Why less is more: Making space for 2026.

Welcome to the end of 2025.

No doubt, this is a week full of recaps and prognostications. Across your channels, you’re likely seeing bulleted lists of achievements from your peers as well as a set of “resolutions” for what will be done better or more efficiently in the year ahead. Perhaps your feed is already inundated with “predictions” or trends reports preparing you to be your best once the calendar turns.

And no doubt, you are also thinking about your own resolutions. How you’ll work out more, eat better, write your manuscript, on and on. I’m doing the same thing if I’m honest. The end of a calendar year is a natural time to take stock of our work and our lives, a turning point that compels us to change habits that have been nagging at us.

Of course, we are free to change our habits or ourselves at any time, but there is something about this moment that normalizes it. “Dry January” makes it more acceptable to take a break from drinking. Gym specials make it easier to sign up for workouts knowing full well that it’ll be near impossible to cancel later on. And if, like me, you live somewhere where it is cold and dreary between now and March, well, there will be less of the pesky fun distractions that get in the way of you committing to becoming your best self.

It’s all so enticing. But it is also baked into an apocryphal narrative of how habits are shaped. You may have heard the idea that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. This idea is not actually based on rigorous scientific study, but instead on a single, anecdotal observation from the 1950s. Dr. Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who wrote about his patients - noting that in his estimation it took roughly 21 days for someone to start seeing themselves in a new capacity. For example, if someone had a portion of their leg amputated, it would take 21 days for them to stop feeling a “phantom” limb and start accepting their new normal.

That’s a pretty specific case, and unsurprisingly, more recent studies have debunked the notion that it can be extrapolated to habit-forming more broadly. Many habits take upwards of 70-90 days of consistent work to form, or more, especially if they are good habits (bad habits seem to be easier to make and harder to break).

Still, in my opinion, the “21 day myth” helps fracture our resolutions before we even begin. Because before the end of January, you’ll be wondering why it is still hard to get up for the gym, or to say no to the extra dessert, or to stick to the time you’ve carved out for yourself to write or paint or read.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the insidious nature of the tyranny of shoulds. That is, how telling yourself you “should” do something can lead to a cycle of shame when you inevitably fall short of your own arbitrary vision.

As usual, I’m mostly writing this as an outward reminder to myself.

If we’re all not careful, the way we handle the next few days could send us off into an unexpected and avoidable spiral that will undercut what might otherwise be an incredibly productive 2026 ahead.

So, what should we do instead?

Well, so much of the discussion around New Year’s Resolutions centers on signing up for more - working out more, writing or reading more, taking our work more seriously.

Specificity is no doubt important. “You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” as the saying goes. But let’s be honest with ourselves. We have no idea what life has in store for us in the year ahead. I’d counter all of you well-meaning planners with the Yiddish proverb loosely translated to “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

With that in mind, instead of signing up for more, what if in 2026 we focused on what we will do less of? There is immense power in shedding ourselves of clutter, be it physical, mental, spiritual or otherwise.

As Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, writes, “By getting rid of the things I don’t use, don’t need, or don’t love, as well as the things that don’t work, don’t fit, or don’t suit, I free my mind—and my shelves—for what I truly value. And that’s true for most people.”

By cutting out things that don’t serve us (for me, that includes excessive IG scrolling, getting into random text arguments with my friends about mundane topics, etc.), we make space in our lives to be filled with more rejuvenating ideas.

And unlike boilerplate resolutions, which might be “good” for us but inevitably set up a tyranny of shoulds spiral, the things that fill the space we create might be unexpected. They might lead to new creative breakthroughs, or habits we didn’t know we needed.

In simplifying life, we will attract the life we’re meant for.

Perhaps it is romanticizing it a bit, but that’s what this time of year is for.

So, in 2026, repeat after me:

I, [INSERT NAME], will protect my time better than I ever have before.

From there, the possibilities are endless.

Wishing you and yours a peaceful New Years, and I hope you take a moment to celebrate all you’ve accomplished this year.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash.