February 2026: Fewer Threads, Sundays Off, Seven Hours of Sleep
January proved I can keep one habit daily: a post every day for 31 days. It also showed how crowded everything else got around it. The January retrospective was about what held and what didn’t. February’s plan protects what worked by doing less.
What January actually taught me
I didn’t write a masterpiece every day. Some posts were short. Some were messy. But the habit stuck, and my thinking got clearer because of it. A daily deadline doesn’t leave room to keep an idea half-formed for weeks.
That’s the lesson I want to carry into everything else this month. Consistency beat intensity: a good-enough post every day did more than an occasional big one would have.
The retrospective added a sharper version of that lesson. What held in January were subtractions, single decisions like no weekend work. The one addition that held, daily writing, had a forcing deadline and a public record. The additions without one (meditation, time-blocking, 5 AM starts) failed. So I’ve tried to make every commitment below either a subtraction or an addition with something forcing it. The one that isn’t, sleep, I’ve flagged.
That rule changes the list I wrote yesterday. Five minutes of daily meditation has nothing forcing it, so it isn’t one of February’s commitments, and the weekly phones-away family activity is folded into no-tech Sundays.
February commitments
Keep writing daily
This one stays. Ideas from one post keep turning up in the next, and problems untangle while I’m explaining them.
I’m not raising the bar on any single post. The bar is that something gets published every day.
No-tech Sundays
This one is new. The report card set one no-tech Saturday a month. What I’m writing down here goes further than that monthly day: one day every week where the laptop goes away. No Slack. No email. No “quick check” on production.
Just family. Books. Maybe a walk.
My wife has been asking for this. My kids deserve it. I need it more than I want to admit.
I already don’t work weekends; that boundary held all of January apart from one emergency Saturday. What I still do is check Slack and glance at production, which pulls my head back into the week even when I don’t reply. That’s what this removes.
Sunday is a good test. It’s the day before the work week, which is when the urge to peek at what’s waiting on Monday is strongest. If I can leave work alone on the day the pull is strongest, the rest of the weekend takes care of itself.
It’s a subtraction, one rule decided once.
There’s an obvious tension with the first commitment: a post every day and a laptop-free Sunday don’t fit together cleanly, and this post itself lands on a Sunday. For now, Sunday posts get written and scheduled on Saturday, this one included; if that turns Saturday into a work day, the rule needs rethinking. February will show whether the writing habit or the Sunday rule gives way first.
Deeper focus on fewer things
January had too many threads: Azure OpenAI work, Fabric migrations, side projects, blog writing, community talks. Each one was worth doing. Together they meant a lot of context switching, and attention spread across five things is thin on all of them.
February will be more selective. Two major focus areas:
- AI consulting work, centred on Azure OpenAI and agents.
- Family presence.
Everything else is secondary. That doesn’t mean it stops. It means when something has to give, it’s not one of those two.
Better sleep
I’ve been averaging five to six hours a night. That’s not sustainable. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society consensus recommends at least seven hours for adults, and the CDC links regularly getting less than that to higher risk of conditions like obesity, diabetes, heart disease and stroke (CDC MMWR, 2016).
The way I think about it: sleep deficit compounds like technical debt. You can borrow against it for a while, and the interest shows up somewhere you didn’t plan for, usually in judgement and patience.
Target: seven hours minimum, every night.
This is the commitment most at risk of failing the way meditation and 5 AM starts did, because “sleep more” is an addition with nothing forcing it. I don’t have a mechanism for it yet, and I’ll find out by the 28th whether intent is enough.
What I’m dropping
Adding commitments without removing anything is how January got crowded, so this list matters as much as the one above.
Guilt about unfinished projects. Some side projects won’t get done. That’s okay. An unfinished project I’ve consciously parked costs nothing. One I keep feeling guilty about costs attention every day.
FOMO on new tools. Every week there’s a new AI framework. I don’t need to try them all. My job is to get good at the tools I actually deliver with, not to have an opinion on every launch the day it lands.
Perfectionism in writing. Good enough and published beats perfect and sitting in drafts.
The mindset shift
January was about doing more. February is about doing less, better.
| January | February |
|---|---|
| Daily writing | Daily writing, no change |
| No fixed tech-free day | Sundays fully off tech |
| Five parallel threads (client work, side projects, blog, talks) | Two priorities: AI consulting and family; the rest is secondary |
| Five to six hours of sleep | Seven hours minimum |
Twenty-eight days
February is short: 28 days this year. That works in my favour. A shorter month is a smaller experiment, which makes it easier to keep every commitment above for the whole of it, and easier to be honest at the end about which ones held.
If you’re setting your own plan for the month, my suggestion is to write the “dropping” list before the “commitments” list. The constraint on most plans isn’t ambition. It’s the time and attention already spoken for.
I’ll report on which of these held in the February scorecard on the 28th.