Atomic Habits: A Book Review

Atomic Habits is a popular productivity book written by James Clear. It has sold more than 20 million copies all over the world and has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for over 260 weeks. As someone who has recently been trying to learn to play guitar, I decided to read Atomic Habits and see if it could help me integrate this new habit into my daily routine.

In Atomic Habits, Clear talks about how you can improve your consistency with your habits using 4 main rules: 

1. Make it obvious. 
2. Make it attractive. 
3. Make it easy. 
4. Make it satisfying. 

According to Clear, you can implement these 4 rules when creating habits to significantly increase productivity.

Let’s start with “make it obvious.” Making a habit obvious means you’ll be more likely to complete it consistently. There are quite a few ways to do this. For example, you can use implementation intentions, which are intentions you set for yourself when creating a habit. Clear provides an implementation intention template in his book, saying, “I will [Behaviour] at [Time] in [Location].”

Another way to make a habit obvious is by doing something Clear calls habit stacking. This is when you decide to do the habit you are trying to implement after a habit you already do consistently. This way, you’ll always remember to do your habit. 

When developing my practice routine for guitar, I habit stacked my practice with my arrival from school. Since I have school almost every day, habit stacking helped integrate practicing into my schedule in a way that felt natural and aligned with my pre-existing commitments.

The final strategy Clear suggests is to optimize your environment. By making your environment conducive to your habit, you are setting yourself up for success. For example, I decided to move by guitar out of my basement and into my bedroom. By doing so, I was optimizing my environment. Every time I went into my bedroom, I’d remember to play the guitar, which helped me consistently practice. Since I was practicing the guitar regularly, my skills steadily improved.  It was especially motivating to see my progress.

The next rule is to “make it attractive.” I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather complete a habit that I find cool than one I do not. Clear understands this and encourages you to capitalize on this when looking at your habits.

To make a habit attractive, he suggests using a technique called temptation bundling. This refers to grouping a habit that may be unpleasant with something you genuinely enjoy. For example, I hate running, but I love listening to podcasts. So, to make running more attractive to me, I would listen to podcasts. Temptation bundling reduced the mental friction I associated with running. After using this trick, I found myself running more frequently.

The other thing you can do is join a group that already practices your habit. Since humans are inherently social creatures, we try to mimic the habits of the people we surround ourselves with. So, by joining a group that practices the habits you want to start, you will encourage yourself to complete the habits you want to implement. Since I already play other instruments, I have quite a few friends who play the guitar. Using the “make it attractive” rule, I would often ask these friends to help me out when I was struggling with a guitar part. Seeing people play the guitar made the habit more attractive to me because I saw the progress I could make if I continued consistently practicing the guitar.

Next is the “make it easy” rule. To make a habit easier to start, a great trick James Clear mentions is the “2-minute rule.” Ideally, you should be able to complete your habit in two minutes or less. To do this, it is recommended you take your original goal and break it into smaller pieces until you are left with a two-minute chunk. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the “2-minute rule” makes it easy to complete your habits and often, you will find yourself wanting to continue with the habit long after your two minutes are up. 

I used the “2-minute rule” when playing guitar to encourage myself to practice more often. Since I regularly find myself struggling to start tasks, I found the “2-minute rule” incredibly helpful for finding the motivation to pick up my guitar, and I usually ended up playing for way longer than two minutes.

The last rule is to “make it satisfying.” Whether or not a habit is satisfying is the biggest indicator to whether or not we will do it. That’s why it’s so easy to complete bad habits that feel good and ignore good habits that don’t feel so good, even if we know which one will be better for us in the long run.

To make a habit satisfying, there are two main tricks Clear suggests using. The first one is positive reinforcement. Similar to temptation bundling, positive reinforcement is when you do something you enjoy to reinforce the habit as enjoyable in your brain. The difference between positive reinforcement and temptation bundling is that positive reinforce happens after you complete the habit and temptation bundling happens while you’re completing the habit.

The other way he suggests making a habit satisfying is by using a habit tracker of some sorts. By tracking your progress, you will create a streak that you won’t want to break and makes completing the habit more enjoyable.

When practicing guitar, I used a habit tracker to keep track of the time I spent playing. The habit tracker motivated me to practice because I wanted to continue my streak.

However, the one time I forgot to practice, I found it harder to return to the habit because I felt my streak, and thus my progress, had already been ruined. To combat this, I began tracking my practice times in a diary-style log. This helped me keep the satisfaction of the habit tracker, but with a more forgiving medium. 

Evidently, Atomic Habits is a great book packed with information to help you become more productive. In fact, I enjoyed the book so much that I signed up for Clear’s 3-2-1 Productivity Newsletter as soon as I finished reading. If you have a habit you have been struggling to implement into your routine, I’d recommend going to your local library and checking out Atomic Habits for a productive read.