I am a D.

Every morning I wake up, remember what I promised myself in January, and decide tomorrow is a better day to begin. It's been nine months now.

So it got a bit awkward when my feed started filling up with people locking in.

Winter Arc. The Great Lock In. 75 Hard. 100 days of discipline.

People are using it for reading, drinking less, building something, fixing their sleep, saving money.

For Winter Arc, the idea is to pick a few habits and work on them from October 1 until the year ends.

For a second I wondered if New Year had come early this time.

And that's when it struck me. Why does it have to be a new year every time before we decide to change something?

But October 1 is just a date. So is January 1. Nothing about either of them is special, and still we keep treating them like starting lines.

So I went looking for why.

In 2014, Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis looked at what people did around dates that feel like a fresh start.

At a university gym, students were about 33% more likely to visit at the start of a week and 47% more likely at the start of a new semester, relative to the study's baseline.

They also looked at tens of thousands of goals people set on stickK, a site where you put your own money behind a goal. Those bunched up around new weeks, months and years too.

The same pattern showed up in searches, gym attendance and goal-setting around calendar landmarks.

My favourite is a later experiment by the same group. People had to pick a day for a goal reminder. One group saw March 20 described as “the first day of spring.” The other saw it as “the third Thursday in March.”

Same Thursday. 26% chose it when it was called the first day of spring. Only 7% chose it when it was called the third Thursday.

Winter Arc is the same trick. October 1 this year was a Thursday too. Someone gave it a name, and it started to feel like a starting line.

Which is useful, except there is a catch…

In 2020, Dai and a few other researchers studied what happens when the fresh start is still ahead.

Future you gets handed the job.

Diet starts Monday.

Winter Arc starts October 1.

I will start properly after Diwali.

January is almost here anyway.

The worst part is that people who slowed down before the date did not work any harder after it to make up for what they lost.

So you can lose September waiting for October and still show up in October as the same person.

In a 2018 paper, Dai looked at what happened when performance records were reset. The research included lab experiments and 40 years of professional baseball data.

People who had been doing well sometimes lost motivation, because their good record disappeared with it.

If your year has gone badly, October can help. If something has been working since February, leave it alone. You do not need a black hoodie and a new Notion tracker for everything.

The study that convinced me most was done with Humana, a US health insurer, and 13,323 people on medication for diabetes, cholesterol or blood pressure.

Some got medicine reminders around New Year, some around their birthday. Some of those reminders even called the date a chance for a fresh start.

It made no difference. The fresh-start groups did not take their medicines any more regularly than everyone else.

A new date can get you to begin. Taking the tablet again tomorrow is still just taking the tablet again tomorrow.

Same goes for the gym, the reading, the savings, the company you are building. October 1 can help you start. October 17 has to work without the trend.

If this is the same goal you set in January, do not start with another tracker.

Start with why the January version stopped.

Was the plan too big? Did work take over? Did you miss four days and decide the whole thing was ruined? Did you even want it, or did it just sound like something you should want?

Then try what helped in the 2020 study. The slump before a fresh start got smaller when people were reminded of the everyday things they were already doing toward their goal.

So before you begin anything new, write down what you have already done for this goal in 2026. Even one evening walk counts.

I would just spend less time naming the new version of you, and a bit more time figuring out why the old plan stopped working.

So tell me: what did you start in January that you have already stopped, and do you know why?

If you picked D in the poll, you are in good company. Reply anyway.

I read every email :)

Until next week,
Ritesh