Why I wanted to read this book
I once read or heard that a productive life is built upon a foundation of good habits. I wanted to review my own habits and determine which habits are good and which ones are bad. Naturally, my goal is to eliminate the bad and foster the good habits, and I use this book as a guidance on how to do that.
Summary
For those who are familiar with the book The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, this book is still relevant. Atomic Habits builds upon the theory provided by Charles Duhigg but adds a practical twist to it.
At the foundation of any habit is a feedback loop, consisting of a cue, a craving, a response, and a reward. To build a new habit or to break a bad one, James Clear provides clear (pun intended) strategies and tactics.
Sharing a few nuggets here:
Boil down new habits to actions that can be completed in 2 minutes, just to get you started. Build from there.
Stack habits. The reward from the first habit will be the cue for the second habit. There's no stopping you if you apply this!
Eliminate any friction between you and your new habit. People choose the path of least resistance by default.
Find an accountability partner to help you keep momentum with your new habit or breaking a bad habit.
Implementation
I built my evening and morning routine on habits, and I track them every day. Whenever I complete a habit I mark it with an X, which also motivates me to keep the streak going.
I make sure that my habits are not time-consuming to keep myself motivated to carry them out. At some point I had ‘grown' my meditation muscle to 20 minutes, but I noticed that sitting down for 20 minutes - even though I enjoy meditating - was too big a hurdle for me and I stopped meditating altogether. Thinking back to this book, I decided to bring back down my intended meditation time to 10 minutes, and now I meditate daily again. It’s more important to me that I meditate consistently rather than for long durations.
I have started making a list of my daily habits. The goal is to determine for each habit whether it is positive, negative, or neutral, and to determine what changes I need to make. Curious to the result? Read on here.
While making my daily habits list, I became more aware of all my actions throughout the day. This is how I noticed that I grab my phone at seemingly random times. I switched off all notifications a long time ago so that my phone never triggers me unless I receive a phone call, so I was puzzled to what triggered me in all those random times. I paid more attention to the cues at which I reached for my phone, and realized that I was delaying executing the task at hand. In other words, I used my phone as a means for procrastination. In this post, I describe how I deal with procrastination.
תגובות