How to End a Winter Arc: The Closing Review

When does a winter arc actually end?

On the date you set, whether or not you feel finished. A floating end date turns a bounded project into an open-ended obligation, and the bounded shape was the main advantage over a resolution in the first place.

Set aside an hour on or near that date. This is the longest single sitting the whole arc asks for, and it is the one that determines whether ninety days produced anything you can use.

What should the closing review count?

Facts first, before any interpretation. Go back through the weekly check-ins and total them up rather than working from your impression, because your impression at the end is shaped heavily by the last fortnight.

Expect the number to be lower than it felt and higher than you feared. Both are normal. What matters is that the number is written down, because next time this is the baseline you will be comparing against.

• Days done and days missed, per behavior, counted from the record.
• The longest unbroken stretch, and what ended it.
• How many weeks you actually did the check-in.
• Which week was the worst, and what was happening that week.

How do you tell a real change from a feeling of change?

By looking for something outside your own assessment. A real change shows up as a behavior you now do without deciding to, a thing other people have noticed, or a measurement that moved. A feeling of change shows up only as a feeling of change, and it fades within a fortnight of the arc ending.

This is the single most useful question in the review, because it determines what you keep. Behaviors that have become automatic can be left alone. Behaviors that still require the full apparatus of the arc will stop the moment the arc does, unless you decide to carry the apparatus too.

What should you write about what did not work?

The circumstance, in enough detail to recognize it next time. "I was not disciplined enough" is not a finding and cannot be acted on. "Thursday evenings never worked because I get home after eight" is a finding, and it changes the design of the next attempt.

Be specific about the thing you avoided writing during the arc, if there was one. Most people have a behavior they stopped recording rather than stopped doing, and that gap in the record is usually the most informative part of it.

How do you decide what to keep?

Keep less than you want to. Two behaviors that survive the year beat five that survive until February, and the end of an arc is when people are most prone to overestimating what they will carry.

A reasonable rule is to keep whatever became automatic, keep one thing that is still effortful but clearly worth it, and deliberately drop the rest. Writing down the dropped ones as dropped, with a reason, is what stops them returning as background guilt.

• Everything that now happens without a decision. These cost nothing to keep.
• One thing that still takes effort and produced something you can point to.
• Nothing else, written down explicitly as dropped and why.

Should you start another challenge straight away?

Usually not, and the urge to do so is strongest in the few days when it is least informed. The fresh start effect that Dai, Milkman and Riis documented in 2014 makes the period just after a landmark feel like the right moment to begin something, which is useful for starting and unhelpful for choosing.

Leave two weeks between the review and any new commitment. What you keep doing during those two weeks without any structure at all is the most honest result the arc produced, and it tells you more about what to do next than any plan made on the final day.

What do you do with the journal afterwards?

Keep it and read it once more at a distance, which is a different experience from reading it during. Entries from the middle weeks in particular read very differently when you already know how it ended.

There is a practical question of what to actually do with a finished record, and it is worth answering rather than letting the thing sit unopened; what to do with last year's journal covers the options. The short version is that a record you will reread once is worth more than one you archive perfectly and never open.

What if the arc clearly did not work?

Review it anyway, and review it more carefully than you would a successful one. An arc that produced nothing still produced information, and the information is specific: you now know one plan that does not fit your week, in detail, which is more than you knew in October.

The thing to resist is converting it into a verdict about yourself. "I do not follow through" is both unfalsifiable and useless. "Three evening behaviors failed because my evenings are not mine" is a finding that changes the design of the next attempt, and most abandoned arcs contain a finding of roughly that shape.

Write the three or four conditions that broke it, as conditions. Then write what you would try instead, without committing to starting it yet. The two-week gap before any new commitment applies here more than anywhere, because the urge to immediately redeem a failed attempt with a harder one is strongest when the attempt just failed.

• What specifically broke it, as a circumstance rather than a trait.
• Which of the behaviors you would keep if you only kept one.
• What you would change about the slot, the size or the number.
• Whether you actually wanted this, which is sometimes the honest answer.

How does a closing review differ from a year in review?

Scope and honesty about causation. An arc review covers ninety days and two or three behaviors, which is a small enough span to actually attribute changes to things you did. A year in review covers a period in which far too much happened for that.

If the arc ran into January, you may be doing both at once, and they are better kept separate. How to do a year in review when the year was bad is the more forgiving of the two formats, and the arc review should not be made to carry that weight.