Achieving Excellent Results

1. Mastery Requires Patience: James Clear emphasizes that achieving greatness requires patience and persistence. ‘The process’ of mastering small habits that lead to profound results is not immediate but gradual.
2. Use the Goldilocks Rule: The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right. This balance keeps tasks engaging and challenging enough to maintain interest without causing burnout or discouragement.
3. The Two-Minute Rule for New Habits: To make new habits stick, start by making them incredibly easy to do. The two-minute rule focuses on starting a new habit in a way that can be done in two minutes or less. The idea is that once you start doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it.
4. Focus on Identity-Based Habits: Build habits that are outcome-based and rooted in your identity. This means cultivating practices that reflect who you want to become, not just what you want to achieve.
5. Leverage the Power of Environment: Design your environment to make good habits more automatic and bad habits challenging to engage in. This might involve physical rearrangements of your space or changing your digital environments to reduce distractions and encourage productivity.
6. Reflect and Review: Regular reflection on your habits and systems allows you to fine-tune and adjust your approaches based on what is working or not. This helps maintain flexibility and responsiveness to change, essential for continuous improvement.

Everything Good Starts Small

The problem with everything good is that it happens from many small things. When folks tell their story, they tend not to talk about the process. They talk about results. And, we often only hear from winners. Only one person wins a gold medal. So, that person has it all figured out, while the rest are just bums with inferior systems. We believe in the romantic notion that inspiration is divine, creativity is not understood and only happens for those who are blessed, and all success happens overnight. To level up, you have to have the other levels.

Drive your satisfaction from the levels.

Final Check In

What habit did you select to focus on over the past six weeks? Did you keep up? What have you learned from the experience?

What does satisfying mean (in this context)?

“Satisfying” refers to the emotional payoff or pleasure we experience immediately after performing a habit. This satisfaction is crucial because it taps into the brain’s reward system, which helps to reinforce the habit, making it more likely to be repeated in the future. It’s a trick, but we are “trickable”. Our brains can know it’s a trick, and we still release dopamine. I get a lot of pleasure from finishing a blog post and hitting the big Publish button in WordPress.” I celebrate it with a listen to my favorite song from Filter.

The Fourth Law of Atomic Habits: Make it Satisfying

The fourth law is centered on the idea that people are more likely to repeat a behavior if they feel a sense of immediate satisfaction after completing it. This law taps into the human brain’s reward system, encouraging habits by making them enjoyable or short-term rewards.

1. Using a habit tracker: This provides visual proof of your achievements, which can be inherently satisfying.
2. Creating a loyalty system for yourself: Rewards after completing certain milestones can boost the gratification derived from a task.
3. Making the benefits of good habits feel immediate: Even if the actual benefits take time to manifest, creating little immediate rewards can help reinforce the habit.

These strategies aim to leverage positive feelings and rewards to cement habits more firmly, countering the natural human tendency to prioritize immediate returns over long-term benefits.

Habit Tracker

Here’s a template that I use to track habits.

I like to use pencils and paper to track my progress. I grab my trusty Peper Mate SHARPWRITER #2 pencil and circle the month, write in the habit on the left, and fill in the dot as the month progresses. Ultimately, you have something physical and can clearly see when you miss a day. When you miss multiple days, the habit tracker smacks you in the face with that information. A trick to make it satisfying is to get some joy out of seeing unbroken chains. This is known as the mythical Seinfeld Method, which is not entirely true but a good story. Jerry has been reported to write jokes every day and actively tracks his streaks.

There are even more sophisticated habit trackers out there—ones with buttons, lights, switches, and flaps. Go for it if they will bring you joy. I can easily slip into being a gearhead, so I have learned to use what I have now and get joy out of using primitive tools. For me, it is an excuse to start when the thing arrives from Amazon instead of right now.

Checking In

How long can you go?

In the first part, the book focuses on why habits form, break, and significantly impact your life. In the second part, we get to work by becoming aware of habits and cues. Then, we must find a way to make habits attractive. Now, how do we make habits easier? The book offers what it means by easier and how to do it. I will share some notes and some of my strategies.

The “Make It Easy” law is about reducing friction to make good habits easier to adopt and bad habits harder to follow. This law is based on the principle that human behavior tends to follow the path of least resistance. The easier it is to do something, the more likely it is to become a habit.

