Winter Reading and New Beginnings Start With One Small Habit
Winter reading and building new habits
Every winter, without planning it, I end up reading more than I do at any other time of year. Something about the shorter days and the slower pace of the season pulls me toward books in a way that summer never quite manages. Last January, I spent three consecutive Sunday afternoons with a cup of coffee and no particular agenda, reading in a chair by the window while it rained outside. The slow pace of those afternoons allowed for contemplation about the person I wished to become.
Winter has a reputation for being a time to wait out, a gap between the year that ended and the one about to begin. I think of it differently. The quietness of the season is not an absence. It is a condition, and it is one of the more useful conditions available for thinking clearly about what you actually want to build. The noise is lower. The calendar is lighter. The social pressure to be visible and productive eases slightly. In that space, if you use it well, you can plant something that will establish and run by the time the year demands your full attention again.
This led me back to Habit Sequencing during the winter months more than once. The book’s central idea is that the most durable habits are not those started with powerful motivation, but those carefully linked to existing daily routines. Winter is an ideal season for this kind of work because the existing structure of your days is often simpler and more visible than it is during busier periods. You can see the anchors more clearly when there is less built around them.
The winter reading habit I developed accidentally over several years is a good example of how sequencing works with no one designing it. The rain arrives, the light changes, the evening comes earlier, and something in that sequence naturally draws me toward a book rather than a screen. The conditions do the linking with no deliberate architecture on my part. But most habits worth building do not arrive that organically. They require a small, intentional act of design: identifying the anchor that already exists reliably and deciding what new behavior to attach to the end.
For the reading habit, the anchor turned out to be Sunday morning coffee. My reading habit coincided with my morning coffee. Once I saw the sequence, I stopped trying to find time to read and started trusting the sequence to find it for me. The coffee appeared. The book followed. The hour settled into place without requiring a decision each time.
Habit Sequencing goes deeper into why this kind of linking works when isolated habit formation so often does not. When a new behavior requires its own dedicated slot in the day, it competes with everything else for that slot. When it borrows its place from a habit that already holds one, the competition disappears. The existing habit carries the new one the way a current carries a boat, not by pushing it but by making its movement the natural outcome of what is already in motion.
Most people find new beginnings in January harder than necessary because they build them from scratch during the season of maximum ambition and minimum sustained energy. A beginning built in winter, quietly attached to something already running, has a better chance of still being in place when spring arrives. It has had weeks to settle, to become familiar, to lose the self-conscious quality of a new habit and take on the ordinariness of an established one. By the time the year fully opens up, the habit is already there, already part of the structure, already doing its work without requiring a daily decision to continue.
This week, while the season still offers some of its quietness, identify one thing you want to be doing consistently by the time winter ends. Not a goal, not an outcome, but a specific, repeated action. Then find an anchor it can attach to, something already happening in your day that occurs around the same time and in the same general context. Attach the new behavior to the end of the anchor and let the sequence run for three weeks before you evaluate it. Winter is not a waiting room. It is a workshop, and the habits you build here will be the ones carrying you when the year picks up speed again.
Wishing you a steady and intentional week ahead.
See you next week,
Pierre P.