Whatever's on my mind

Season One, Day 5: it's a game now

Three days ago I wrote about changing the tracker on Day 2. It's Day 5 and I've changed it again, properly this time, whole structure. Because: me! Except this one isn't a perfectionist wobble, and I want to be honest about the difference, because the difference is the whole point of documenting this thing live.

Here's what actually happened. The observe-plan-prep week I so carefully built on Day 2, backed with all that lovely research about preparation? By Day 4 it was boring me out of my own challenge. Watching your days without acting on them turns out to be a genuinely terrible fit for a dopamine-seeking brain, and mine did the maths immediately: skipping a day cost nothing, nothing happened either way, and the reward was 68 days off. I designed the thing, and I was already drifting by Wednesday.

That's not a me problem, though. That's the design flaw in nearly every habit challenge going: the payoff arrives at the end, and the end is forever away. 75 Hard patches the hole with punishment, miss a day and you restart from zero, which works right up until it doesn't and then it takes your whole sense of self down with it. Yeah, nah. So I went looking at what actually keeps people moving, and it turns out the answer has been sitting in loyalty cards all along. There's a thing called the goal gradient effect: people speed up as a reward gets closer, the classic study literally watched people buy coffee faster the nearer they got to the free one. And its cousin, the endowed progress effect, found people are far more likely to finish something when they can see progress already on the card. Visible, frequent progress isn't a gimmick. It's the mechanism.

So Semi Sorted 73 is now a game, and I mean properly. Every day earns XP. A Did Something day, one real thing in each pillar, 15 to 30 minutes all up, earns 5. A Nailed It day, the full rhythm when capacity allows, earns 10. There are levels, ten of them, front-loaded so the first ones come quick. Sundays are Boss Battles now, the weekly reset with a name and a grudge: the Kitchen Boss, the Budget Boss, the Appointment Boss, also known as the GP booking I've been dodging for months. Beat one and the day scores double.

The Ugh, Fine tier didn't survive the rewrite, and I'll admit I was attached to the name. It's been replaced by something better: Grace Cards. Four of them, one in each pillar colour, and any card covers anything. Play one on a whole day that falls over, streak safe, zero shame. Or play it on the single pillar you had nothing left for, and the rest of the day still counts. Sick kid, card. Had a walk and a cuppa in me but absolutely nothing for the house, card on Home, day still scores. They're limited so they mean something, and beating a boss wins one back. The one rule hasn't moved: never miss three days in a row. No streaks. Streaks punish, rhythms forgive.

And the tracker? The tracker is a colouring page now. A little storybook cottage on the fridge, and every 5 XP colours one piece of it, in the colour of whichever pillar worked hardest that day. Coral for Home, green for Heart, gold for Body, teal for Soul. By Day 73 the cottage isn't just finished or unfinished, it's a picture of where the season actually went, and if it comes out nearly all coral I'll know I organised my way through winter and forgot my body and my people. Some pieces can't be bought with XP at all: the windows light up as you level, smoke appears once you've beaten three bosses, and the cat only colours itself in after your first comeback week, because of course it does, it's a cat. The sun waits for 350 XP, Season Legend, the season target. The heart above the door gets coloured on Day 73 no matter the score, because finishing a season is the win.

Two rule changes in five days. The old me would have read that as proof the whole thing was broken and quietly shelved it for another year of polishing. The actual lesson is the opposite: the system caught its own flaw on Day 4 instead of Week 4, out loud, in public, and kept going. If the game version holds, it's the shape Season Two ships in, and the shape the printable becomes. Everything's on the challenge page if you want to play along, any start date you like, and the season's being filmed wobbles-and-all on the channel.

Near enough is good enough, even when near enough has XP now. Semi sorted, still becoming. Back to it.

Season One, Day 2: I already changed the tracker

Two days into Season One and I've already gone and tweaked the tracker. Because: me!

This is exactly the pattern that's kept this idea sitting in my head for years instead of live on a page. I start something, I notice a wobble on day two, and the perfectionist voice goes "well, that didn't quite work, maybe tomorrow", and tomorrow quietly becomes never. I felt that exact tug last night. Nearly shelved the whole tracker to go "fix it properly" first. Then I clocked what I was doing, because that's the opposite of every single thing I actually believe. Perfection's overrated. Near enough is good enough. You just get started, and you keep on keeping on. So instead of shelving it, I fixed the one bit that actually needed fixing, out loud, on Day 2, and kept going.

