The decision

Here's the rule, and then what to expect.

The rule. One wish at a time, written as a Tuesday sentence at its least version, looked at for five minutes every Sunday. The wish can be as large as you like. The sentence is what you'll do, when, where, and what you'll do instead when the day goes wrong. The size is the size that survives a bad ordinary day. The Sunday look changes the sentence, never the person.

Three when-then plans. These are the form the sentence takes, and they're the same form Gollwitzer and Sheeran's review found effective. When it's the first of January and I feel the clean page, then I'll enjoy it, and I'll write one sentence about next Tuesday before I write anything about the year. When I miss a planned day, then I'll do the least version on the next planned day, and I'll bring the miss to Sunday and not to bed. When three planned days in a row don't happen, then I'll shrink the sentence on Sunday and start again on Monday at the smaller size.

What to expect. This is my expectation and not a finding, because the rule hasn't been tested as a package. Expect the sentence to feel too small. It's meant to. Expect the good fortnight to tempt you to enlarge it, and don't, until three Sundays say so. Expect the third and fourth weeks to be where the ordinary Tuesdays start arriving, and expect the least version to hold on them where the wish didn't, because that's what it was sized for. Expect the thing to feel like effort for longer than a fortnight, since Lally's volunteers took anywhere from three weeks to eight months to reach the point where it felt automatic. Expect misses. Expect that a miss followed by the least version on the next planned day is what the habit forming looks like, not what failing looks like.

And expect something you may not have had before, which is a March in which the thing is still happening. Not in the size of the picture. In the size of the sentence, which by March has probably grown once or twice on a Sunday, and which is, unlike the wish, actually there.

The rule has one job. It moves the decision from a day with a push behind it to a day with nothing behind it, and it makes the decision small enough for that day to carry. Everything else in this book was the reason for that move.