January starts in November

Hi, it's Nora.

Saturday was the extra hour. I hope you spent at least some of it on purpose, and I hope your small people have stopped waking you at five. Ours took until Tuesday.

Today I want to talk about January, which feels like an odd thing to do on the fourth of November. Stay with me.

Every year, around the second week of December, a familiar feeling arrives. The year is nearly done. You start making a mental list of the things you'll fix in January. You'll get up earlier. You'll move more. You'll stop checking your phone in bed. You'll finally use the planner you bought last January.

Then January arrives. It's dark, it's cold, everyone is tired from the holidays, and you're trying to start five new things at once, at the exact moment every other person you know is doing the same thing. By the third week, most of it has quietly slipped away. Not because you're lazy. Because January is the worst possible month to start anything.

So here's my suggestion. Don't wait. Start now, small, while nobody else is paying attention. By the time January comes, the habit is already eight weeks old, and you get to spend January keeping something instead of starting it.

January has three problems, and none of them are about willpower.

It's crowded. Everything starts in January. New goals at work, new routines at home, the gym is packed, the kids go back to school. You're asking a brain that's already handling a lot of change to handle five more.

It comes straight after the holidays. Your routines have just spent two weeks being knocked sideways by travel, late nights, sugar, and visitors. You're not starting from a steady place. You're starting from a mess.

It's all or nothing. January habits tend to be big, because January feels like it deserves big. Run every day. Read fifty books. No sugar, ever. Big goals with no practice run tend to break the first time life gets in the way, and in January, life gets in the way by about the ninth.

November has none of these problems. It's quieter. Your routines are still fairly normal. And because nobody makes November resolutions, there's no pressure to make it dramatic.

From today to January first is about eight weeks. That's a useful amount of time. Long enough for a small habit to start feeling normal. Short enough that you can see the finish line.

Here's how I'd use it.

Weeks one and two: the tiny version. Pick one habit, and do the smallest possible version of it. Not the version you'd like to be doing in March. The version that's so small it feels almost silly. If you want to walk every morning, walk to the end of the street and back. If you want to read before bed, read two pages. If you want a calmer morning, put the kettle on before you look at your phone.

The point of the tiny version isn't the result. It's the slot. You're teaching your day that this thing happens here, at this time, every day.

Weeks three to six: let it grow, slowly. Once the slot feels normal, and you'll know because skipping it will feel odd, let it get a little bigger. The walk goes to the park. The two pages become ten. Only grow it when the current size feels easy.

Weeks seven and eight: the holiday test. This is the important bit. Late December will knock your routine around. That's fine. The habit you've built doesn't need to survive at full size. It just needs to survive. On the hectic days, go back to the tiny version. Two pages. The end of the street. The kettle.

If you can keep the tiny version alive through the holidays, January isn't a starting line. It's just a normal Tuesday.

I'll keep saying this until I'm blue in the face: one. Not one per area of your life. One.

I know there are probably six things you'd like to change. Write them all down if it helps. Then pick the one that would make the other five a bit easier.

For a lot of people, that's sleep. Getting to bed thirty minutes earlier makes mornings easier, which makes exercise more likely, which makes the afternoon slump smaller. For others it's the phone, or the first hour of the day, or dinner.

If you can't decide, here's a question that helps: which change would I notice most on a bad day? Not a good day. On a good day, everything is fine. Pick the habit that would hold you up when things go sideways.

The fastest way to make a habit stick is to give it a hook. Something you already do every day, without thinking, that the new habit can hang off.

A few examples:

After I pour my first coffee, I write three things on a notepad. (This is the oldest habit in this newsletter, from the very first issue, and it's still the one I'd start with.)

After I drop the kids at school, I walk for ten minutes before I get back in the car.

After I close the laptop for the day, I put my phone on the charger in the kitchen.

After I brush my teeth at night, I read two pages.

Notice that each one is a sentence with "after" in it. That structure matters. You're not relying on remembering. You're relying on something you already never forget.

Most habits don't fail because we forget them. They fail because we renegotiate them. Every morning the question comes up again. Should I walk today? It's cold. I'm tired. I'll go tomorrow.

The fix is to decide once, ahead of time, on a good day, and then stop asking. I wrote about this back in August in the default setting, and it's the idea underneath almost everything in this newsletter.

In practice, that means writing down three things:

What it is. "Walk for ten minutes."

When it happens. "After school drop off."

What counts on a bad day. "To the end of the street and back."

That third line is the one most people skip, and it's the one that saves the habit. When you've already decided what the bad day version looks like, there's no negotiation. You just do the small one, and the streak stays alive.

You don't need an app. A paper calendar on the fridge and a pen works better than most apps I've tried, because you see it every time you open the fridge.

Put an X on every day you do it. Even the tiny version counts. Especially the tiny version.

A couple of rules for the calendar:

Never miss twice. Missing one day is life. Missing two days in a row is the start of a new habit, the habit of not doing it. If you miss Monday, Tuesday becomes the most important day.

Don't punish yourself for gaps. Look at the calendar at the end of November. If there are twenty Xs and ten gaps, that's twenty more days than you'd have had if you'd waited for January.

In the spirit of honesty: mine this year is stretching. I sit at a desk too much, and my back has started sending me notes about it. So, after I put the toddler to bed, I'm doing five minutes on the living room floor. That's it. Five minutes, most nights, with a free video on my phone.

The bad day version is one stretch. I'll let you know how it's going in January.

Pick one habit. Write the three lines: what it is, when it happens, what counts on a bad day.

Find the hook. Write it as an "after" sentence.

Put a calendar on the fridge and start tomorrow. Tiny version only.

By New Year's Day, you'll be eight weeks in, and everyone else will be on day one.

Back Saturday, when I want to talk about something nobody plans for and everybody needs: a plan for the day someone in your house gets sick.

Better, not busier.

Nora Bishop

P.S. If you liked the "decide it once" idea, that's the whole of The Default Setting. It's a printable pack and a Notion template for deciding the recurring stuff in your week once, on a good day: the Decision Ledger of forty household decisions, the Sunday Money Check, the Weekly Reset, four default dinner menus, and the walk in the door routine. Every default comes with an escape hatch for bad days, and it tells you to start with one, not six. It's $19, and if your week doesn't get quieter in thirty days, I'll refund you.

P.P.S. Reply and tell me the one habit you're starting this week. I read every reply, and I'll check in with a few of you in January.