Here's what the wobble actually was. I sat down last night to fill in Day 2 the same way I'd set up every day on the tracker: Home, Heart, Body, Soul, pick your tier, tick it off. Ugh, Fine or Semi Sorted or Sorted, same as Day 73 will look. And something about it felt off before I'd even filled it in. I hadn't actually worked out my cues yet. I don't mean I hadn't decided what to do, I mean I hadn't sat still long enough to notice what my actual days look like right now, this season, this house, these kids at these ages. I was about to start tracking a rhythm I hadn't built yet.

So I went down a research hole instead of finishing Day 2 (very on brand, I know).

Turns out there's a name for what I was about to skip. The Stages of Change model, the one most real behaviour-change programs are built on, puts Preparation in as its own stage, sitting before Action, not folded into it. Skip straight from "I want to change" to "I'm doing the thing" and that's one of the more reliable ways people fall off. Which, hand up, tracks with every routine I've ever laminated and then abandoned by week three.

Then I went back to the study I already quote on the Semi Sorted 73 page, Lally's habit research from UCL. I'd only ever pulled the headline out of it, the 66 days thing, not the mythical 21. But sitting in it properly this time, the bit that actually mattered wasn't the number of days at all. It was that the habits which locked in fast were the ones where the behaviour and its cue were dead clear from the very start. The vague ones dragged for months. So whatever sorting out you do before Day 1 changes how the rest of the days go. That's not a vibe, that's the actual finding.

And then there's the planning research, Gollwitzer's implementation intentions, decades of it, most recently backed up again in a 2024 review of over 600 studies. People who make an actual "when this happens, I'll do that" plan follow through at roughly three times the rate of people who just mean to. Three times. Just from writing the if-then down instead of leaving it as a nice idea in your head.

So here's what I've changed. Days 1 to 7 of the tracker are no longer a normal rhythm week. I've tagged them Observe, Plan, Prep instead. This week I'm not chasing tiers. I'm watching what actually happens in my real Tuesday, noticing where the friction already lives, and writing down the specific cue for each rhythm before I ask myself to do it on repeat. Day 8 is when Rhythm properly starts, and I reckon it'll hold better for having a week of actual noticing underneath it instead of me guessing on Day 1 and hoping.

This is exactly why Season One is the live one. I get to catch things like this mid-run and just fix them, instead of sitting on the idea for another year polishing it into something that never launches. If Week One as Observe, Plan, Prep holds up by the time I hit the reset week, it's going straight into how Season Two is built too.

Near enough is good enough, even (especially) when near enough means changing your mind on Day 2. Semi sorted, still becoming. Back to it.

Semi Sorted 73: I've started

A few days ago I wrote about needing to just start. So: I've started. Today is Day 1 of Semi Sorted 73, a 73-day challenge across all four pillars, Home, Heart, Body and Soul. Not 75 Hard. Deliberately not. This one has exactly one rule: never miss three days in a row. Two days off is grace, not failure.

Season One is an experiment, honestly. This idea has lived in my head forever, and instead of polishing it for another year I'm running it live and documenting what happens on the channel, the good days, the meh days, and the days ticked out of pure stubbornness.

The other trick is that every day comes in three sizes. There's a two-minute version of showing up (I've named it the "Ugh, Fine" tier, because that's the noise I make doing it), a 15-minute version, and a proper one for the days with actual capacity. Which means there's no falling off, no starting again Monday. You can't fall off something that fits inside two minutes.

My Season One runs 8 July to 18 September, but you don't have to wait for my dates or match them. The challenge page has a little season calculator: pick your own start date and it maps your Day 1, your halfway, your Day 73 and your reset week. Start tomorrow, start next Monday, or wait and join Season Two with me on 26 September. The printable season calendars are free either way, no sign-up, moon cycles included, both hemispheres covered.

Semi sorted is enough. Day one is done.

Wait, it's not Monday

Before anyone asks: yes, I know today's a Wednesday. That's not a typo, and it's not me losing count either. I chose it.

