One day at a time

Friday, 7 p.m. Sixty tickets hang on the rail, two plates are going cold at the pass, and the dining room is full. Nobody in that kitchen is thinking about the fourth-quarter result, the supplier meeting in two weeks, or whether the restaurant will survive the winter. Everyone is thinking about the next ticket. After eleven years in UK hospitality, I have seen that this is exactly the state in which people work best: calm, fast, no wasted movement.

Then Monday arrives. The same person who ran Friday service like clockwork sits down with a twelve-month plan and cannot sleep. The kitchen did not break them. The year did.

This is a paradox I have watched for years: the more of the future you try to hold in your head at once, the less you can do today. The best answer to it was invented by people who could not plan even a week ahead. And that is precisely why it worked.

The beginnings

In 1935, in Akron, Ohio, two men, Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith, began talking about a problem no institution of the time knew how to handle. From those conversations grew the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, and in 1939 a book appeared that gave it its name (Alcoholics Anonymous, 2001). One of its most durable slogans became “one day at a time”.

Notice how cleverly it is built. For someone who has spent years listening to their own broken promises, eternity is an instrument of torture. “Never again” sounds noble and works like a weight that cannot be lifted. The slogan trades eternity for something smaller: twenty-four hours. Today I do not drink. Tomorrow I will ask again.

I am writing about this without labels and without stepping into anyone’s life. I am not an expert in addiction and will not pretend to be. What interests me is the construction itself: a strategy born in the hardest possible conditions, whose mechanics work far beyond their original context. I respect its source. I am borrowing this idea and, where relevant, being clear about its limitations.I am borrowing an idea and, where it matters, saying plainly where the it has its limitations.

Why the whole future paralyses

Psychology offers several explanations. 

Willpower as a resource

In 1998 Roy Baumeister and colleagues described a phenomenon they called ego depletion. Participants who sat in front of fresh-baked cookies and chocolates but were allowed to eat only radishes gave up sooner afterwards on an unsolvable puzzle (Baumeister et al., 1998). The conclusion was that self-control works like a muscle that tires with use. Applied to the future, the intuition is simple: if you are mentally settling accounts with a whole year of decisions, sacrifices and worries at once, you spend the resource that was meant to last you through today.

Stress weakens the part of the brain that plans

Here the foundations are firmer. Amy Arnsten of Yale has described how even mild, uncontrollable stress can rapidly weaken the prefrontal cortex, the region that handles planning, weighing options and inhibiting impulses (Arnsten, 2009). The meta-analysis by Shields, Sazma and Yonelinas (2016) shows the same on the behavioural side: acute stress impairs working memory and cognitive flexibility. Hence the trap every restaurant owner knows. A person who sees a whole year of bills ahead can be unable to write tomorrow’s rota. That is not laziness. Exactly where they need planning at its sharpest, they have it at its weakest.

A too-dark forecast

The third mechanism concerns how we imagine the future. Wilson and Gilbert (2005) show that people systematically overestimate the intensity and duration of their future emotions, especially negative ones. We paint the year ahead in colours that are too dark. Watkins (2008) adds a distinction I find the most useful when working with leaders: repetitive thinking about problems can be constructive when it is concrete and process-focused, and unproductive when it is abstract and circles around the question “why”. “What will happen in a year?” almost always belongs to the second kind. “What do I do until the end of this shift?” almost always belongs to the first.

To get the future in order, you need exactly the abilities that fear of the future weakens first.

The day as a unit of strategy

Karl Weick argued as early as 1984 that problems framed on an enormous scale often paralyse, because they exceed human cognitive limits and push arousal to levels at which we stop functioning well (Weick, 1984). His proposal was a strategy of small wins: concrete, completed outcomes of moderate importance that build into a pattern. It reads like a scientific commentary on the Akron slogan, written half a century later from a completely different direction.

The slogan alone, though, is only a resolution, and resolutions fail most often at the moment you have to start. That is why it helps to give them the form of an “if–then” plan. Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) pooled 94 independent tests and found a medium-to-large effect of such plans on goal attainment (d = 0.65). Not “I will try to stay calm on Friday”, but “if the tickets start to pile up, I take one deep breath and sort them oldest first”.

Seneca wrote in the first of his letters to Lucilius a sentence that sits at the root of this approach: omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est, that is, everything, Lucilius, belongs to others; only time is ours (Seneca, 2015). It is worth reading on, because the same letter does not comfort us that nobody can take our time. It warns that we give it away most easily, because we do not count it as carefully as money. A day is the smallest unit of time you can genuinely guard.

Impact on leadership

Leaders in restaurants often make the opposite mistake to paralysis: they pass their own horizon on to the team. A cook on the line does not need to know that winter will be hard. They need to know what must be ready by noon and what a job done well looks like. A leader’s task is to translate the horizon into the language of the day.

A team told “we must improve this year” hears noise. A team told “today every plate leaves in under twelve minutes” hears a task that can be done, and seen to be done. This is not about hiding the truth. Tell the team how things really are, then give them something they can do today.

There is a personal side too. If you are carrying the whole year yourself, you have nothing left to run the briefing with, and the team can see it. To be honest: this is a conclusion from my own practice in kitchens and dining rooms, not a research finding.

