Why September Feels More Like a New Year Than January

How I’m using the change of season to get organized, rebuild a few habits and make our busy fall days work a little better.

Maybe that's what a reset looks like at this stage of life. Not reinventing myself. Just looking at the season ahead and asking what would make our days work a little better.

Every year, somewhere around the middle of August, the emails start to arrive.

The kids’ fall sports schedules begin landing in my inbox, along with school dates and other reminders of what’s coming. At first, I can happily ignore them. It’s still summer, after all. But inevitably, a week or so later, I wake up earlier than normal one morning with the sudden urge to get organized. I pull up the calendar and start plugging everything in, figuring out where everyone needs to be and when. That's usually the moment I know I'm beginning to shift out of summer mode and into planning mode.

Summer has such a distinct personality in our house. Our normally overscheduled kids suddenly have almost nowhere they need to be. Bedtimes become more of a suggestion than a rule. They sleep until they wake up. I’m not getting up in the morning immediately thinking about where someone has to be or what needs to happen next.

We have lazy afternoons by the pool. We decide at the last minute to go somewhere for the day. We might suddenly head down to the lake house for a couple of nights. Dinner gets pushed later because everyone is still outside. The kids stay up much later than they should. Plans change. For a couple of months, we just aren’t ruled by the calendar in the same way, and I love it.

There is something especially wonderful about that kind of summer when so much of the rest of our year is scheduled. Maybe living in Canada makes us even more aware of how finite it is. There are only so many warm evenings, weekends at the lake and afternoons when doing absolutely nothing by the pool seems like a perfectly legitimate plan for the day. Summer is the season when I’m happiest to say yes, figure it out later and worry a little less about whether everything is running efficiently.

By late August, though, I'm usually beginning to want a little structure again. I'm not ready to give up the pool days or warm evenings, but the idea of knowing what the week looks like starts to feel surprisingly appealing. After a couple of months of we’ll figure it out, I'm ready for a plan.

The Shift Back to Real Life

Maybe that's why September has always felt much more like the beginning of a new year to me than January ever has. It doesn't feel arbitrary because the shift is already happening all around us.

The light starts to look different. The evenings get shorter. The mornings become cooler. Our routines change. What we wear changes. The kids go back into their school and activity worlds, and our family settles into a completely different rhythm. There is still a little bit of summer hanging around, which makes this time of year feel nostalgic, but there is also a sense of possibility about what comes next.

And with that change in rhythm, I want to get organized.

Getting the House Ready for a Busier Season

It’s around this time that I start looking at our house differently too. In July, a messy drawer or disorganized closet doesn’t seem particularly urgent. If it takes an extra five minutes to find something, who cares? But once school and activities start again, our house has to work a little harder. Mornings have deadlines. School bags and sports equipment need to be where we think they are. Some nights, the kids need something substantial to eat before heading out to an activity, followed by what they’ve started calling “second dinner” when everyone finally gets home. There are more moving parts, and suddenly all the little inefficiencies I barely noticed over the summer start to matter.

That’s what usually sends me into an organizing mood. I start cleaning out drawers, going through closets and finding better places for the things we use all the time. I’m not trying to create a perfectly organized house; I just want it to function well when our days are full. If everyone can find what they need on the way out the door, and I’ve thought ahead about what they can eat before an activity and what we’ll have when everyone gets home, that removes a surprising amount of friction from the day.

There’s something satisfying about getting those systems back in place. They aren’t particularly glamorous projects, but they make a busy season feel more manageable — and after a summer when we could afford to be a little inefficient, I’m suddenly very motivated to deal with them.

The house starts to feel ready for a change in other ways too. By the end of summer, some of the outdoor plants that looked incredible in June have seen better days. Things get leggy. A planter that once looked lush starts looking tired. I start trimming things back, pulling out what no longer looks good and generally cleaning up the remnants of summer.

I’m not necessarily ready to fill the house with fall décor. In fact, I usually prefer the opposite. I like to edit first — clear away what has run its course, tidy things up and create a little breathing room before the next season really settles in. Somehow, just doing that makes everything feel fresh again without having to completely redecorate.

And Then I Start Thinking About My Own Routine

Once the family routine begins taking shape, I inevitably start wondering what I want my own days to look like too.

This is where I have to be careful, because I know myself well enough by now to understand that deciding I'm going to do something and actually building it into my life are two very different things. I wrote about this recently in I Thought I’d Finally Have Time for Everything. For years, I assumed that having more time would mean I would naturally do all the things I never seemed to get around to doing. It turns out that having time doesn't automatically create habits. If I actually want something to become part of my routine, I have to figure out when and how it’s going to fit into my day.

So I'm not approaching the fall with a giant list of resolutions. There are just a few things I'd like to do better. One is incredibly basic: drink more water. I'm terrible at it, so hydration is high on my very unexciting reset list.

I also want to get back to lifting weights three times a week. I have a gym in my house, which should theoretically make this extremely easy. I have learned that it does not. I simply haven't been using it consistently, so I've joined a gym again. I'm hoping that changing the environment and having somewhere I physically go to exercise will help me rebuild the habit.

I'm taking a similar approach to cooking. My perpetual goal has been to sit down on Sunday, look at the week ahead and figure out what we're eating before Monday arrives. I have had this goal before — many times. But our fall schedule makes planning meals even more important. I'd like to make home-cooked meals happen more consistently, and thinking through the week ahead would make that much easier.

Maybe that's what a reset looks like at this stage of life. Not reinventing myself. Just looking at the season ahead and asking what would make our days work a little better.

A Different Kind of Fresh Start

Interestingly, the actual “New Year” of January has never had quite the same effect on me. It arrives immediately after Christmas, when I'm tired and it's dark and cold outside, along with all the pressure of new goals, new routines and a supposedly new version of ourselves.

Fall feels less forced. Life is changing anyway, so I find myself changing with it.

I'm still a little sad to give up the freedom of summer — the spontaneous trips to the lake house, evenings when nobody is watching the clock and days when we can decide what we're doing after we wake up. But I'm also ready to put some structure back into our lives and make a few small changes that fit the season we're entering.

Maybe that's why this has always felt like the real fresh start to me. I'm not trying to become a different person. I'm just ready for a different rhythm.