"This year's different"

Every January it feels like this year is different, and the feeling is not a delusion. Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis published a paper in 2014 with the title "The fresh start effect", and what they found in three sets of archival data is that people are more likely to start on goals just after what they called temporal landmarks. Google searches for the word diet, visits to a gym and commitments made to pursue goals all rose after the start of a new week, a new month, a new year, a new term, a birthday, a holiday. The authors' interpretation is that a landmark closes a mental account, so that last year's imperfections belong to a previous period and you can look at your life from a wider view and want more for it.

So the clean page is real. It's just not personal. It's the calendar doing to you what it does to everyone, and it did the same thing last January, when the year also felt different. That's the first thing to take from the finding. The sense that this time you mean it is a reliable feature of the first of January and says nothing at all about what happens on the twentieth.

The second thing is where the effect lives. It lives in starts. Dai and colleagues measured searches, gym visits and commitments, which are the things people do at the start of a goal. The paper isn't about February. A landmark can put you at the gym on the second of January. It has no opinion about whether you're there on a wet Tuesday six weeks later, because by then the landmark is behind you and the account it opened is filling up with ordinary days.

You can feel this in your own list from chapter 1. The wish was made in a moment when the calendar had handed you a clean page. The drop came on a day with no landmark on it at all, a Tuesday like any other. The feeling that made the wish wasn't there on the day the wish needed it.

None of this means the fresh start is worthless. It's a free push, and the method in chapter 18 uses it. The point is only that it's a push at the start, and a push at the start is not a plan for the middle. The mistake isn't feeling that this year is different. The mistake is treating the feeling as if it were the work.