Atomic Habits provides a proven framework for personal and professional growth through the establishment of effective habits. By focusing on the compounding effects of small, continuous improvements, the book equips readers with strategies for creating positive habits and breaking negative ones. For instance, it emphasizes making good habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying, while conversely, breaking bad habits involves making them invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying. Key Takeaways: - Creating Good Habits: - Make it obvious: Optimize your environment to trigger habits unconsciously. - Make it attractive: Use rewards and pair habits with enjoyable activities. - Make it easy: Reduce barriers to starting the habit. - Make it satisfying: Reward yourself and track progress for motivation. - Breaking Bad Habits: - Make it invisible: Hide cues that trigger bad habits. - Make it unattractive: Reflect on how bad habits detract from goals. - Make it difficult: Increase friction to discourage starting bad habits. - Make it unsatisfying: Create accountability and impose costs for bad habits.
"Atomic Habits" is crucial for Engineering Leaders as it provides a framework for fostering continuous improvement within their teams, helping them establish effective habits that enhance productivity and collaboration. A key actionable takeaway is to "Make it obvious" by optimizing team environments to encourage desired behaviors and diminish distractions.
What it is about?
Atomic Habits is the definitive toolkit that gives you a framework for growth on your personal or professional life by thanks to a continuous improvement system by setting in place the right habits that will lead you to achieve your goals.
Source: jamesclear.com/atomic-habits
What are the key take aways?
The compounding effects of small and continuous improvements is one of the main takeaways from the book. The book gives you a framework not only for creating good habits but also for breaking bad ones as two faces of the same coin.
Creating a good habit:
- Make it obvious: Make your habit trigger unconsciously, optimise your environment so the habit is obvious for you to do it.
- Make it attractive: Make your habit rewarding, use the gratification of completing the task to motivate you to keep doing it. Bundle the habit with another satisfying activity.
- Make it easy: Reduce as much as possible the friction that makes you start the habit, once you have started you have achieved the most difficult part and you will likely continue.
- Make it satisfying: Reward yourself for completing your task, make sure the reward is aligned with your long term goal. Track your progress, the fact of visualising your streak gives triggers the satisfaction of achievement. Don’t break the chain.
Breaking a bad habit:
- Make it invisible: Make it difficult to start a bad habit, hide the cues that trigger them (e.g: uninstall your most used social network app)
- Make it unattractive: Do the exercise of how the habit is pushing you away from your goal.
- Make it difficult: Add as much friction as possible, add barriers so the lazy in you will skip the habit
- Make it unsatisfying: Make yourself accountable for doing it, add a painful cost so you think twice before falling into the bad habit.
Extra:
Here is also a really great video summary of the book