100 days of summer begins, by my reckoning, tomorrow – “Summer” in the U.S. is considered by most^{[citation needed]} to be the roughly 100 days from Memorial Day to Labor Day, which are the last Monday in May and First Monday in September respectively. Typically 14 full weeks plus a Monday—99 days—which every last one of us^{[citation needed]} will pad out to 101 by including the Friday & Saturday of the upcoming 3 day holiday weekend, which is how most of us (who don’t work retail or hospitality) celebrate these things.

So actually 101 Days of Summer – 101 and a half if you take off early on Friday like a lot of us might have already done.

In 2020 it’ll actually be 108 days of summer, because of the calendar, which just so happens to line up & give us 15 weeks of summer whenever Memorial Day lands on the 25th – this happens on average one-year-in-seven but not every seventh year, because of leap days; the interval is every 5-6 years (usually 6) except when it sometimes takes 11 years off. Enjoy the summers of 2020 & 2026 I guess is what I’m saying.

For a little more on that check out https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/next-summer-already-better-summer

“100 days of summer” is an expression^{[?] [citation needed]} common enough that I seem to remember hearing it well before 500 Days of Summer riffed off the common[?] idiom for its title in 2009. But maybe it isn’t as common as I think, or maybe my brain misfired after the movie came out and it’s just a back-formation that makes its own kind of sense because what we call “Summer” in the vacation-planning but not astronomical or meterological sense just happens to be 100 [ok: 101] days.

I was also planning a “100 Days of Summer” diary/planner – sort of a smaller, pocketable extension of my Weekend Planner idea – but didn’t manage to make anything I liked, let alone would consider selling, in time for Summer 2019. Which starts tomorrow.

I guess I’ll file that idea away for now, maybe to be picked up again when I have time off in the Fall, though I suppose for 2020 I should just go ahead and title it “108 Days of Summer” to be accurate.

Outside of things like students’ assigned summer reading, for most of us Summer isn’t considered a time for big undertakings, but 100 is a big round number and Summer is the sunny, beautiful time of year most of us (at my latitude) spend completely indoors, all the time, with the air conditioning on – so maybe 101 Days of Summer would be a good time to line up a lot of little daily things that would add up into a new skill or a sizable chunk of some kind of project.

This past Tuesday was New Year’s Day and that means we’re not even quite a week yet into 2019 and there are no doubt at least a few resolutions made that are not being kept.

At least, not yet. Don’t give up hope just because it’s been a rough week.

If this blog post were an essay or pamphlet of a vintage, say, around 1790, the title would be something like “A Year’s Resolution, in Three Parts, and a Proposal for a Scaled Back Annual Commitment, ~or~ A Month of Sundays” (I used the shorter title above). So I guess I need to get to those three parts first, and then the proposal.

One thing about a New Year’s Resolution is that mostly, we expect too much of ourselves, and we discount the effort some things will take. If you have a nebulous goal, like, “I’m going to eat better!” or “I’m going to lose weight!” you’ve basically just signed on for mindfully keeping a commitment every waking minute of every day ¹. One stressful day, or a day where you don’t have the time or energy, and you’ll find yourself with a take-out or delivery container [or pint of ice cream] and an excuse; after enough excuses stack up you’ll be back on your usual habits and routines and you’ll actually feel better about giving up.

If your goal is to daily [Do The Thing], make it a small ask. Take the stairs, not the elevator: small, concrete, measurable, often a substitute for other worse behavior, and not more than 15 extra minutes out of your day. If you have a nebulous goal like ‘eating better’, you could make it something small & but actionable like, “I will eat one extra serving of vegetables with every meal.” (Baby carrots, either with breakfast or as a snack between breakfast & lunch, is a good way to get that first one in. Vegetable omelets are good too, if you have time to cook breakfast; most leftover non-salad veg from dinner the night before can be put in an omelet the morning after and usually works).

Health-based resolutions are most common (and sell a lot of gym memberships every January) but creative or project-based resolutions can be fun targets that encourage you to stretch your limits a bit. But if your goal is too big, too broad, or a daily [do the thing] you might find yourself in six to eight weeks eating metaphorical pizza amid the ruins of your 2019 Resolution failure. Possibly also with actual pizza.

Let me drop a section break and restart the article with part two.

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New Year’s Resolutions could, possibly be traced back to certain practices of ancient Babylon or ancient Rome (…if you believe Wikipedia, and in this case actually no, I don’t) but the idea of making changes for the New Year probably dates back, informally, to a point when we first had numbered years and calendars to track them with.

Odds are good the annual “resolution” as such is more modern, perhaps taking a bit from historical paying of debts before New Year’s Day (in ancient Babylon or more-recent-but-still-going-pretty-far-back China), lenten sacrifices and other religious annual practices of reflection, atonement, and forgiveness, and the Aristotelian idea of temperance, virtue, and self-governance as rediscovered by Europe in the 1200s and then refocused through the lens of the Reformation? At any rate, we have proof of Samuel Pepys making resolutions for 1662 and 1664, “solemn vows”, and gaining cultural traction and wider acceptance by the early 1800s. The idea of a New Year’s resolution as a secular, personal thing as opposed to solemn vows made to God or god probably date to Kant, or the Transcendentalists who followed him — not that I can point to a single essay saying as much, but the timelines match and then the Victorians get a hold of it and a lot of “things we’ve always done” and our collective holiday traditions only date back to like, 1840.