The restaurant realm

Five habits to implemenet the strategy:

• The pre-shift briefing. One thing that must go right today. Not five. Say it out loud.

• Mise en place for the mind. Ten minutes in the evening to prepare tomorrow: the rota, the orders, one difficult conversation. Then stop. The rest of tomorrow can wait for tomorrow.

• Today’s numbers, not the quarter’s. Sales, food cost, labour hours from a single shift. You can see one day’s data and react to it. A quarter is already a memory.

• An “if–then” plan for the typical crisis. If someone does not turn up for a shift, I call two people from the reserve list. You made the decision earlier, while your head was cool.

• Closing the day. Three sentences: what went well, what I carry over, what I let go. A day should have an end.

Critical evaluation

Ego depletion is now a contested theory. A multi-lab, preregistered replication across 23 laboratories and over two thousand participants found no significant effect (d = 0.04; Hagger et al., 2016). A further project, in 36 laboratories with more than 3,500 people, also failed to confirm it in the preregistered analyses (d = 0.06; Vohs et al., 2021). Earlier, Carter and colleagues (2015) pointed to publication bias in the original literature. Defenders of the theory disagree and challenge how studies were selected for that analysis (Cunningham & Baumeister, 2016), so the dispute continues. In the exploratory part, only participants who reported fatigue showed a larger effect (Vohs et al., 2021). So I treat Baumeister as an intuition and a metaphor, not a pillar.

Stress research speaks about the laboratory, not about a strategy of days. Shields and colleagues examined mainly acute stress, because manipulating chronic stress is difficult and often unethical. Effects also depend on the type of task and on other variables, such as sex. As far as I know, nobody has directly tested whether dividing time into days reduces paralysis. That is my inference from mechanisms, not an experimental result.

A day is not a horizon. The most serious risk of this strategy is short-sightedness. A venue where nobody looks at seasonality, supplier commitments and cash reserves will get into trouble even if every single day was “well lived”. A good leader holds the horizon but does not live in it: plan once, in a calm moment, then act at the scale of a day.

An analogy is not proof. The strongest data on the effectiveness of the AA approach come from a Cochrane review (Kelly et al., 2020). It found that structured, clinically delivered twelve-step facilitation programmes produce higher rates of continuous abstinence than other established treatments, while non-manualised programmes perform comparably. That does not show that the slogan “one day at a time” is what drives the effect, or that it will transfer to running a restaurant. I treat it as a borrowed construction, not as a research result.

The limit of application. If this text touches you personally, it is no substitute for talking to a specialist. I borrow a method; I am not treating anyone.

Conclusion

Back to Friday, 7 p.m. The person on the line is no better than the person with the Monday spreadsheet. The difference is the scale at which they were told to think. The future still matters. It stops being the unit in which you make commitments. You may have a plan for the year. Your commitment is for today.

What one thing must go right for you today? Write it on a slip of paper before your shift starts.

References

• Alcoholics Anonymous. (2001). Alcoholics Anonymous: The story of how many thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism (4th ed.). Alcoholics Anonymous World Services.

• Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648

• Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252

• Carter, E. C., Kofler, L. M., Forster, D. E., & McCullough, M. E. (2015). A series of meta-analytic tests of the depletion effect: Self-control does not seem to rely on a limited resource. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(4), 796–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000083

• Cunningham, M. R., & Baumeister, R. F. (2016). How to make nothing out of something: Analyses of the impact of study sampling and statistical interpretation in misleading meta-analytic conclusions. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 1639. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01639

• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

• Hagger, M. S., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D., Alberts, H., Anggono, C. O., Batailler, C., Birt, A. R., Brand, R., Brandt, M. J., Brewer, G., Bruyneel, S., Calvillo, D. P., Campbell, W. K., Cannon, P. R., Carlucci, M., Carruth, N. P., Cheung, T., Crowell, A., De Ridder, D. T. D., Dewitte, S., . . . Zwienenberg, M. (2016). A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 546–573. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616652873

• Kelly, J. F., Humphreys, K., & Ferri, M. (2020). Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs for alcohol use disorder. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2020(3), Article CD012880. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012880.pub2

• Seneca. (2015). Letters on ethics: To Lucilius (M. Graver & A. A. Long, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published ca. 65 CE)

• Shields, G. S., Sazma, M. A., & Yonelinas, A. P. (2016). The effects of acute stress on core executive functions: A meta-analysis and comparison with cortisol. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 68, 651–668. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.06.038

• Vohs, K. D., Schmeichel, B. J., Lohmann, S., Gronau, Q. F., Finley, A. J., Ainsworth, S. E., Alquist, J. L., Baker, M. D., Brizi, A., Bunyi, A., Butschek, G. J., Campbell, C., Capaldi, J., Cau, C., Chambers, H., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D., Christensen, W. J., Clay, S. L., Curtis, J., . . . Albarracín, D. (2021). A multisite preregistered paradigmatic test of the ego-depletion effect. Psychological Science, 32(10), 1566–1581. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621989733

• Watkins, E. R. (2008). Constructive and unconstructive repetitive thought. Psychological Bulletin, 134(2), 163–206. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.2.163

• Weick, K. E. (1984). Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40–49.

• Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131–134.

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