The habits you keep are the ones that need almost no effort. If posting means a fresh decision, a blank page and a hunt for what you wrote last time, it will slip. So the way to make it stick is to turn it into the easy default, where the routine runs with barely a thought.
The behavioural designer Nir Eyal describes how something earns a place in a person’s routine: a trigger, an easy first action, a small reward, then a little investment that draws them back (Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products). It is worth turning that on yourself. Give your own posting a clear trigger and an easy first step, and it stops being a chore you have to summon the will for.
New Year is the moment people rebuild their routines from scratch, which is why it is a good time to set this up. You can see this on the New Year run-up: become part of the new routine by making the first action easy and giving yourself a reason to come back to it.
So strip the effort out, piece by piece. Fix the trigger: the same day and time, tied to something you already do. Fix the shape: the same simple kind of post, so there is nothing to design. And keep your work in one place, so you are never starting from a blank page or scrolling back to find what you said before. When the next post is “the usual, on the usual day, building on what is already there”, you will do it without a fight.
Keeping your work in one place matters more than it sounds. Half the friction in posting is the faff around it, where is that photo, what did I write last time, what is coming up next. Put your saved posts and your plan somewhere you can open in a second, and the habit gets easier every week instead of harder, because you are always adding to something, never starting cold.
Reduce the choices, too. Every decision is a chance to stall. Decide once what your weekly post looks like and you remove a dozen little decisions from every week after. The goal is a routine so light that doing it is easier than skipping it, because skipping it would mean breaking a pattern that is now just how things are.
A takeaway owner might settle on one simple weekly move: a photo of the Friday special, posted every Thursday teatime, with the price on it. Same day, same shape, same spot. After a few weeks he is not deciding whether to post or what to post; he is just taking one photo he was practically taking anyway. That is what the easy default feels like: the habit almost runs itself.
A caution. Easy is the aim, but do not let the routine go stale or lazy. A habit that runs on autopilot can drift into the same dull post every week, which people tune out. Keep the shape simple, but keep the content real and current, this week’s actual photo, this week’s actual news. Effortless to make, still worth seeing.
The short version: you keep the habits that cost you nothing, so make posting cost you nothing. Fix the day, fix the shape, keep your work in one place, and cut out every needless decision. Build a routine so easy that it runs itself, and posting stops being a thing you have to remember and becomes a thing you just do.
Make the first post the one you can repeat. Open What should I post?, settle on a simple weekly shape, and each post you make is kept in one place, ready to build on the next week rather than starting from nothing.