In talking to members at CFNYC, I’ve noticed that almost all New Year’s resolutions are about creating habits, about doing (or not doing) some single, simple thing, reliably and consistently over the course of the coming year.

I’ve read and received all kinds of advice about building habits, but the best of it seems to boil down to one simple idea: make the hurdle of that new habit as small as possible. Commit to running three miles a day and you won’t make it two weeks; commit to putting on your workout clothes and sneakers and then stepping outside your door each day and you can make that happen for months and years at a stretch. The idea being, of course, that while, on some days, you turn around and head right back inside, on many others, you actually go for a run. And that the mileage built over those many jaunts quickly totals far more than what you can rack up in two, abortive three-mile-a-day weeks.

So, for example, if you want to get back to blogging, to actually writing stuff regularly, you probably need to be willing to put up something on January first, even if you don’t really have much to say, even if the post turns out something like this.