Happy Monday
January feels like the Monday of the year. It’s cold, slow, and often written off as something to endure. We’ve even managed to brand part of it as the most depressing day of the year1.
I’ve always liked Mondays. Not because they’re easy, but because they reset the board. Whatever didn’t happen last week no longer matters. You get a clean slate and another go.
A lot of people dislike Mondays. I think that’s a mistake. Treating Mondays positively feels like a quiet advantage. If everyone else starts the week annoyed or drained, starting with intention already puts you ahead.
I’ve always loved fresh starts in general. A new MacBook for a new job, or because you’ve been around long enough to earn an upgrade. That moment where everything is clean, fast, uncluttered. No cruft, no habits yet, just potential. It reminds me of the start of a new school year, opening a fresh notebook or jotter, your handwriting suddenly perfect because you want to set a standard from the beginning. You know it won’t last forever, but it matters that it starts well.
That’s what Mondays give me on a smaller scale. What happened last week, the goals I didn’t hit, the things I dropped, they don’t carry the same weight. I can learn, adjust, and move forward. The opportunity ahead feels tangible, not abstract.
January is just this idea, but zoomed out. New Year’s resolutions tend to fade faster than I’d like. Instead, I aim for a hard reset, setting myself up so the year feels lighter, calmer, and easier to operate in.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. Clearing my desktop and Downloads folder. Deleting files I don’t need anymore. Getting unread emails back to zero, or close enough that I’m not constantly scanning for things I’ve already missed. Removing visual and mental noise. None of this changes what I’m capable of, but it removes friction. And friction is what quietly kills momentum.
This year I tried something new. I used AI to help me reset my local development environment. I gave Gemini my .zshrc and had it review and clean up my shell configuration. The result was a 4.5x faster shell startup, a small thing, but one I feel dozens of times a day. I then did the same with my VS Code setup, extensions, settings, the lot. I didn’t benchmark load times before, so I can’t give a neat before and after chart, but everything feels noticeably snappier and generally cleaner.
I’d been meaning to do these things for months, but January was the excuse to down tools for a few minutes (literally) and actually do a bit of a reset.
That’s the pattern I keep coming back to. Fresh starts don’t magically change outcomes. They change environments. And better environments make good behaviour easier to sustain.
You don’t need a new year to reset. You get one every Monday. But if you’ve got both at once, you might as well use them.
Happy Monday!