The order runs from easy to irreversible: the first spot is a short walk, so the habit starts before it needs motivation, and each later step leans on a record the earlier ones produced. Rating only means something once you have two sunsets to compare, and inviting a friend only works once you know which spot earned the trip.
Step 1: Find your first west-facing spot
Distance is the quiet variable nobody plans for. A spot forty minutes away turns ten sunsets into ten errands, and by the third week the streak dies of logistics, not boredom. So start with the compass: west-facing, unobstructed horizon, ideally under a fifteen-minute walk. Walk your own neighborhood at 7pm and check rooftops, a pedestrian bridge, the far end of a park, a parking garage top deck. A sun-position app confirms which direction the sun actually drops for your latitude and month. The first spot does not need to be beautiful. It needs to be reachable on a Tuesday when you are tired and it is already 6:40. What kills this step is choosing the postcard view instead of the close one, then discovering the walk home in the dark is the part you dread.
Step 2: Watch one sunset with empty hands
Silence is the point of this one, and the phone is what breaks it. Arriving twenty minutes early matters more than staying late: the color happens in the ten minutes before the sun touches the horizon and the ten after, not at the instant of the dip. Check the exact sunset time, subtract twenty-five minutes, and treat that as your departure. Bring something to drink in a sealed cup, because holding a warm cup gives your hands a job and stops the reflexive reach for a screen. Leave the phone in a pocket, not a hand. Where people go wrong: they arrive at the printed sunset time, see a grey dimming, and conclude sunsets are overrated. They are not overrated. They were late.
Step 3: Score each spot like a critic
By now you have sat through two or three, which means there is finally a baseline to judge against; rating before that is just guessing. Score each new spot on five things: horizon line, seating, crowd, walk time, and afterglow, meaning how long the color lingers after the sun is gone. Keep it in a phone note or a small notebook, one line per visit. Example entry: 'Bridge, 8/10, traffic noise, but the water doubles the color and there is a railing to lean on.' The common skip is rotating spots at random with no record, so by sunset six every evening has blurred into every other evening and you cannot remember which park had the bench. The rating is what turns ten evenings into ten distinct ones.
Step 4: Share the one that won
One person, not a group. After rating, you know exactly which spot earned the invitation, and the whole point of this step is that you now hold an opinion worth sharing; that is the thing the previous evenings were building toward. Pick the top scorer. Give your friend the arrival time, not the sunset time, and say plainly that you will both be quiet for the middle twenty minutes. That one sentence prevents the awkwardness of two people narrating a sky. Bring the drink you brought before, and a second one for them. Where this falls apart: it becomes a hangout with five people and someone's speaker, and nobody faces west once. Two people watching the same thing without talking is a different experience from two people at a nice view.
Step 5: Turn ten sunsets into a record
Ten sunsets produce almost no memory unless you make an artifact, and a photo alone will not do it; you need the word. For each of the ten, keep exactly one photo and exactly one word. Not a caption, not a paragraph. 'Copper.' 'Drizzle.' 'Static.' 'Cheap beer.' The word should describe the evening rather than the sky, because the sky looked similar eight times and the evenings did not. Write each word the same night, since by morning it has evaporated. Print the photos small, a grid on one 4x6 sheet or a strip, and write the words beside them in pen. Waiting until sunset ten to compile everything is the failure mode here: you will have ten photos and no idea what any of them felt like.
A phone reminder for sunset number six vanishes the moment it is dismissed and leaves nothing behind. A paper strip taped by the door keeps getting shorter as each finished line is torn off, and it stays there until the tenth one is gone. Ten evenings, ten spots, one empty strip at the end.