‘Easy’ could mean…

• Low Effort: Actions that require minimal physical or mental effort to initiate and complete. The easier a task is to start, the more likely it is to be done. For example, reading one page of a book each night before bed is considered an easy task that can lead to the habit of reading regularly.
• Simplicity: A straightforward and uncomplicated habit is more likely to be adopted and sustained. Complex routines requiring multiple steps or conditions to be met can be discouraging and more challenging.
• Reduced Friction: Minimizing the obstacles or barriers to performing a habit. This could involve physical setup (like having your gym clothes ready if you plan to work out) or removing distractions that might deter you from a productive habit (like turning off notifications on your phone to focus on work).
• Convenience: The habit should fit seamlessly into your life or routine. The more convenient a habit is, the less resistance you’ll feel towards doing it. Placing a water bottle at your desk to stay hydrated or having a fruit bowl visible in the kitchen to encourage healthy snacking are examples of making habits convenient.
• Accessibility: Making the tools or elements you need to perform the habit readily available. For instance, if your goal is to play guitar daily, keeping the guitar in a stand in the living room rather than tucked away in its case makes it more accessible and thus easier to pick up and play.

“Easy” (in this context) means designing habits so that starting and continuing them requires the least resistance.

So, how do you make it easy?

1. Reduce Friction: Identify the steps involved in your habit and find ways to simplify them. The goal is to reduce the number of obstacles between you and your desired behavior. For example, if you want to exercise in the morning, prepare your workout clothes and gear the night before.
2. Environment Design: Optimize your environment to make good habits easier and bad habits harder. This could mean placing a water pitcher on your desk if you’re trying to drink more water or removing junk food from your home if you’re trying to eat healthier.
3. The Two-Minute Rule: To make a habit easy to start, focus on the first two minutes of the behavior. Break down your habits into actions that can be done in two minutes or less. The idea is not to complete the entire task in two minutes but to make the starting point as simple as possible.
4. Automation: Use technology or services to automate your habits where possible. Automation can take the effort out of good habits by making the desired action the default option. For instance, setting up automatic transfers to your savings account can help with financial goals.
5. Habit Shaping: This involves gradually increasing the complexity and duration of your habit as it becomes more ingrained. Start with an incredibly easy version of the habit and slowly build upon it. This approach can help you maintain momentum and avoid burnout.
6. Use Commitment Devices: Commitment devices can help you stick to your habits by adding a layer of external accountability. For example, signing up for a class with a friend can increase your commitment to exercising.

The Two-Minute Rule

My biggest takeaway is the Two-Minute Rule. Of course, I looked for a two-minute video to help me with the two-minute rule. The video, however, was 2 minutes and 37 seconds. I guess the trick worked and got me to focus for a little more time

The Two-Minute Rule from “Getting Things Done” by David Allen

In David Allen’s productivity system, the two-minute rule is a practical guideline for managing tasks efficiently. The essence is simple: if you encounter a task that can be completed in two minutes or less, do it immediately.

• Immediate Action: It reduces procrastination by encouraging instant action on small tasks.
• Clears Mental Clutter: Completing the task immediately helps clear your mind, reducing the cognitive load of remembering to do it later.
• Efficiency: Often, the effort to record, track, and revisit a minor task exceeds the effort of just completing it. This rule keeps your to-do list more manageable and focused on larger, more time-consuming tasks.

The Two-Minute Rule from “Atomic Habits” by James Clear

James Clear’s adaptation of the two-minute rule in “Atomic Habits” focuses on habit formation rather than task management. Here, the rule is designed to lower the barrier to entry for starting new habits by committing to just two minutes of the desired activity.

• Overcoming Initial Resistance: The most challenging part of any task is often just starting. Committing to only two minutes significantly reduces the mental barrier to the beginning.
• Building Consistency: It emphasizes the importance of consistency over intensity at the beginning of forming a new habit. It’s easier to increase the duration of an activity once the habit is established than to start with a high level of intensity.
• Catalyzing Longer Sessions: Often, you’ll find it easier to continue beyond the initial two minutes, leading to more meaningful engagement with the task or habit.

