Eleven open messages again

It'll happen. A bad month, a holiday, a stretch of work that ate the evenings, and one Sunday you open the phone and there are eleven open messages and the oldest is from three weeks ago and the small heavy feeling is back. The thought that follows is that the rule didn't take. That you're the kind of person who leaves messages and a month of not leaving them was a phase.

Look at what the month showed. For four weeks the replies went on arrival and the list stayed clear and the friend from Bristol is back in your week. That happened. It isn't undone by three weeks in which it didn't, any more than a month of walking to work is undone by a week of buses. Lally and colleagues, in the study chapter 22 mentioned, found that a missed day didn't materially affect the habit forming. I'm extending a missed day to a missed month, and that's my extension, but I think the shape holds. What the return to eleven open messages tells you is that the old default is still there underneath and comes back when the conditions that made it come back, tiredness and a full list. It doesn't tell you the new one failed.

The mistake to avoid now is the catch-up. Eleven open messages after three weeks look as though they need a session, an evening set aside to work through them properly with a surcharge on each. That's the proper reply arriving in bulk, and it'll keep the eleven open for another fortnight while you wait for the evening. Don't set aside anything. Two lines each, from the queue, today, no sorry at the top. A quarter of an hour. The list is clear again by tonight and the return took a day.

Then ask which belief let it back in, because it'll have been one of the chapters. Usually it's chapter 10, the busy season, and the message that needed to say "not this month" and said nothing instead. Sometimes it's chapter 3, a message that arrived with a question big enough that a standard got attached. Find the one and you'll know what to watch for. Don't look for a character flaw. There isn't one, and looking for it adds a surcharge to every reply for a week.

And don't count. Not the open messages, not the days since the lapse, not the times it's happened. The turn was a count and it did nothing. The rule is the same size after a lapse as before it. Two lines, today, and no better one owed.