Growing up, “I don’t feel like it” was never a real reason. Not for soccer practice on a Saturday morning, not for a shift at the golden arches after school, not for class the day after a long weekend. My parents didn’t argue the point. You committed, so you showed up. End of conversation.
Some of that slipped when I was on my own for the first time, in university, when nobody was checking whether I showed up. But it came back around once I was building something of my own. Running a business doesn’t leave room for “I don’t feel like it.” The oven doesn’t care how you slept. The wholesale order doesn’t wait for your mood to improve.
There’s a trend going around online right now called the great lock-in. The idea is simple: pick a handful of rules and hold them from September through the end of the year. No official start, no founder, no restart penalty if you miss a day. What’s caught my attention about it isn’t the productivity part, it’s who’s doing it and why. A lot of people are treating it less like a challenge and more like proof. Proof that January doesn’t own the concept of starting over. Proof, as one creator put it, that you can walk into the new year with receipts instead of another unfulfilled promise.
I’ve used the phrase “lock in” for years, but usually for one specific night. The one before a deadline, when you put your head down and get it done. What’s different about the version going around now is the length of it. One night takes willpower. Four months takes something else. It takes systems.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. The rules that survive four months aren’t the ones that ask the most of you every single day, they’re the ones that ask the least. My own rule this season is capping food delivery apps to once on a weekday, once on the weekend, down from almost daily. It all starts with my mornings: no two are alike. Some days start when the sun comes up. Other days start late because I worked too long the night before, and by the time I’m in the groove, stopping to eat feels like losing momentum.
A subscription works on the same principle. It’s not a bigger commitment, it’s a smaller decision. You make it once, in September, and it holds through the season without asking you to remember it every morning. That’s not a sales pitch so much as it is the honest reason I believe in the model. Showing up isn’t a mood. It’s a commitment you made once and didn’t have to revisit.
If you’re picking your own rule this season, I hope it’s the kind that keeps itself.
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