About The Steady Day

The Steady Day is a magazine about the parts of a day that repeat. Not the resolutions, the programmes or the transformations: the hour before bed, the ten minutes after lunch, the height of a screen, the glass that never gets drunk, the lamp that stays too bright at eleven at night.

What this is

A day is not built out of decisions taken once. It is built out of the same small sequences, done again, mostly without being noticed. That is an unglamorous subject and it is the whole of ours. The pieces here describe a habit, the mechanism usually given for it, what typically gets in its way, what the smallest workable version looks like, and what we noticed while keeping it ourselves.

The magazine publishes in seven sections and every entry carries the date it was written. If you want a single place to begin, the entry on building a wind down routine touches more of the other habits than anything else on the site, and it hands off naturally to the question of where the light in a home actually falls.

The unit is ten minutes

The scale of this magazine is deliberately small. One lamp. One glass. One flight of stairs. Ten minutes on a pavement. Two minutes of a routine on a morning that has already gone wrong. We write at that scale because it is the scale at which habits actually survive contact with an ordinary week, which is the argument set out at length in the entry on the two minute rule.

The unit of this magazine is ten minutes, one lamp, one glass, one flight of stairs.

Seven sections

Sleep and rest deals with the hour either side of the night. Movement is almost entirely walking. Everyday nutrition is about meals that repeat rather than meals worth photographing. Desk and posture covers the furniture a body spends its working day in. Stress and calm collects the short tools: a counted breath, three written sentences, a defended evening. Home and environment is about rooms, since rooms decide what happens in them. Habits and routines cuts across all six.

The sections are not sealed off from each other, and the entries link across whenever the subjects genuinely overlap. A lamp is a sleep habit and a home habit at once, and the walk after a meal belongs as much to the entry on the pace of a meal as it does to the movement section.

The register we write in

We write observationally. That means we describe habits, report the accounts commonly given for them, and say what we noticed when we kept notes on our own week. We do not prescribe, we do not diagnose, and we do not put numbers on anything we have not counted. When a fortnight of notes in one household is all we have, that is what we say, and we leave the conclusion where it belongs, which is with the reader.

The method behind that, including what we mean by a fortnight of notes, is described in more detail on the page about how this magazine is written.