Every January, instead of making resolutions, I drop a habit. The rule is that it has to be something I once liked. The bad habits — doomscrolling, staying up too late, refreshing email at dinner — I don't even count. Those leave on their own, eventually, or they don't. The harder ones are the habits I built because they once meant something, and that I'm still doing out of sheer momentum.
Some years it's easy. Some years it takes me weeks to notice what it should be. The process itself is the point. Once a year, I audit what my life has accumulated.
What the practice has taught me
Lives grow, by default. Every interesting thing you encounter adds a small obligation. Every hobby you start becomes, eventually, a drawer of equipment. The slow accumulation of good habits is not an unambiguously good thing. At some point the volume of things you're trying to maintain starts to compromise your ability to do any of them well.
The dropped habit is a forcing function. It makes me actually ask — not rhetorically, but with a specific answer at the end — whether something that was once working is still working. Most of the time the answer is: it's not, I've just been too busy doing it to notice.
Lives grow, by default. At some point the volume of good habits you're maintaining starts to compromise your ability to do any of them well.
Some things I've dropped
A yearly trip I was taking mostly out of loyalty to a friendship that had quietly changed. A journaling format I had outgrown but kept forcing because the notebook was nice. A weekly newsletter I subscribed to for good reasons that were no longer the reasons I was opening it. Strength training at a gym that made me tense every time I walked in. The gym wasn't the problem. It was that I was doing a thing I didn't like in order to maintain a version of myself I was no longer trying to be.
In each case, what I noticed after the drop was not loss. It was a small decompression I hadn't realized I needed. The space the habit had been taking up — not just time, but attention — was more than I'd estimated.
The hardest one
Two years ago I dropped reading the news. I'd been reading a major daily paper every morning for fifteen years, carefully, the way my father had. It felt like a civic duty. I believed — I still believe — that being informed matters.
What I'd stopped noticing was that my reading was not making me more informed. It was making me more agitated about a narrow set of stories that the paper happened to select for me. The signal-to-noise ratio had quietly inverted while I kept performing the ritual. A month off confirmed what I suspected: I had not actually lost much. I was just less anxious.
I read the news differently now. Longer-form, weekly, in clusters. The habit I dropped was daily news, not news entirely. That distinction matters. Dropping a habit is not the same as rejecting the thing the habit was trying to give you.
The underlying idea
I think the reason this practice has stuck with me is that it inverts the standard productivity question. The standard question is what should I add. The better question, most years, is what am I carrying that I don't need to carry anymore.
If you're the kind of person who builds things, it's very easy to keep building without ever demolishing. The dropped habit is a small, annual demolition. It reminds you that your life is not a warehouse. What you include, you include at the cost of something else. Choosing well means knowing what's on the shelves.
I haven't picked this year's yet. I'm three months behind. I'll know when I notice it. That's usually how it works.