I’m normally somewhat sceptical of self-help guides as, while they often contain an interesting idea, meaningful exploration of this idea is usually not enough to fill a 200+ page book. Therefore, in order to please the publisher, you end up with somewhere in the region of 30% useful advice, and about 70% bullshit padding in order to meet a quota.
Atomic Habits bucks this trend in a pleasant way, sitting at a very trim size, easily manageable in just a few sittings if you’re a fast reader. It makes its points, and then getting out of the way to allow you to continue with life (as opposed to chewing through the latter half of 300 pages, vaguely hoping something useful may arise).
Synopsis
Unsurprisingly, Atomic Habits covers the ground of building habits to improve your life. Or, in its own words, it aims to provide:
An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones
In terms of whether it meets this ideal, I’d say it does a pretty good job overall. The book focuses on 4 key areas in the realm of habit building, and explores how you can use these tenets to help build your good habits, and inverting them to break your bad ones. You probably won’t find everything in here useful, but I certainly found several aspects that I’ve taken away with me, and have helped me bring some order to an otherwise chaotic existence.
Key Points
Notable ideas I’ve picked up and incorporated into my day-to-day:
- Habit Stacking: “After I do X, I will do Y”. Simple, but exceptionally useful for chaining together habits, and surprisingly good at ensuring you don’t forget the little things. I currently have stacks for:
- Morning routine
- Making tea
- Starting work (weekday)
- Lunchtime routine
- Finishing work (weekday)
- Evening routine
- Never miss a day twice: Surprisingly difficult to keep to without concious effort. But honestly I’ve lost count of the number of habits I’ve fallen out of because I let it slide for a couple of days…
- Use a habit tracker: I personally use the excellent Loop Habit Tracker (also on F-Droid) with reminders set to kick off my stacks
Conclusion
Overall, if you are like me and really struggle to build lasting healthy habits (indeed frequently finding yourself falling back into old routines), then I thoroughly recommend picking up a copy of Atomic Habits. it’s quite a light read and is bound to have at least something useful in there.