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Bondi Media

Atomic ⚛️ Habits

Talented Rach Smith has written about James Clear's influence on her personal and professional life changes through his book Atomic Habits. She describes it as good read that she put off implementing until motherhood made the basic premise of little daily habits more achievable than ‘going hard with discipline and willpower’ (which had worked for her previously). But this may not be right for everyone.

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Smith began her plan with: writing a journal, learning a language and meditation — committing to five minutes to her journal, two Duolingo lessons and five minutes of meditation each morning. Her language work has been consistent because she limits her study to two sessions only. She's dropped the mediation entirely (not working for her) and has added an evening journal session. She uses Notion for habit tracking but her daily data goes into Things which has an auto-repeat checklist. She's an extremely productive person …

Some days that looks like me tapping out very average prose on my phone while the baby feeds, but I have to do something. Little by little, the words add up to something worth sharing. Rach Smith.

For the record but, James Clear's a blogger who took it upon himself to write about productivity. By being regular in his writing he's been able to turn it into a book selling 15 million copies. Great — for him. But as with so many ‘self-help’ books it's basically just some self-evident generally helpful tips that could just as well be served from a blog post or two.

Clear's packaged his advice with pithy aphorisms surrounding each habit building up ‘fundamental units contributing to overall improvement’ which seems OK but there's little evidence it applies universally. His prime anecdote about British cycling improvements isn't so much about compound habitual improvements but, rather, lots of money and support for elite athletes.

You can't keep improving playing the harmonica at 1% per day … because at the end of a year, you're not 365 times better.

Clear also sees changing identity as being essential to change — you need to become the sort of person who does/is/uses x and by doing/being/using x you become that person … 🤔

The Four Stages of Habit

Following this (does Smith?) is self-supporting of the ‘new’ habit by being something obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. But, are the results that obvious? Does habit ‘stacking’ (where one completed habit cues the next) actually work? Scientific support varies greatly — but there's no real down-side because it's all low stakes stuff (minus the book's price 😜). And, let's face it, very little advice about anything in the world is original.