My Trick: Take Care of ‘Future You’

‘Future You’ is the you that exists moments from now, tomorrow, or years from now. Future You will forget about the book your reading now. Future You will not remember what lightbulb type is in your dining room. Future You might be disappointed that it didn’t run a 5k. So, do things for Future You. Take care of Future You. This is why I take notes. I am leaving clues for the future version of me. I get my outfit ready at night for tomorrow’s me. That me that’s tired and has a big day. Today me has a little energy left. Today me can anticipate what tomorrow’s me might need.

Checking In

What are you doing to take care of Future You?

In the first part, the book focuses on why habits form, break, and significantly impact your life. In the second part, we get to work by becoming aware of habits and cues. Now, we must find a way to make the habits more attractive. Here are my notes and takeaways.

Anticipation of Reward

Habits are easier to adopt if they are attractive. Anticipation of reward drives us to act. The greater the anticipation, the greater the reward.

Consider the habit of exercising daily. Expecting rewards like improved health, better mood, and physical appearance can make this habit more attractive. For instance, envisioning yourself completing a marathon or achieving a personal fitness goal can amplify the anticipation, making lacing up your sneakers and heading out the door much more appealing.

Temptation Bundling

Temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with the action you need to do.

If you love listening to audiobooks but struggle to find time to work out, combine these activities. Only allow yourself to listen to your audiobook while exercising. This way, the desire to see what happens next in your book propels you to hit the treadmill, effectively bundling a want (listening to the audiobook) with a need (exercising).

Imitation of Social Groups

We tend to imitate three social groups: the close, the many, and the powerful. If a behavior gets us approval, respect, and praise, we will find it attractive.

If you’re trying to adopt a plant-based diet and you see that your close friends (the close), a majority of people in your social media circles (the many), and celebrities or influencers you admire (the powerful) are all praising and adopting this lifestyle, you’re more likely to find it attractive and worth pursuing.

Joining a Culture

To build a habit, join a culture where your desired behavior is expected.

If you want to make reading a habit, join book clubs or online communities where reading regularly is the norm. Being part of a group where members share book recommendations, discuss their readings, and celebrate the completion of books provides motivation and makes the habit of reading regularly more attractive and normal.

Highlighting Benefits of Avoiding Bad Habits

Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive. Frame negative things as positive.

To make the habit of reducing screen time before bed more attractive, focus on the positives of avoiding this bad habit, such as improved sleep quality, better mental health, and more time for reading or meditating. By understanding that avoiding the blue light from screens before bed can lead to deeper, more restorative sleep, you frame the reduction of screen time not as a loss but as a gain of positive outcomes.

Checking In

How’s your progress this week?

In the first part, the book focused on why habits form, break, and impact your life in major ways. In the next part, we get to work by first becoming aware of habits and cues.

Become Aware of Your Habits

Before you can change your habits, you need to become aware of them.

The concept might seem straightforward, but the implementation can be surprisingly challenging. Many of our actions are performed subconsciously, making them difficult to recognize and evaluate. The solution? Verbalization. By articulating your actions as you perform them, you bring them from the subconscious into the conscious. For example, saying out loud, “I am getting out of bed to get coffee,” helps pinpoint a routine action that might otherwise go unnoticed. This practice of verbalizing your activities serves as a form of self-observation, allowing you to become a detached analyst of your own behavior.

Awareness is more than just observation; it’s about understanding the frequency, triggers, and outcomes of your habits. It requires patience and honesty, especially when confronting habits that may not align with your goals or self-image. This initial step of awareness is crucial for setting the stage for meaningful change. Without recognizing the habits that shape your daily life, it’s impossible to accurately target or modify them.

Become Aware of Cues

Cues are what lead you to take action. You might not even notice them, but something triggers you to do something. James Clear describes cues as “silent conductors” orchestrating our actions. Understanding these cues is essential for anyone looking to reshape their habits, as they are the first domino in the chain of behavior.

Cues can be anything: the smell of coffee brewing, the sight of your running shoes, the sound of an alarm clock. They can be environmental or emotional, tangible or abstract. But they all share a common trait: they signal to our brain to initiate a behavior. For example, the mere sight of a remote control on the couch might be all it takes to prompt an unplanned TV-watching session. The challenge lies in identifying these triggers, as they are often deeply ingrained in our routines and surroundings.