Resolutions are fine, strive to be a better human, yada yada yada, but this isn’t ancient wisdom handed down on papyrus from the first civilizations. More self-help 1960s & 70s, less 1690s or even 700s.

So Don’t Feel Bad™ when inevitably all your resolutions fail in an epic pizza binge on Friday 15 February ².

The main takeaway here is that you’re not breaking a vow to Janus and breaching the ancient compact when you fail with a resolution, as about 88% of us will, and that there’s nothing particular about the New Year (and its 1st day) or the calendar year except as a convenient framework.

We can select different frameworks.

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There’s actually a whole very long List of Timed Artistic Challenges, including a few you’ve heard of like Inktober and NaNoWriMo, and others for every month and some year-round or year-long ‘organized’ challenges besides. A New Year’s Resolution might be considered the first of these, or at least related as a type. Granted, resolutions predate NaNoWriMo [1999] but now we have a model and a vocabulary for this sort of thing (including but not limited to ‘timed artistic challenge’) and we can see how certain types of New Year’s Resolution (like any other year-long project) are a timed artistic challenge in all but name.

The various WriMo’s and -embers and -obers all have a certain cadence and set of rules: where creatives & others who want to try the ‘challenge’ take a month (30 or 31 days) and Do The Thing — and occasionally, post and share it. There’s an ad hoc community that can form, either organically on social media as everyone posts using the same hashtags, or in official and unofficial forums. The Doing Of The Thing is enough for some people, and the excuse/opportunity of the timed challenge plus their internal motivation is enough. But for most of us, we need the social-support-slash-peer-pressure to convince ourselves to stretch, to go just a bit past what we think our limits are. An opportunity to try something new or to tackle something in a new way. So the community is the more important part, even past the challenge ³.

But the big honking thing in the room with these timed artistic challenges is The Daily Grind: the daily grind is kind of the point — but could also be very off-putting for people who can’t sacrifice that much time OR maybe could but not for a full month OR for those who think they can hack it and will try, but for whom burnout around day 7 or 8 is a real and often encountered thing.

A month of the daily grind is one thing. If we were to stare down a whole year of a daily grind, we’d be forgiven if we just gave up on, say, the 5th of January which happens to be a Saturday and order a Fail Pizza ⁴ and get wrapped up in other things happening because damn, there’s a lot of distraction out there. The Resolution dies on Saturday with pepperoni.

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And so: the proposal.

There’s an English idiom, “a month of Sundays”, often used to imply a really, really long time or something that happened a long time ago. But if you do the math, it’s only 30 or 31 weeks and that actually fits quite comfortably in a year with a fair buffer on either side.

If you were planning on doing something for ‘a month of Sundays’ in 2019 you could start now(-ish, Sunday 6 January, though most of us just missed that mark so 13 January) and finish up on 4 or 11 August

…Or pick any start week between now and Sunday 2 June and still be able to start and finish a project of 30 or 31 weeks in 2019.

You could use any of the List of Timed Artistic Challenges, already framed for a month, and instead post/finish/finalize one block each week, instead of a daily dash to a scramble finish and a mess it takes weeks to recover from.

The benefit of doing a creative challenge this way is that instead of a daily grind, you only have to post once a week. On a Sunday, so after most of us have Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning — even if we did the ‘bad’ thing and put off doing any creative work during our ‘pays the bills’ work week. And many of the challenges are annualized anyway, “Hey friends let’s break and bust everything and do this impossible thing in a month — but not every month, ha, who’d do that. We’ll do it this one month out of the year”

If the thing is so impossible to do that we’d never manage outside of that flat-run-whole-month-heroic effort, why, it might take A Month Of Sundays to do otherwise. [insert a self-satisfied winking meme here]

That’s it: A neat catchphrase, a recycled idea, and a framework you might be able to hang your project on. I’m not curing cancer here. But if you either made a resolution you’ve already slipped on — or only had half an idea for a project, if only you had the time, let me give you a gift of time.

A month of Sundays.

Let’s go.

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¹ If your resolution is to quit smoking: Do that! Some days will be rough, and none of this advice applies, but go for it. If you have a really rough day, might I recommend a pint of ice cream instead of nicotine? I mean, it’s not a perfect solution but we can address the extra 15 pounds in 2020.

² Epic Pizza Binge is my new holiday/tradition, to be celebrated annually on the Friday after 14 February because why not.

³ See, it’s the end of the post, so I can reference the whole post in the footnotes and not just the bit with the number on it. If *someone* who isn’t me because I’m not doing it, wanted to do a Month of Sundays 2019 as a Thing, I’d recommend 3 March to 29 September (that’s 31 Sundays) just to kind of work around some of the end-of-year stuff, including NaNoWriMo and also because it gives folks 7 or 8 weeks into 2019 as a runway to ramp into the “year-long” project before the 3 March/first Sunday in March launch date.

⁴ sorry for relying so heavily on pizza-as-metaphor; as I write this, I think I’m just hungry