The rules

Winter arc rules that last until December

Every autumn the internet fills up with lists of winter arc rules. Up at five, cold shower, no sugar, no social media, ten thousand steps, ten pages, no alcohol, gym six days a week. They are good lists. Almost nobody is still keeping one in week seven. Here is how to write five rules of your own that you will still be keeping when the year ends.

Why five and not fifteen

A rule is a promise you check every night. Fifteen of them is fifteen chances a day to fail, and once the first one goes it takes the others with it, because the list has already been broken so what is one more. Five is different. Five fits on one hand. You can say all five out loud without looking, and at the end of a bad day you can look at five boxes and still see that you kept four.

The gap between five and fifteen is not ambition. It is the difference between a plan for your best day and a plan for your worst one. The arc is ninety days long, and there will be a fair few worst ones in it. Write the rules for those.

What makes a rule keepable

A good winter arc rule passes four tests, and most of the ones people copy off a list fail at least two of them.

It happens every day. "Gym three times a week" is not a rule, it is a target, and it belongs with your pillars. A rule is something you can tick or not tick tonight. "I move outside every day, even if it is only ten minutes" is a rule.

It is a yes or a no. If you have to think about whether you kept it, you did not write it clearly enough. "Eat better" is a wish. "Nothing to eat after nine at night" is a rule.

It fits the worst day. Sick, travelling, late shift, the kids up all night. If the rule cannot survive that day, it will not survive the arc. Write the floor, not the ceiling. You can always do more than the rule says. The rule is what you do when you cannot.

It is yours. A rule you copied is a rule you can argue with. A rule you wrote, in ink, on the first page of your own arc, is much harder to talk yourself out of at eleven at night. That is most of the reason the journal makes you write them by hand.

Examples, by pillar

Most arcs run on three pillars, a body one, a mind one and a craft or money one, and it is worth having at least one rule for each. These are examples of the shape, not a list to copy. Yours will be different, and they should be.

The body

• I am in bed with the light off by eleven.
• I move outside every day, even if it is ten minutes round the block.
• Nothing to eat after nine at night.
• Water before coffee, every morning.

The mind

• The phone does not come into the bedroom.
• Ten pages of a real book before any screen in the morning.
• No news before noon.
• One page in the journal every night, even the bad ones.

The work

• One hour on the thing before I open anything else.
• I write down every pound I spend, the same day.
• One message to one customer, every working day.
• The desk is clear before I leave it.

Notice that none of them says how well. The rule is that you did it. How well is what the weekly review is for.

Rules for men, rules for women, rules for students

People search for these as if they were different lists, and they are not. The shape of a good rule is the same for everyone. Five, daily, yes or no, keepable on a bad day, written by you. What changes is what goes in them. A student's five might be about the desk, sleep and the phone, because those are the three things an exam term is made of. Somebody training might have three about the body and two about everything else. A parent's list will have a bedtime in it that is not their own.

Write the list for the life you actually have this winter, not the one on somebody else's screen.

The rule underneath all of them

Never miss twice. Missed days happen, but two in a row is a decision. This is the rule the other five stand on, and it is the one that keeps an arc alive in November. You are allowed a bad day. You write it down, you give the box a slash instead of a cross, and you keep the next one. What you do not do is let one missed day quietly become a missed week, because that is how every January resolution has ever died.

Where the rules live

In the journal, the rules get written once, on the contract page at the front, in ink. After that they appear on every one of the ninety day-pages as five boxes, so you meet them every night. The weekly review asks which one slipped and why. The halfway page at Day 45 asks which rule you have kept best and which one needs rescuing. By Day 90, two or three of them will have stopped being rules and become just how you live, and the last page asks you to name those, because they are what you keep.

If you are running the arc in a plain notebook, do the same thing. Write the five on the first page, copy them onto every day, and check them every night. The full plan is laid out here.