Why you always start on Monday, and how to start today

Monday feels like the right day to start because a new week works like a clean slate, and research backs that feeling up: people really are more likely to go after their goals right after a fresh start. The trouble is that the same feeling makes waiting look like a plan. Start a tiny version today, and save Monday for something better than beginning.

The Monday loop

You know the cycle. You might be in it right now.

1. Thursday: you decide that this time is different. Starting Monday, everything changes: the gym, eating better, the early alarm, the side project.
2. Friday to Sunday: since the new era begins Monday, the weekend becomes a farewell tour for every bad habit you have.
3. Monday: you launch all of it at once, at full intensity.
4. Wednesday: something gets in the way, the giant plan collapses, and the week is "ruined."
5. Thursday: you decide that next Monday will be different.

It also comes in seasonal editions: "after the holidays," "once summer's over," "when things calm down at work." Nothing in that loop is laziness, exactly. It's a very human mix of a real psychological effect and some creative accounting.

Clean slates really do motivate you

In 2014, Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis of the Wharton School published three studies on what they called the fresh start effect. Compared with their baseline, Google searches for "diet" ran 14.4% higher at the start of a week and 82.1% higher at the start of a year. At a university gym, the probability that a member would show up was 33.4% higher at the beginning of a week and 47.1% higher at the start of a semester. On stickK, a site where people sign commitment contracts for their goals, new commitments jumped 62.9% at the start of a week and 145.3% at the start of a year.

In a follow-up published in 2015, the same team ran experiments showing that part of the push comes from distance: a landmark like a new week makes your past, imperfect self feel like someone else. Last week's failures belong to last week's you.

So the instinct is sound. A clean slate is a real source of motivation, and you're not imagining the extra energy on Monday morning.

The catch: Monday is also the perfect excuse

The same researchers pointed out the downside themselves. In the 2014 paper, they suggested that people who expect a better opportunity after an upcoming landmark may strategically delay their plans until it arrives, and that an upcoming fresh start might license some misbehavior in the meantime, since the slate gets wiped anyway. They offered both as questions for future research. If you've ever had a "last weekend before the diet," you've run the pilot study yourself.

There's evidence for the second part. In a 2002 University of Toronto study by psychologists Urbszat, Herman and Polivy, people who habitually diet were told they'd start a week-long diet, then given a taste test. They ate significantly more than similar people who weren't expecting a diet. Merely planning the restriction triggered the splurge.

Then there's the person you're scheduling all of this for. In 2008, Emily Pronin and colleagues at Princeton found that people make decisions for their future selves much like they make them for other people, and differently from how they decide for themselves right now. Present you feels every bit of the discomfort. Monday you is an idea, and it's very easy to sign an idea up for a 5 a.m. run.

What the wait costs you

Waiting for Monday looks free. In practice it's procrastination with a calendar invite, and it charges interest.

• You lose the practice days. Every day between now and Monday is a rep you didn't do. If you started today, the habit would already be a few days old by Monday.
• The plan inflates to justify the wait. If you're delaying for a grand opening, the opening has to be grand. So Monday's plan is twice the size of anything you'd attempt on a Wednesday, and much more likely to collapse.
• Failure gets expensive. When the plan breaks on Wednesday, the next clean slate is five days away, so one bad day turns into a lost week. Run that loop a few times and you've spent a month starting.

Start today, embarrassingly small

The way out of the loop is to remove the reason to wait. Shrink today's version until it's too small to postpone: put on your sneakers and walk around the block, write one sentence of the essay, do ten squats while the coffee brews, open the course and watch three minutes. This is the logic of the two-minute rule: today's only goal is to have started.

Tomorrow, do it again at the same time, a little bigger if you like. By Monday you won't be starting anything. You'll be on day four, and Monday becomes the day you keep going. If the thing you keep postponing is a big task rather than a habit, our guide on how to start a task you keep avoiding breaks down the first step.

A quick test for whether "Monday" is a real reason or an excuse: if someone offered you the tiny version right now, would you have an actual objection? "I'm at work" is an objection. "It just feels like a Monday thing" is not.

If you're reading this on a Friday

Then the farewell tour is about to start, so cancel it. Do the tiny version today, then again on Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday night, take five minutes to set up Monday: lay out the clothes, pack the bag, set the alarm and write down when and where the first full session happens. Monday becomes day four, with the hardest part, starting, already behind you. You still get the fresh-start energy. You just spend it on going further instead of getting going.

Use fresh starts on purpose

None of this means you should waste the fresh start effect. Use it to upgrade a plan that's already running instead of launching one from zero.

• Make Monday a review day. Ten minutes: what worked last week, what didn't, what you'll add this week.
• Collect landmarks. The first of the month, a birthday, the first day of a new season, the day after a trip. In the 2014 data, birthdays (except, curiously, the 21st) and the end of school breaks worked as fresh starts too, so the next one is never far away.
• Turn a bad day into a mini fresh start. Tomorrow morning counts as a clean slate. So does after lunch, honestly.
• Save the big push for January. The new year is the most famous fresh start of all, so use it to raise the bar on something you already do. Our guide on how to keep New Year's resolutions has the details.

Before you close this tab

Pick the thing you've been saving for Monday. Do the smallest possible version of it in the next ten minutes, then set a reminder for the same time tomorrow. Monday can still be special. It just won't be day one.