Ninety Degrees

A ninety-day program you can actually finish. Ten small habits, added one at a time, with a page for every day and a chart for your wall. You turn one degree a day. By Day 90 you are facing a different way.

Most 90-day challenges ask for everything on the first morning and send you back to Day 1 when you miss. This one is built the other way round. In Week 1 you do one thing: get up at a set time. In Week 2 you add a walk. A new line joins your daily log most weeks until there are ten, and every line has a floor, a version small enough for your worst day.

What you get

• The book (168 pages, PDF). Part One explains the method and the six subjects it covers: sleep, movement, food, attention, money and people. Part Two is the ninety days. Every day has its own page with a short reading, one instruction, your log and a question to answer. Every week opens with the new habit, its full and floor versions and a plan to fill in, and closes with a review. There are checkpoints at 30, 60 and 90 degrees.
• You can type straight into it. The circles, blanks, writing boxes and tables are fillable in Adobe Acrobat Reader and most PDF apps, or you can write on it with a stylus.
• The Logbook, in US Letter and A4 (130 pages each). Only the pages you write on, for printing.
• The wall chart. Ninety rays to color in, one a day. US Letter, A4 and an 18 x 24 inch poster.

The ten lines

Wake at one time. Walk for twenty minutes. Keep the phone out of the bedroom. Do one 25-minute block on a project of your own. Do strength work twice a week, at home, with a chair and a backpack (eight exercises, each pictured in two positions and given in three levels). Look at your money for two minutes a day. Make half your plate vegetables and fruit at two meals. Keep a last call for caffeine and for screens. Stop one thing you choose. Reach out to one person a day.

Along the way you map your money on two pages and set up one automatic transfer, write a plan for the weeks when things go wrong, and take your own numbers four times so you can see what moved.

Where the facts come from

Everything the book says about how sleep, exercise, food, attention, money or habits work comes from a source you can check: 44 of them, listed at the back with what each one found. They include the CDC, the NHS and the World Health Organization, and the research on habit formation, if-then planning and progress tracking. Where the evidence is thin, the book says so. You will also find out what is wrong with 10,000 steps, eight glasses of water and the dopamine detox.

What it does not promise

A weight, an income or a new personality. It is not a diet and it is not medical, psychological or financial advice. It asks for about an hour a day once all ten habits are running, about fifteen minutes on a floor day, and much less in the early weeks.

Who it is for

Adults who have tried to change several things at once and stopped. It assumes no fitness, no savings, and no more willpower than it takes to open a book.

Four PDF files. No app, no account and no subscription.