Atomic Habits The 1st Law - Make It Obvious
Habit Scorecard
When you have some time today, I encourage you to sit down and write out a list of your daily activities and then score them. Once you have your full list, look at each behavior and ask yourself "is this a good habit, bad habit, or neutral habit?"
Place a (+) beside good habits, (-) beside bad habits, ( = ) beside neutral habits. See below for example.
Wake up =
Turn off alarm =
Check my phone -
Go to the bathroom =
Brush my teeth +
Take a shower +
and so on
When judging your habits, decide if they are effective for you goals and in the long run. Those that push you away from your goals are considered bad and those that are ineffective are considered neutral. This all depends on what YOUR goals are so judge them accordingly.
Does this behavior help me to become the type of person I wish to be?
Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?
All you do now is just look over your habits and rankings and make sure that you are aware of how you are spending your time.
Make it obvious
Chapter 4 The Man Who Didn’t Look Right
The human brain is a prediction machine. After several times of dealing with the same situation, your brain begins to recognize the cues without you even realizing it and pulls information from the catalog of analyzed cues, allowing you to be aware of your surroundings. You then begin to predict certain outcomes through the learned experience of your catalogued cues.
Examples:
Museum curators who can tell the difference between authentic and counterfeit pieces of art, but not being able to tell you the exact differences in the details they notice.
Paramedics who recognize a health issue by the pattern of distribution of blood in the face.
Military analyst who can identify which blip on the radar screen is an enemy missile and which is a plane from their own fleet.
Hairdresser who can tell if a client is pregnant by the feel of her hair.
It’s a lot like intuition. Our brains are trained to notice these things after a while even if you cannot entirely explain why you came to whatever conclusion you have, similar to mothers knowing when their baby/child is going to be sick.
Our brains are constantly learning and we do not need to be aware of the cue for the habit to begin.
Awareness is necessary to begin the process of habit change.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” -Carl Jung
Pointing-and-Calling: safety system designed to reduce mistakes, think of “All Clear” being called out before a train leaves the station. Once we perform a habit so many times, our awareness decreases and we’re able to stop paying attention, but sometimes that results in forgetfulness and not being careful.
This is especially true with bad habits like eating chocolates everyday when you are trying to lose weight. Eating chocolates pushes you further away from your goal, but sometimes this happens without us being aware. Increasing awareness can help us drop our bad habits.
Chapter 5 The Best Way to Start a New Habit
The most practical way to make it obvious is to use strategies like implementation intentions and habit stacking. Design a clear plan for when and where habit will occur.
During an exercise study by researchers in Great Britain, three groups were tested. Group 1 was to track how often they exercised. Group 2 was to do the same, but was also given motivational materials to aid in their desire to exercise. Group 3 was given the same as Group 2, however, they were also asked to formulate a plan for exercise.
The results: Group 1 and 2 only had a 35-38% success rate, motivation did not help. In Group 3, 91% of the participants exercised once per week. The success is more than double because they created a plan.
Implementation Intention: plan made beforehand about when and where to act; how you intend to implement a new habit.
Formula: When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.
I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
ex. I will do yoga at 9am in my living room.
You are more likely to follow through with your plan because you have clarity. Try beginning this the first day of the week or month, there tends to be more hope and with more hope comes more reason to take action.
Being specific also helps you to say no to any behaviors that will distract you or pull you off course.
BJ Fogg Habit-Stacking
No behavior occurs in isolation; each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.
Diderot Effect: obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases (ex. You find a pretty new dress, but now you need new shoes and earrings to match.) Habit Stacking is a positive form of Diderot.
Habit-Stacking: special form of implementation intention; pairing your habit with a current habit. Time and location is implicitly built into this system because it depends of the habit you attach it to, and your cue should have the same frequency as your desired habit (ex. If you want to do a habit every day, don’t attach it to a habit that only occurs on Monday.) This method works best when cue is extremely specific and immediately actionable.
Habit-Stacking Formula
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].
ex. After I turn the stove on to boil my water for tea, I will pick out my clothes for the next day.
Chapter 6 Motivation is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More
Be the architect of your environment, not the victim.
Designing your environment is one of the biggest factors in habit forming. People choose things not because of what they are, but mostly because of where they are, for example, choosing bottled water over a soda because of the several locations around the store of the bottled water. Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. (ex. 45% of Coca-Cola sales come from end-caps on aisles. Almost half of the sales are due to the easy-to-see and accessible location.
Therefore, if you want to make a habit a larger part of your life, form your environment to do so by making the cue a part of your environment. It’s easy to not read if the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room, and it’s easy to not eat your fruits if they are hidden in the bottom drawer of the fridge.
Think of your objects or furniture as a relationship rather than “things”. The relationship you have with your couch could either be the place you sit to read a book after work, or the place you sit to watch tv and eat ice cream after work. Your mind will subconsciously desire these behaviors when you sit on your couch because you have trained yourself to your environment.
Context is key in this. “One space, one use.” Use your dining room table only for eating and your bed only for sleeping (this is a big one for me. Since dorm-living, I have made it a point to not do any homework/work on my bed so that my mind knows that bed is for sleep.)
Every habit should have a home and in creating this for yourself, your habits will thrive due to the predictability.
Chapter 7 The Secret to Self-Control
False idea: Discipline will solve all of our problems.
Disciplined people live in a way that does not require a lot of willpower and self-control. They have designed their life in a way that does not involve temptations, thus they actually use self-control the least.
Bad Habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. (ex. Watching tv makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more tv because you do not have the energy to do anything else.) This is a downward spiral that we can get rid of by taking away the temptation.
Cue-Induced Wanting: an external trigger that causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit.
You can break a habit, but you probably will not forget it. In order to stick to positive habits, you must remove the negative environment. Do you want to eat healthier? Do not buy that pack of cookies at the grocery store. Remove your temptation.
Inversion of the 1st law (make it obvious) is to make it invisible.
The secret to self-control: Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.
*this summary is based on the writings in the Atomic Habits book by James Clear. I am not the owner of this summary and do not take credit for the ideas and writings in this post.
For more info, visit the Atomic Habits Website.