New Year? New Month? Just a New Day.

Happy New Month!!!

January started with high spirits as usual, but now it has breezed through. Do we have anything to show for it? I've watched too many new year resolutions die—the gym is emptier again, that business did not start, the product did not launch, or that blog post was never written. If this sounds like you, we need to talk. I want this post to convince you that the new year is not special, and there was never any need to wait.

My claim is simple: if you cannot start a smaller version of your resolution today, the New Year will not save it.

Why do we trust a calendar date more than our own discipline?

PS: I intended to post this on January 1st, but today is February 4th. Am I trying to prove my point or just lazy? 😂

Fresh Starts

We think of time in chunks: 7 days make a week, 30 days a month, 12 months a year. It's only natural to want to review a chunk when it ends.

Psychologists call these dates "temporal landmarks", and they actually do change how we think—it's not just in our imaginations. Whether it's a Monday, your birthday, or the first day of school, these landmarks create a psychological separation between your current self and your past, imperfect self (more on this later). They essentially allow you to think, "Last week me was terrible. This week me will be better".

When last semester ended, I swore that I would start early next time around. The semester started well: I bought a 10-in-1 notebook and outlined all my courses. Fast-forward a month or two and now, I'm currently behind in class. That initial resolve feels like ages ago.

Fresh-start dates push people into big-picture mode which can be genuinely helpful for clarifying goals, vision, and aspirations. A study from UPenn show that Google searches for the term "diet" spike by over 14% at the start of a new week and 82% at the start of a new year. University gym attendance increases 33% at the start of a new week and 47% at the start of a new semester.

A similar trend comes up for commitment contracts: putting money on the line to achieve a goal. The creation of new commitment contracts jumps by 63% at the start of a week and 145% at the start of a new year!! Una get money sha 😂🤲

Now, the big question: Does it work? Oftentimes, the answer is a discouraging NO.

A longitudinal study by Norcross & Vangarelli followed 200 New Year's resolvers and found that while 77% were still on track after one week, only 19% maintained their resolution for two years. The data shows that, eventually, the hype wears off and motivation dies. We tend to think that a fresh start means a perfect start, but this study also found that the average successful person messed up 14 times over the two-year period. The moment alone was not enough. Long‑term success depended on behavioral tools like stimulus control, reinforcement, and willpower, not the date itself.

Your Future Self is Still You

I want you to ask yourself this: for this goal you have in mind, are you planning for it or pushing it to your future self?

Research on present bias suggests that we tend to overestimate how disciplined our future selves will be. That is precisely why we always say "I'll start later". The problem? Framing a resolution this way often just dresses up procrastination in a more respectable language.

Now, I keep saying "future self", but who even is that?? I found that the best way to think of them is as a friend who picks up where you left off. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology defines future-self continuity as a deep sense of connection and similarity between who you are now and who you will be. They found that this is a massive predictor of success as those who felt more connected to their future selves were far more likely to exercise and report better overall health.

When you treat your future self like a stranger, you burden them. When you treat them like yourself, you help them.

What Next?

So if the New Year isn't magic, but fresh starts can still be useful triggers, what should you actually do with your resolutions?

In The Stormlight Archive, Dalinar Kholin is asked: "What is the most important step a man can take?" The answer isn't the first one, or the big one you take on New Year's Day. It's the next one. Always the next step.

Here are some practical next steps I followed:

Write a smaller version today.

If you say your resolution matters, prove it by doing it badly today. Some resolutions are simple enough that you can plan while working on it. For example, I'd been procrastinating on fitness for 3 years now. This year, I started with a smaller version: "Run today". Not "Run weekly" or "Run tomorrow", but "Run today". I started running on the 14th of January—no running clothes or gear, just regular shoes—and I was terrible.

What do you mean 9 min per km?? And I didn't even reach the 5 km mark. However, a few weeks of consistency brought me this:

Not the fastest, of course, but about twice as fast as when I first started. If I can do it, why can't you?

More examples:

• "I want to write a novel this year" → "I will write a 50-word outline this evening"
• "I want to get 5.0 this semester" → "I will start one topic after today's lecture"
• "I want to get fit" → "I will do 10 pushups right now" And so many more.

The point is to make it as frictionless as possible because, if you cannot sustain the micro-version today, the main goal will not survive the year.

Redefine your fresh starts.

New notebooks and Mondays work because they feel clean, but you can create that feeling any day by marking a restart intentionally. If you make a mistake or miss a routine today, you don't have to wait till next month. Tomorrow can be your fresh start.

Protect your future self.

Design friction against quitting: tell a friend, join a group, sign up now, pay ahead of time. Anything external that can keep you accountable without you needing too much self-motivation.

Did I mention I started learning embedded systems? This is another activity I've been procrastinating on for about a year now. What changed this time around? I joined BotsHub: a robotics community in the Faculty of Engineering, UNILAG. They have this strict rule where you must not miss more than two classes in a row. No need for self-motivation! The community already enforces the required discipline.

Stop trusting the date. Start trusting your ability to suffer a little bit today for the sake of the person you will be tomorrow.

Journey before Destination ✌️