Recently, I was reading “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. Though I didn’t finish it yet, I had found some interesting points that I thought I should note. This is part 1 of my notes. I might make new parts to cover the rest of the books, along with any other books/videos on habits I find.

Let’s Jump Straight in:

  1. Schedule: When we decide to start a new habit, we usually either don’t schedule it at all. Or we select a very vague description on when we are going to do the habit. A better way to get into new habits, and maintain old ones, are to select when, where and how you are going to do a habit. For example, if you want to exercise every day, this is how you can go about it.

      When: I will exercise every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 30 mins, from 6:30PM to 7:00PM.

      Where: I will exercise at the gym, which is a 5 min walk from your home.

      How: To get there, I will set a reminder for 6:20PM to remind me to start from home for the gym. I will keep my gym bag ready the night before so I can directly pick the bag and head out for the gym.

  2. Friction: If you want to lose weight and have started a diet, to ensure that you stick you diet, you need to reduce friction for habits that help you maintain your diet and increase the friction for habits that break your diet.

    What does this mean?

    For example, if you want to stop watching a lot of TV, habits that can increase your friction to watching TV can be unplugging your TV after every TV-watching session. Maybe keep your remote inside a drawer in another room. These increase the friction to watch TV. So, each time you need to watch TV, you’ll need to get the Remote, plug in the TV and then watch. This makes it ever-so slightly harder to watch TV, and you are less likely to watch TV.

  3. Environment: Your Environment highly affects how you make decisions. If you are on a diet and want to avoid deserts, you can change your environment to have no deserts. This can be done by keeping your fridge deserts free, and not buying any deserts from outside. If you have no deserts at home, you are less likely to mindlessly eat deserts, unless you really want to have a desert.

  4. Systems: A quote from James Clear in this book that I really like is, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”. Why I like this quote is that usually everyone has the similar goals, but only few people achieve them. This is because, when you have just goals, you need to motivate yourself every day, at every instance you need to do a habit that takes you close to the goal. But when you have made a “System”, where you have set habits, which have clearly defined “Why”s, “Where”s, and “How”s, you are almost mindlessly doing the habits that get you closer to achieving the goal. You run on autopilot in the direction that takes you closer to your goals. Running on autopilot towards your goals is easier than having to spend your willpower multiple times every day, for years. Some days you might be highly motivated, some days with decent motivation and some days with no motivation. Systems get you through all these days easily, as opposed to using motivation to get through every day.

    A practical example on how this works instead of my abstract words can be brushing your teeth. You don’t need to motivate yourself to brush your teeth everyday morning. That’s because it’s a part of your system. So, brushing your teeth is going to happen every day, regardless of your motivation on that day.

Those were some interesting points I learned from the book. I’ll make more parts as soon as I have something that I can share.

I hope these points help you improve how you deal with habits!

- yash mouje.