It's been on the list four Januaries running.
Each time it goes well for a few weeks. Each time it fades somewhere around March. And each January it comes back, slightly heavier, because now there's a history attached — three previous attempts, all of which stopped.
The repeat restart is a different situation from a first attempt or a single long absence, and it has its own failure mode.
What accumulates between attempts
Not skill. Evidence, and the evidence is about you.
By the fourth attempt you're not starting a goal, you're starting a goal you've failed at three times, and that's a materially different thing to begin. Every session in the early weeks carries a quiet prediction underneath it: this is the bit where it goes well before it stops.
That prediction does real damage, because it makes the first missed session enormous. On a first attempt, missing a Tuesday is a missed Tuesday. On the fourth, it's confirmation — the thing you were watching for, arriving on cue.
There's also a slow narrowing of the goal itself. Each restart tends to be a bit more modest than the last, on the reasonable theory that it was too ambitious. By the fourth version it's small enough to be uninteresting, which introduces a new reason to stop.
Why it stops in March specifically
Because the same mechanism operates each time and nobody looks at it.
That's the whole problem with a restart: it addresses the fact that the goal stopped and not the reason. A January resolution to try again is a decision about effort, and the previous three attempts almost certainly didn't fail for want of effort.
Find out what actually happened. What were you doing in the last three sessions before each attempt ended? Not what you think stopped it — what the sessions consisted of.
The answers tend to be consistent across attempts, and they're rarely about willpower. It stops after every work trip. It stops when the material gets harder in month two. It stops just before anything would have been shown to somebody. That's a pattern, and it's the same one four times.
The restart that works differs in one place
Not in the plan. In what you do about the specific thing that ended the last three.
If it stopped after every disruption, the change is a written rule: after two missed sessions, do a deliberately trivial version — ten minutes, no ambition — whatever else is happening. That's the whole intervention, and it's aimed at the fortnight where a pattern converts back into a nightly decision.
If it stopped when the material got harder, the change is expecting that and lowering the floor for that period specifically, rather than being surprised by it in month two.
If it stopped before exposure, the change is a named person and a date, decided at the start rather than left until the end.
One change, aimed at the actual mechanism. Not a better plan, a better schedule or more resolve.
The date itself is doing harm and it's easy to remove.
A January start carries the whole weight of the previous Januaries. It also invites the ceremony — the plan, the fresh notebook, the ambitious version — and ceremony is what makes the first missed session feel significant.
Start it in February, or on a Wednesday in October. A restart with no anniversary attached is just a person doing a thing, which is the state you want.
And don't announce it. Each previous attempt probably had a small announcement, and the accumulated embarrassment of those is part of what makes the fourth one heavy.
When four attempts is the answer
The honest counter, because this can be read as encouragement to persist with anything.
Four failed attempts is evidence, and one reading of it is that you don't want this. Run the relief test properly: imagine deciding tonight that it's finished, permanently, and never attempting it again. If what arrives is lightness, the January pattern isn't a problem to solve — it's a decision you've been making annually and reversing out of guilt.
There's a specific version worth watching for. Some goals get restarted because they belong to an idea of yourself rather than to anything you want to do. Those produce exactly this pattern, and the fourth attempt fails for the same reason as the first.
And some things genuinely take several attempts, with the earlier ones doing necessary work. Plenty of people stopped smoking on the fifth try. The distinguishing question is whether each attempt gets further, or whether all four look identical.
Four Januaries
Running, started in January four years running.
Year one: eight weeks, stopped after a fortnight's holiday. Year two: six weeks, stopped after a chest infection. Year three: five weeks, stopped after a fortnight in March when work took every evening. Year four: he writes down what happened each time before starting, which is the only new thing he does.
The pattern is obvious once the three sit next to each other. Every attempt ended after an unavoidable break of about a fortnight, and not one of them ended because he stopped wanting to run.
So the fourth attempt has one rule attached that the others didn't: after two missed runs, go and do a deliberately bad one — fifteen minutes, half the distance, no attempt to make up for anything.
It gets tested in March, after a week away with no trainers packed. He does twenty minutes at a pace he'd have been embarrassed by in year two, and comes home slightly annoyed at how pointless it felt.
That's the whole difference. Four years, three of them ending in the same fortnight, and the fix was a rule about what to do on the day it was about to happen again.
What the record makes possible
None of this diagnosis is available from memory. Ask someone why the last three attempts stopped and you'll get a theory about discipline.
A line each session, kept across attempts, gives you the actual answer — the last three entries before each one ended, in the words you used at the time. That's four data points on the same person doing the same thing, which is about the most useful information anyone could have about their own goals.
It also means the fifth attempt, if there is one, starts from something better than resolve.
Related: Coming back after six months away · The graveyard audit · Fitness goals and the two-week disappearance
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