Sharing: Atomic Habits

Background

Just yet another day. I was randomly watching videos on a channel dedicated to put translation subtitle on english videos. There was one vlog attracted my attention: a guy talked about how he stayed focus for studying 12 hours per day¹.

In the video, he mentioned a few books that he read and for sure, he mentioned this book Atomic Habits by James Clear. So I decided to get this book not long after that.

Why?
Because I was struggling to find a good way to cultivate good habits and eliminate those are bad. Recently, those bad habits have been hurting my daily life and kind of stopping me to live my life they way I wish.

If you wish to know my review for this book,
Long story short, it's indeed helpful to me.

Brief Intro

The author of book James listed out 4 necessary actions to successfully build a feedback loop that will in turn, build a habit. A handful of tricks are introduced to reader as well. They are:

And to break a bad habit, you do the opposite way:

James used 1 section to cover each law & inversion of it in depth & 1 for advanced topic.

Interesting Part

Environment Binding for a Habit

There is an interesting idea saying to cultivate a habit, you need to create an environment that can trigger it. And ideally, 1 environment should only cue 1 habit. For me, this is the difficult part due to the fact that I only live in a rented room, which means I don't have the luxury to just make the whole room specific for production work. After all, I still need a space to sleep.

And the book suggested an alternative way to do this, which is to segment the room into different space. Each space is dedicated for one purpose. For instance, sleeping area, bed, is only for sleeping. productivity area: space around my working desk is only for working & reading. I may create a coffee corner solely for brewing/drinking coffee if extra space is available.

Start with Small Step instead of Perfect Big Move

I'm something of a perfectionist myself.

In other words, I may spend unnecessary pain to achieve something with low ROI. Before I take action to do something & make it a habit, I always procastinate and plan in my heart multiple times in order to get it done perfectly at once. But over time, I may just forgot it in the end and never pull it off. There is 1 chapter in the Book covering this behaviour. The solution is quite simple: just do it first. And if it fails, learn from the mistake and redo it, and the cycle goes on & on until you really make it your habit. It is very unlikely that a habit that you are trying to cultivate can be done perfectly at the first time. So small & consistent moves are better than perfect big move.

Medium Difficulty Makes It a Good Spice to Stay Focus on Habit Building.

If the task you perform is very easy when you are building a habit, you are very likely to loss interest on continueing doing it. However, if it is too difficult, you will very likely feel defeated and stop doing as well. So a task not too difficult, not too easy is the good difficulty to make you feel interesting, and stay focus to practice more, which in the end may become a habit.

Mastery = Habit + Deliberate Practice

Once you cultivated a habit, you probably would stop paying attention to it. So you need to stay focus on what can be improved and do so. Thus in the long run, habit may become your mastered skill.

Add Cost to Cue for Bad Habit

Very often, my phone distracts me from staying focus on productive tasks. A nice way to avoid this is to make your phone far away from your productivity space. This adds difficulty for you to access to your phone, even it is barely few steps away. Nonetheless, the effectiveness is magical.

Conclusion

There are still lots of insightful ideas covered by the books and I don't want (& I am impossible) to mention all of them in this post. But I trully found this book helpful, and it did provide a handful of tricks to build habits effectively. If you find building habits or stopping bad habits are difficult, this book is definitly worth your bucks.