You Don’t Have to Wait Until January
January 1st holds no magic. What the science of fresh starts says, and what starting today could add up to by 2027.
I bet that back in January you wrote a few things down that you wanted to get done this year. Did you do any of them? If not, that’s okay! There are 75 days until the new year, and today is just as good as any January 1st to continue chipping away at your goals.
Maybe you told yourself you’d call your mom once a week going forward. Maybe you wanted to start reading books. Or maybe you told yourself you’d become a vegetarian. Maybe this was for sure the year you’d get a life coach or a therapist and invest in your growth. Maybe none of it happened. Maybe some of it did.
But what if I told you that you don’t have to wait until 2027 to do the things you told yourself you’d do at the beginning of this year?
The truth is, January 1st doesn't hold any real magical power. The reason so many of us suddenly feel motivated to become better versions of ourselves and achieve all of the things at the start of a new year has a lot to do with something psychologists call the Fresh Start Effect.
In 2014, researchers found that people are more likely to pursue "aspirational behaviors" following particular dates or milestones, which they referred to as temporal landmarks.
These include:
- The beginning of a new year
- Birthdays
- The beginning of a month
- Mondays
- The start of a new semester
These dates create a psychological sense of a fresh start. They help us separate who we've been from who we want to become, making it feel like we have a clean slate and a new opportunity to do things differently.
And if that is not convincing enough, just know that time is going to pass anyway. From today through December 31st, there are 11 weeks. That means someone who starts today could potentially:
| Goal | Progress before 2027 |
|---|---|
| Call Mom once a week | About 11 conversations |
| Exercise three times a week | About 33 workouts |
| Read 10 pages a day | 750 pages |
| Walk 30 minutes a day | 37.5 hours |
| Save $25 a week | About $275 |
| Write 200 words a day | 15,000 words |
| Meditate 10 minutes a day | 12.5 hours |
I don’t know about you, but these are some serious numbers. Of course, this assumes that you start today and stay consistent. But even if you miss a day or two or ten, you'll still have made more progress than if you hadn't started at all.
Does it actually make a difference whether you start on an ordinary October day or wait until January 1st? Think about it like this:
Imagine two people on January 1st. One says, "This year I'm finally going to exercise regularly." The other says, "I've been exercising two to three times a week for the last 11 weeks, and I'm going to keep going."
They both have the same goal. The difference is that one person is starting with an intention (one they’ve probably had for many January 1sts), while the other has already built experience and evidence that they can follow through. That experience can grow their confidence and make continued action feel more possible.
Think of this time of year as a really good opportunity rather than as a time to shame yourself for the resolutions you didn’t accomplish.
It takes approximately 66 days for a habit to become automatic, and there are 75 days until the new year. What habit would you want to have by 2027? What can you start now that you haven’t gotten around to yet?
The science behind this essay comes from Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis’s 2014 study of the Fresh Start Effect and Phillippa Lally and colleagues’ 2010 study on how habits are formed in the real world.
