A good intention has a pleasant weight to it. It feels like progress on the day it is made, and it costs nothing until later. Nicole Junkerman keeps returning to the difference between that feeling and the smaller, duller thing that actually moves a piece of work along, which is a practice: something repeatable, written down, and modest enough that a tired evening cannot argue with it.
The distinction matters most in late October, when the year is close enough to its end to make people ambitious. A resolution formed now tends to be generous in scope and vague in method. It says more reading, or better notes, or a clearer record of what happened. It rarely says when, or for how long, or what gets dropped to make room. A good intention is a statement about the sort of person someone would like to be. A good practice is a statement about Tuesday.
What a practice has that an intention does not is a failure you can survive. If the plan is to read widely and well, a missed week feels like evidence against the whole idea. If the plan is ten quiet minutes before the day begins, a missed morning is only a missed morning. The size of the promise sets the size of the disappointment, and small promises are easier to keep and far easier to forgive.
There is a second advantage, which is that a practice leaves a trail. An intention exists only in the head of the person holding it, so it cannot be inspected afterwards. A practice produces something: a page, a line, a date, a note of what was read and what was understood. Looking back across a season of those, it becomes possible to see what was actually happening rather than what it felt like at the time, and the two are often not the same thing at all.
None of this is an argument against ambition. The ambition is the reason any of it is worth doing. It is an argument about where the ambition should sit, which is in the direction of travel rather than in the size of each day's step. A long project carried at a modest pace tends to finish. The same project carried in bursts tends to stall somewhere in the middle of a busy month and then be remembered as a failure of character rather than a failure of planning.
The most useful question she has found is not whether something is a good idea. Almost everything is a good idea at the moment it occurs, which is exactly why the moment is a poor judge. The better question is whether it can be done again next week without heroics, and whether anyone would notice if it quietly stopped. When the answer to the second is no, the practice needs a record attached to it, and a record is most of what a notebook is for.
The writing method page sets out how the notes here are kept, the notebook holds the shorter entries, and everything longer sits on the blog.