Once a month
The monthly check-in
A month is the first unit where mood stops being weather and starts being a trend. The monthly check-in asks about the shape of it rather than the events in it, which is a question you can only answer if something has been counting.
What it asks
The month in trends, your goals, and what carries into the next one.
- How the month went overall, and where it turned
- What happened to each goal you are carrying
- What you are taking into the next one
What a month can show that a week cannot
Four weeks of the same complaint is information. One week of it is a bad week. Most people never see the difference because nothing is holding the four weeks side by side, and memory is unreliable in a specific direction: it over-weights the last few days.
The useful monthly question is therefore not "what did I do" but "what was true most of the time". That is a question about distribution rather than events, and it needs a record to answer.
This is also where a goal gets its first honest test. Four weeks is long enough that a goal you have not worked on has told you something, and short enough to do something about it.
How Crystal asks it
Inside the product.
- Ten minutes, built from the daily and weekly answers you have already given.
- It opens on the month as a line rather than a list, so the shape is the first thing you see.
- Crystal writes a memo from it, which is the part Premium pays for.