National Kick Butt Day

What the day is

National Kick Butt Day is observed on the second Monday in October. It began in the early 2000s, generally credited to a motivational speaker, as a push to stop deferring a goal and act on it. The exact origin is not firmly documented, which is typical of observances started informally rather than by proclamation.

Origin and background

The date is not an afterthought. Researchers studying goal pursuit have identified what they call the fresh-start effect: people are measurably more likely to commit to a new goal immediately after a temporal landmark, a date that feels like a boundary between an old period and a new one. Mondays produce a small version of this, the start of a month a larger one, and the combination used here, a Monday that also falls early in a new month and clear of any other major observance, stacks both effects.

The honest finding attached to this research is less motivating than the marketing around it. The fresh-start effect reliably increases the rate at which people begin something, searches for gyms and planning tools spike right on schedule, but it does very little on its own for whether the attempt is sustained past the first few weeks. The boundary makes starting easier; it does not make the follow-through automatic.

What does predict follow-through, across the behavior change literature, is specificity. A vague intention to be more productive rarely survives contact with an ordinary day. An implementation intention, a plan with the shape of if this situation occurs, then I will do this specific action, performs considerably better in controlled trials, because it removes the moment of deciding from the moment of acting.

The day's appeal is really an invitation to use a boundary that is arriving anyway, rather than inventing a vaguer one of your own.

How to take part

• Pick one deferred task, not a list of them. One finished thing beats five started ones.
• Write the plan as an if-then: name the trigger and the action together.
• Tell someone what you are starting. Accountability outperforms willpower in most studies.
• Expect the boundary to fade by the following week, and plan for that rather than being surprised by it.