When the drop came — A wish isn't a plan

It's February, or it's May, and the sentence has stopped. Three planned days went and you haven't looked at it since, and the old feeling is back, that the thing is over and you're the sort of person it's over for.

The first thing to say is that this isn't the rerun. The rerun is a wish set the same way and dropped the same way. What's happened is a sentence that was sized for a week you don't have any more, and that's a different event with a different fix. Lally's data said a missed day doesn't undo a habit. Three missed days is not nothing, but it's three days, and the thing that ends a habit at three days is the reading of them, chapter 13 said, not the days.

So do the Sunday look now, whatever day it is. Look at the three days. What was in them? Nearly always it's one of three things. The week changed, a new job, a child ill, a house move, and the sentence was written for the old week. Or the size crept up on the good days and the sentence quietly became the wish again. Or the day and time were wrong from the start and the good fortnight hid it. Each of those is a sentence problem. None is a person problem. Shrink it, move it, or rewrite it for the week you've got.

Then do the least version tomorrow. Not Monday. Tomorrow. Chapter 11 said the ordinary day is the honest day to start, and it's also the honest day to restart. If tomorrow's a Monday, fine, there's a push behind it. If it's a Thursday, there's a Thursday.

The honest objection is that you've restarted before and this is starting to feel like the rerun with extra steps. The difference is that the rerun restarted the wish and this restarts the sentence, smaller. If the run was fifteen minutes and it stopped, the run is ten. If the writing was twenty minutes and it stopped, it's a paragraph. The thing that survives a restart is the least version, and if the least version keeps failing, it isn't the least yet.

And put the verdict down. Wohl's students who forgave themselves procrastinated less the next time. That's a small correlational study and I hold it loosely, but I'd hold the opposite idea much more loosely, that a hard verdict on yourself makes next Tuesday easier. Nothing in this book suggests it does, and five Januaries of trying it probably suggest it doesn't.