Nicole Junkerman on Small Autumn Routines, October 2026

Six small things that cost almost nothing, suit the shorter days, and tend to hold for a whole month once they are started.

By Nicole Junkerman · 3 October 2026

Large autumn resolutions have a poor record. Small ones, the kind that take under half an hour and need no equipment, tend to still be running at the end of the month, which is the only test that matters. Nicole Junkerman keeps a short list of them and adds to it rarely.

Here is the version that suits October, when the evenings go early and the weather has not yet become an argument.

1. One walk that goes nowhere. Half an hour, no destination, ideally at the hour the light is about to go. It works better in October than in any other month, because the light is worth watching and the cold is still mild enough to ignore.
2. A book kept by the kettle. Not the serious one. Something that can be read three pages at a time while the water boils, and which therefore actually gets read. The reading room usually has a candidate.
3. Twenty minutes on a Sunday evening. Notebook open. What happened, what was read, where the week went. It is the smallest possible version of keeping a record, and it survives the months in which larger versions do not.
4. One room rearranged for the new light. A lamp moved, a chair turned towards the window, the reading corner shifted three feet. October light comes from a different place than September light, and furniture rarely works this out unassisted.
5. A small bag left permanently packed. Autumn travel is short notice travel. The same four things in the same bag removes most of the friction, and the packing notes are largely an argument about which four.
6. One walk somewhere already known. Same street, different season. A familiar place in the second week of October is not the version anyone remembers from August, which is most of the pleasure of it. A single afternoon in London makes the point quickly.

None of these are ambitious and that is deliberate. A routine has to be small enough to happen on a bad week, because bad weeks are the ones that decide whether it lasts. Anything that requires a good mood, clear weather and a free evening will be gone by the middle of the month.

The other thing worth saying is that six is plenty. Adding a seventh is how a short list turns into a system, and a system is a thing to maintain rather than a thing to enjoy. Nicole Junkerman drops one from the list most years without much ceremony.

What they share is that each one improves the ordinary parts of a day rather than adding an occasion to it. October has a great many ordinary days in it, and improving them by a small margin turns out to matter more than any single good one. The notebook method keeps track of which ones held.

Explore more of the journal: Packing Notes and Travel Journal, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.

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