Five Things to Make in November That Nobody Needs to See

There's a specific week in early November where the whole country seems to collectively deflate. Bonfire Night is over, the Christmas adverts have started creeping in, and it's pitch dark by the time you leave the office. Every year I convince myself this is the bit where I get loads done, and every year I spend it eating toast in a blanket and watching videos about people restoring canal boats.

So this year I've stopped trying to be productive in November. Instead I've got five small things I do, none of which take more than about half an hour, none of which require a trip to Hobbycraft, and none of which have to be any good. They're not tasks. They're more like ways of keeping the creative bit of my brain warm until the light comes back.

The rules I set myself first

Nothing new bought. Nothing that needs a finished result. Nothing that goes online unless I actively want it to. And if I skip a day, I've not failed — I've just skipped a day. That last rule is the one that makes the whole thing work, because the moment these turn into a streak, they become a chore, and I'll abandon them by the 14th.

Also: keep everything in one place. I've got a battered A5 notebook that lives on the kitchen table from November to February and gets used for all of it. One notebook means no big decisions about where to start.

1. The one-page field guide

Pick somewhere within ten minutes of your front door. A stretch of canal, a park, a street, the alley behind the retail park. Then make a single-page guide to it — A4, one side, no more — as if you were writing it for someone who'd just moved in.

I did our local rec last year. Things that ended up on it: the bench that's always in the sun at 11am, the corner where the ground floods, the two trees that drop conkers about a fortnight before the others, the owner of the terrier who'll talk to anyone. It's a completely useless document and I'm slightly in love with it. It's the opposite of a guidebook, because nobody's ever going to publish it. That's what makes it easy to finish.

2. The five-minute audio diary

Voice notes, phone, same time each evening. Five minutes maximum, no editing, no script. Talk about what you saw, what annoyed you, one thing you noticed. That's it.

I started doing this because I wanted to catch ideas before they evaporated, but the actual benefit turned out to be different. After about a week you start hearing what you're genuinely interested in, because it's the thing you keep going back to when nobody's giving you a prompt. Also, the sound of your own voice stops being weird after day four. Mostly. I still delete about a third of them out of sheer embarrassment, which I think is allowed.

The only rule: don't listen back for at least a fortnight. Listening back immediately turns it into content and you'll start performing.

3. The one-colour walk

Twenty minutes, one constraint. Everything you notice or photograph has to share a single attribute. One colour, one shape, one kind of object — doorways, signs, bins, things that are rusting.

I did a red walk in the rain last week and came home with about fourteen photos of a very specific shade of faded postbox red, including a car, a fire hydrant and someone's front door. It's an excuse to look properly at a street you've walked down four hundred times. The constraint does all the work — you don't have to be inspired, you just have to be looking for red.

4. The single-sheet zine

One sheet of A4, folded into eight pages, filled in with a biro in under half an hour, then stapled. That's the whole project. Copy it on the office printer if you're allowed, or at a library, and give it to exactly one person.

The point is the deadline and the smallness. Eight tiny pages is not intimidating. It's the perfect size for something that has no ambition beyond existing. My best one so far was called Things I Have Said to the Cat This Week and it had a print run of one. My mum has it on her fridge.

5. Twenty minutes with the stalled thing

This is the one I'd recommend to anybody. Go and find the project you abandoned in, say, March. The half-finished thing in a folder or on a shelf or in the back of the notebook. Set a timer for twenty minutes and just touch it. Not finish it. Touch it.

Open the file. Read the first page. Re-tape the corner that's coming away. Add one line. That's it. More often than not, twenty minutes is enough to remind you why you started it and you'll go back the next day without any drama. And if you don't, fine — you've lost twenty minutes and you've stopped feeling guilty about something that's been quietly nagging at you since Easter.

Don't turn it into homework

Here's the trap. You do three of these in a week, feel brilliant, decide to formalise it, make a spreadsheet, set targets, and by 20 November you're three days behind and you've ruined it.

So: no tracking, no posting schedule, no turning any of it into a series. If you only do one of these five, once, in the entire month, that still counts. November's job is to get you to February with your enthusiasm intact. Everything else is a bonus.

And if you do nothing at all except eat toast in a blanket, that's also a legitimate response to the British winter. I'll probably see you in there.