January gets the credit for beginnings, but September does the work. The real restart in Britain happens in the first days of that month, and the preparation for it happens now, in the closing week of August. Nicole Junkermann treats these days as the quiet half of a beginning rather than the tail end of a summer.
There is a reason September carries more weight. The year is old enough by then to have a shape, and everybody can see how much of it remains. Terms begin, diaries reopen, and a considerable number of decisions parked in July return asking to be made in the same fortnight.
Prepare the season, not the fortnight
Nicole Junkermann's preference is to prepare the whole autumn in rough outline rather than to plan its first two weeks in detail. Detail is fragile. It survives contact with about four days of a real month, and once broken it tends to be abandoned rather than adjusted. An outline holds, because it is built from intentions rather than appointments.
In practice this means naming three or four things the autumn is for, and writing them somewhere they will be seen again in October. Not targets, and certainly not resolutions, which have a January flavour and a January survival rate.
Three preparations worth making
- A reading list of no more than five things, chosen now while the mind is unhurried, with one title well outside the usual range.
- A clean page, since a new season deserves not to begin halfway down somebody else's list.
- One recurring hour a week, protected before the diary fills, because it will never be free again once the month begins.
That is the whole apparatus. Nicole Junkermann has tried more elaborate versions over the years and found that the elaborate ones are abandoned by the middle of October, while the short one survives to Christmas.
Fewer things, finished properly
The temptation at this point is to plan expansively, because a fresh season invites a long list and a long list feels like ambition. It is worth resisting. A long list is really a decision not to decide, handed forward to a version of the team that will have less time and less patience than the one making it now.
Three outcomes for a season can be held in mind without a document, explained without a meeting and finished without heroics. The discipline is not in choosing the three but in accepting what the choice implies, which is that a great many reasonable ideas will not be worked on this autumn.
Finish before you start
There is a second and less obvious use for these days, which is closing rather than opening. Most people carry a small number of unfinished items from summer into autumn, and most are unfinished for no better reason than that the season changed underneath them.
Clearing two or three of them now costs very little and changes the mood of September considerably. Nicole Junkermann finds that a surprising amount of what feels unfinished turns out to be unfinished in writing rather than in fact.
Leave room for what arrives
A common mistake is to fill the autumn completely while it is still theoretical. September always looks emptier from August than it turns out to be, and a plan that assumes the emptiness will hold does not survive its first fortnight.
The safer approach is to commit to rather less than seems reasonable and to leave the rest genuinely open. What arrives will fill it soon enough, and having space for it is what makes an autumn feel manageable rather than merely full.
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