Unfuck your life with Gretchen Rubin's commandments and daily chart

Somewhere in the last few months, things slid. Maybe it was the mail, or the sleep, or the friend you stopped answering, and now the pile is big enough that you don’t know where to put your hands. I don’t know your pile. I do know the feeling of looking at a list and wanting to lie down, so this is a letter about a way to start that doesn’t require a list of everything.

It comes from Gretchen Rubin, whose book The Happiness Project (Harper) has a subtitle that reads like an inventory of small things: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Her site says she “decided to dedicate a year to a happiness project.” I read her own pages, not the whole book, and the pieces I found are useful for a reader in your position.

What does Rubin do first?

She writes a short list of rules about how to act. Her Twelve Commandments, posted on her site on September 10, 2009, are: Be Gretchen. Let it go. Act the way I want to feel. Do it now. Be polite and be fair. Enjoy the process. Spend out. Identify the problem. Lighten up. Do what ought to be done. No calculation. There is only love.

She is candid about the list’s size. In her piece on writing your own, she says she reviews hers daily, suspects twelve is too many and thinks two might be enough. She also says it took several months to develop, and that five of the twelve came from other people. “Act the way I want to feel” is her paraphrase of William James, and “No calculation” paraphrases St. Therese.

For you, right now, two lines are plenty. If “Do it now” is one of them, you have a rule that fits a pile of unopened envelopes better than any plan does.

Which of her Secrets of Adulthood matter when everything has slipped?

Rubin keeps a second list called Secrets of Adulthood. A few entries from her “25 secrets” post read like triage notes:

• “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.”
• “Outer order contributes to inner calm.”
• “Never let myself get too hungry, too sleepy, or too cold.”

The first tells you to stop waiting for a heroic weekend. The second is why a twenty-minute tidy backed by a cortisol study is a reasonable place to put your hands. The third is the least glamorous and probably the most useful when you’ve slid: sleep and food come before reinvention.

How does the daily chart work?

Rubin makes a calendar with her resolutions on it and gives herself a check mark or an X each day. She adapted it from Benjamin Franklin’s chart. In her article on the idea, she says goals are more likely to progress when they are “concrete and measurable actions, with some kind of accountability,” and that even a mark in a box rewards good behavior. She also says she finds it easier to do something than to refrain from doing it.

That last point is worth building on. “Stop staying up late” is hard to score. “Lights out by 11” is a thing you either did or did not do. Pick three actions at that size: a wake time, one bill opened, a ten-minute tidy. Write them down the side and put the days across the top.

A wake time is a good first row, because you can answer it yes or no before breakfast. Sleep clinicians anchor on it too, as in why CBT-I fixes the wake time first.

What can a check mark not do?

Quite a lot, and it’s better to say so now.

A chart is only as honest as the person holding the pen, and on the days you most want an X to go away, you hold the pen. Rubin’s own method assumes you will look at it. If you’ve learned that you keep promises to other people more reliably than to yourself, her Four Tendencies framework, and the Obliger type in particular, is a reason to hand the checking to someone else. One way to do that for the wake-up row is DontSnooze: when the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record a video showing you’re up, and if you don’t, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose.

A chart also can’t tell you which problem to work on first. Rubin’s commandment “Identify the problem” is a prompt, not a method. If you are facing money, health, mess and sleep all at once, a sequence helps more than a calendar, and the 72-hour 5S plan lays one out. Use that to decide the order, then use the chart to hold it.

And it can’t fix what isn’t a habit problem. Rubin’s project, as she describes it, is a year of someone choosing to be happier. It is not a treatment for depression, a way out of debt or a substitute for medical care. If the slide has a weight on it you can’t lift with a check mark, take that to a professional first. The chart can wait for you.

I also did not find trial evidence for the method itself. What you have is one writer’s practice, borrowed from Franklin, with reasons that sound sensible. That is enough to try for two weeks and not enough to believe in blindly.

What does the first week look like?

Tonight, write two lines. They can be Rubin’s, a friend’s, or yours. Tomorrow morning, pick the wake time you can actually keep and put it on the chart as row one. Add two small actions underneath, each worded as something you do. Before bed, mark the grid, X included.

On day seven, don’t add a fourth row. Look at the pattern and ask which of the three you are keeping and which you are dodging. Make the dodged one smaller, not bigger. That is the whole rebuild at this stage, and it is allowed to be this small.

Rubin’s year was long and full of closets and singing. Yours can begin with one mark in one box.