"I don't have time"

By the third week of January the honest account of the drop is usually that there wasn't time. The evenings filled up. Work came back. Something needed doing every night the run was meant to happen. And this is true, in the sense that the time the wish assumed doesn't exist in an ordinary week. That's not a failure of the week. It's a failure of the wish to look at the week before it was made.

Go back to Milne, Orbell and Sheeran's study from chapter 6. The plan that lifted exercise sharply was made by people who wrote down when and where in the coming week they'd do it. To write that sentence you have to look at the week, and looking at the week is where the time question gets answered before it's asked. If Tuesday evening has nothing in it that could reliably take fifteen minutes, then Tuesday evening isn't the day, and you find out on the Sunday before rather than on the Tuesday itself, standing in the hall with the form to sign.

The other half of the answer is size. "I don't have time" is nearly always "I don't have time for the version I imagined". The version imagined on the first of January was an hour, because the picture was an hour and January's evenings were empty. The least version from chapter 8 is fifteen minutes, or ten, and ten minutes exists on most Tuesdays, even bad ones. The question isn't whether there's time. It's whether the sentence has been written at a size the time can hold.

The honest objection is that some things really can't be done at ten minutes. You can't write a novel in ten-minute pieces, you might say, or learn a language in ten-minute pieces. I'd say you can, and a fair number of novels have been written on trains, but that's an opinion. What isn't an opinion is that you can't write a novel in zero-minute pieces, and zero is what the hour becomes on a Tuesday that can't hold an hour. Ten minutes on a Tuesday, an hour on Saturday when the week can hold one. That's a plan. An hour every day was a picture.

If time is the reason, then the time is the plan, and the plan is made on Sunday, looking at the actual week, and not on the first of January, looking at the year.