Slow down. By Friday.
A free 14-day reset, sent one email a day. One small experiment each morning — 3 minutes to read, 5 minutes to actually do. No apps, no spreadsheets, no morning-routine optimisation.
Free forever. Unsubscribe whenever. Day 1 arrives within a minute.
14 small experiments, one a day.
Most "slow living" advice is a 4,000-word essay you read once and forget. This is the opposite: one short, concrete thing to try, each morning, for two weeks. By the end you'll have data on what actually fits your life.
One experiment per day
Not a habit you have to maintain forever — just one thing to try today and see how it feels. Most take under 5 minutes.
3-minute reading time
Each email is short on purpose. The whole point is that you spend less time reading about slowing down and more time actually doing it.
Tested, not theorised
Everything in here is something I personally ran for at least a fortnight in 2024 or 2025 and either kept doing, or didn't (and why).
No system to maintain
No notion templates. No habit-tracker apps. No 5am routines. The point is to subtract, not add.
Here's a sample of what arrives.
The full series is 14 emails. Below are five of them — the ones I get the most replies about.
The 20-minute morning
One small subtraction from your morning routine — pick the thing you've been doing on autopilot for months and just don't do it tomorrow.
Cancel one thing on purpose
An exercise in seeing what actually happens when you say no — usually less than you fear, and often nothing at all.
Walk instead of wait
For one full day, when you'd normally check your phone in a queue or waiting room, walk a few steps instead. Notice what changes.
Re-read something you loved
Find a book or essay you remember loving in your twenties and re-read 20 pages. The point isn't nostalgia — it's noticing how you've changed.
The retrospective
The final email is a 6-question audit of what you tried, what stuck, what didn't, and what (if anything) you want to keep. No template needed.
"I expected a newsletter. What I got was the first thing I've actually finished in a year. I unsubscribed from twelve other Substacks halfway through Day 5."
— Maya R., subscriber since March 2025"It's the only 'productivity-adjacent' thing I've read that didn't try to sell me an app. Day 4 alone is worth the inbox space."
— Tom L., subscriber since December 2024Hi — I'm the one writing these.
I started The Quiet Year in 2024 after a year of feeling like I was optimising my life in directions I didn't actually care about. The newsletter is the byproduct: just the small experiments that survived, written up in a way that takes 3 minutes to read.
I don't sell courses, masterminds, or 1:1 coaching. There's no upsell at Day 14. If you've got recommendations of your own, I read every reply — they're how the better experiments make it into future series.
Start tomorrow morning.
Drop your email in and Day 1 will be in your inbox before you finish breakfast. You can unsubscribe at any point with one click.
Free forever. Unsubscribe whenever.