I couldn't tell you how many times "I'll start Monday" has been the exact sentence that made sure something never started at all. Monday comes, something's on fire, and the plan quietly slides to next Monday instead. Repeat that enough times and next Monday becomes a season you never actually enter. I know because I've done it more times than I'll admit to on a public website.

There's an actual reason Monday pulls at you like that, and it's not just in your head. There's a bit of research called the fresh start effect (Dai, Milkman and Riis, 2014) that found people really are more likely to chase a goal right after a "landmark" moment, a Monday, a new month, a birthday. It's real, gym visits spike about a third at the start of a week. But the flip side nobody talks about is what happens when you miss that landmark. You don't just start on Tuesday instead. You wait for the next one. That's the trap, not Monday itself.

So Day 1 is a Wednesday, on purpose, smack in the middle of a completely unremarkable week. No new month, no new year, nothing lined up to make it feel significant. Just a Wednesday I happened to be ready on. If it can start here, it can restart on any old Tuesday too, which is rather the whole point of a rhythm over a routine.

Sunday's not Day 1 either, and that one's simpler: Sundays are check-in day, not start day. It's the day I actually have a bit of flex in my house to sit down honestly and ask how the week went. Different job, different energy, doesn't need to double as a launch pad too.

So there it is. Not Monday, not Sunday, just a Wednesday that was ready when I was. Day 1's done either way.

Rhythms over routines: why my schedules kept failing and my rhythms don't

I have written a lot of routines in my life. Beautiful ones. Colour-coded ones. Routines with start times and laminated intentions. And nearly every one of them died the same death: one chaotic morning, one sick kid, one alarm that didn't happen, and the whole thing collapsed like it was never there. For years I thought that was a me problem. It's not. It's a routine problem.

A routine is welded to the clock. Walk at 6, journal at 9, reset the kitchen at 7:30. When the clock slips (and in a house with four kids, two dogs, two cats and a full-time job, the clock always slips) the routine registers it as failure. Miss the time, miss the day. Miss a few days and the perfectionist brain files the entire system under "ruined" and quietly starts waiting for the next new year, the next Monday, the next round number.

A rhythm is welded to an order instead. My day does start at 5am, and I love that it does, but the rhythm isn't the 5. It's what comes next, in what order: my Sunrise Starts. And it's not just mornings. Sections of my day each have their own start, a small sequence that sets that part of the day back to zero: surfaces cleared, calendar glanced at, what's-for-dinner answered, brain unclenched. When the 5am doesn't happen, and some days it doesn't, the rhythm just runs smaller and later. It's still the rhythm. A rhythm bends where a routine breaks.

The house this all runs in has changed, too. When I first started vlogging, the mess was toddler mess and the problems fit in a nappy bag. The kids are bigger now. The problems are bigger, the mess is different, but they can do a lot more for themselves than they could back then. What hasn't changed is my dopamine-seeking brain, and I so wish I'd had a structure back then that actually made sense to it, instead of one more schedule designed for someone else's brain entirely.

Because motivation is a rubbish foundation and I've stopped building on it. Motivation is weather. Rhythm is climate. I love the fresh-start feeling of a new year as much as anyone, which is exactly why I want to engineer it into the calendar on purpose, in seasons, rather than waiting for January to hand it to me once a year and take it back by February.

The test I use for any new rhythm is simple: could I still do some version of it on a 6/10 day? Not a good day. A Tuesday where everything went sideways. If the answer is no, the rhythm is too big, and I shrink it until the answer is yes. Self-awareness beats self-judgement, and a tiny rhythm that survives real life will take you further than a perfect routine that only works in the version of your life where nothing goes wrong.

There's a 73-day version of this thinking that has been living in my head forever: four rhythms, three sizes of day, one rule. I keep thinking about doing it. I need to just start. Maybe this week.

Starting the blog, near enough is good enough

I've been dabbling with this website for weeks now, printables, pillar pages, a newsletter that's given me more grief than it's worth some days. This blog is the bit with no pressure attached. No content calendar, no perfect launch post, just me writing when I've got something worth saying.

If you're here from YouTube or the free Facebook group, welcome. If you're new, have a poke around the four pillars, grab a free printable, and I'll see you in the next post, whenever that ends up being.