does this well. Even after all the design-and-power-related competitive advantages, that are adjusted to the one-thousandth of a second’s advantage, they eke out every last racing advantage they can get. They famously polish their cars to a fine gloss to increase the speed on the straights by reducing air resistance, or give them a matt finish to increase drag and get more grip with downforce to go faster around the corners. They make progress by moving the needle on the smallest variables. So, even if it is a little improvement towards achieving your monthly goal, just do it.

For everything you are today is what you have done for the last so many months with so many important days.

Start managing your month by managing your days. Your life will have a way of adjusting itself to your patterns, as much as you affirm to the patterns of your life.