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Out the door before coffee cools — a walk short enough that skipping it feels sillier than doing it.
The walk is deliberately short: ten minutes, one loop, no headphones the first week. Long enough to see the sky and feel the temperature, short enough that there is never a good excuse.
The surprise was not energy or step counts. It was that the day gained a clean starting line — a firm boundary between sleep and work that used to blur together at a desk. Rainy days counted too, with a jacket; missing a day made the next one harder, so the streak became its own reason.
Start smaller than feels reasonable: to the corner and back counts. The habit is the leaving, not the distance.