Changing Your Life in Baby Steps: Summary & Review of Atomic Habits by James Clear

tl:dr summary of Atomic Habits by James Clear:

• Small, incremental changes in daily habits can lead to major results over time.

Okay, here’s a little more info:

• It’s a self-help book that teaches you how to change or start new habits in a way that is sustainable over time.

• Those changes are measurable!

• There’s a framework for creating good habits (and breaking bad ones!) based on four “laws”: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.

• It’s a long-term New York Times bestseller and it has been praised by both experts and readers.

Annnnd, even more info if you’d like some insight....

Why should you read this book? Not because I love it, but because of the idea of small incremental changes that you set into motion now having a big impact on your future self. These actions apply to all areas of your life, including career progression. You can be very systematic about habits or more relaxed, but as long as you are making progress, no matter the speed, you are making progress! The speed at which you make progress will change over your lifetime as well.

The more you can do while you are young and child-free, the better your foundation for the future. This uninterrupted time should be spent working on you. Of course we all have different pressures like illnesses and aging parents and family emergencies as life happens, but I would encourage you to focus on yourself and what you can change.

If you have children, all is not lost, you will just have a different rate of progress. You may have a different focus during their childhood as well. When my kids were little, I worked on my masters degree slowly because I could read while they were sleeping or in activities. As they got older, their needs changed and so my habits changed to be more flexible. Once they were teenagers, I could focus on career progression again and think about the steps that I needed to take to get to the next level.

And if you're in the anti-work category, maybe you want to use Clear’s philosophy to get better at something you really love, like rock climbing or painting. You can acknowledge that you’d like to work to live and develop yourself in other ways. You can be employed and leave the work at work and be just fine.

Clear has a very systematic way of making you think about the difference between goals and systems - which some people love and some people hate. People think, oh, I have to have a goal - what’s the point of life otherwise? The problem is that once you’ve hit that goal, what else is there? A set of habits - the system - will help you keep motivated long after the goal is met. Once you run that 10K are you going to quit running? Maybe the system should be set up so that you run another 0.1K each week or run it faster so that you are consistently running and not just getting some huge bucket-list accomplishment checked off.

Another section of the book spells out how to break bad habits, which I was wowed by. The way to do it is to run the habit in reverse! If only I could kick the sweet tooth….and make cookies unattractive.

Let’s talk about the book’s drawbacks for just a moment - sometimes the book seems too simplistic. One piece of advice is to not skip the habit twice - if you skip it once, you can recover, but if you skip twice, you’re doomed. I can vouch that keeping up with your habits is easier than trying to reinstate them, such as when you return from a vacation, for example. Also, at points, it can feel like the book’s advice is going too slow and you want to rush the process a bit to get there faster.

My advice is to let it sink in slowly. I decided to rearrange my bathroom drawer to get myself into a routine at bedtime - I’m always so distracted at bedtime and thinking about what I have to do the next day that I sometimes forget what I want that routine to look like. I bought dividers for my drawers and have only the things that I want in my routine in those drawers. I open the drawer and move from one divider to the next, doing the task.

Over time, I add things to the drawer, so once in a while I do a purge and, for example, move the two extra toothbrushes to another spot so that I just see the routine when I open the drawer and not the clutter. I’ve been doing this for a few years and my dentist is definitely happier.

When you’re using this for career progression, set some SMART goals for yourself and develop your system around those goals. If you would like to chat about what those pals might look like, send me a message at Deborah@ChimeraTQM.com and we can set up a quick call.