Every January the internet fills up with plans that need an hour a day and a new personality. This is the other list: nine things that take between thirty seconds and five minutes, and that survive a bad week.
Start with the ones that cost nothing
- Write down tomorrow’s first task tonight. Thirty seconds, and it removes the worst ten minutes of the morning.
- Put the phone in another room to sleep. Not on silent. Another room.
- Drink a glass of water before coffee. Unglamorous, and it works.
A habit you can do badly is a habit you will still be doing in March.
The failure mode of every ambitious routine is the same: it assumes an average day. Design for the bad day instead, and the good days take care of themselves.
The two-minute rule, restated
- If it takes under two minutes, do it now.
- If it takes longer, write down the first two minutes of it.
- If you cannot name the first two minutes, the task is not defined yet.
The ones that need a little discipline
- One walk without headphones. Twenty minutes, no input.
- A weekly ten-minute tidy of the desk. Friday afternoon, timer on.
- One message to someone you have not spoken to in a month.
- Read four pages before bed. Four. Not a chapter.
- Stand up every time the phone rings.
- Close the laptop lid at the end of the day. The gesture matters more than it should.
Small things done consistently beat big things done occasionally. It is a boring truth and it keeps being true.
Anonymous, on a whiteboard
Reader challenge: pick two from this list and keep them for a fortnight. Tell us which one survived.
What if I miss a day?
Miss one, carry on. Miss two, look at the habit — it is probably too big. The rule is never miss twice, and the fix is almost always to make the thing smaller rather than to try harder.
Four pages. Not a chapter. That reframing alone got me reading again.
The phone in another room one is the only advice on this list I have never managed to follow.