Becoming aware of cues requires a blend of observation and introspection. Start by reflecting on your habitual responses and what precedes them. What environment are you in? What time is it? How do you feel? These questions can help unearth the cues that lead to automatic behaviors. Once identified, you can begin to alter your environment to reduce negative cues and introduce positive ones. For instance, hiding the remote control can remove the visual cue that encourages TV watching, while placing a book in its place can create a new cue for reading.

Create New Environments

Our environment, which could be your house, workplace, or school, contains our cues. New environments can be particularly conducive to forming new habits because they lack the established cues that trigger old behaviors. This explains why people often find it easier to adopt new behaviors while on vacation or after moving to a new house. By understanding and manipulating cues, you can design an environment that fosters positive habits and discourages negative ones.

Breaking bad habits starts with making their cues invisible, removing the triggers from your surroundings, and thereby disrupting the cycle of habitual action.

Habit Stacking

Once you’ve become aware of your habits and the cues that trigger them, the next step in your journey towards self-improvement is to build new, positive habits. One of the most effective strategies from the book “Habit Stacking.” This method involves integrating new habits into your existing routine by pairing them with established ones. This technique leverages the momentum and familiarity of your current behaviors to naturally introduce new actions without overwhelming your daily routine.

Here’s how you can stack habits. Start by identifying a current habit with its cue, then add on a new behavior you want to adopt. For example, if you already have a habit of drinking a cup of coffee every morning, you could stack a new habit of meditating for five minutes immediately after you start brewing your coffee. The existing habit provides a built-in cue for the new habit, creating a seamless transition between the two. This not only makes it easier to remember the new habit but also embeds it into the fabric of your daily life.

The cool thing about habit stacking lies in its flexibility and adaptability. It can be applied to virtually any scenario and tailored to fit any schedule. This is something that YOU (I mean ME) can do right now.

Checking In

How’s your progress?

BLOT: This book will change your life.

Did I oversell it? Well, one way of thinking about life suggests that I am not overselling it. Tiny habits are the basis of everything you do, from your personal and professional goals to your beliefs and personal identity. Time keeps ticking forward. You are presented with many choices. Some choices fall into patterns, namely habits. The results are all the results of the systems that emerge.

“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.”

James Clear

I am going to write about the book club as I go. This is kind of like a tiny habit that I want to form. The system is the framework of the book club, and the habit is to read a little every day and reflect on it in the form of a blog post here.

Critical Threshold

My favorite takeaway from the first three chapters is this idea of hitting some critical threshold. Our intuition is that you make linear progress toward goals and outcomes. But it doesn’t work that way. It is often frustrating until it is not.

First Three Chapters

1. The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits: The book emphasizes the compound growth of tiny improvements and the concept of marginal gains. James Clear illustrates how making 1% better choices and improving your daily habits can lead to significant, transformative changes over time. The idea is that just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the small, foundational components that can lead to larger systems of success.
2. How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa): This chapter delves into the relationship between habits and identity. Clear proposes that true behavior change starts with a change in our self-image and our sense of who we are. Instead of focusing on what you want to achieve, focus on who you wish to become. This shift from outcome-based habits to identity-based habits can lead to more sustainable change because it integrates the habits into your sense of self and everyday life.
3. How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps: In the third chapter, James Clear introduces the four-step model of habit formation: cue, craving, response, and reward. These four steps are the backbone of every habit, and understanding them can help in breaking down and rebuilding habits. Clear explains how cues trigger a craving, which motivates a response, leading to a reward, which consolidates the habit. He emphasizes the importance of making cues obvious, cravings attractive, responses easy, and rewards satisfying to form new good habits.

Professional Systems Versus Personal Systems

A good discussion in our book club formed around why we separate our professional systems from our personal ones. At work, we tend to fall into the systems the office has in place. Often, these systems help us get things done and have predictable results, but at home, we don’t have any systems.

Challenge

What system do you want to build for yourself? Let me know. Maybe we can hold each other accountable.

Have you ever found a recipe online and noticed it so much editorial before it gets to the recipe? The author has to write a bunch of text, embed ads, write snappy prose, take nice photos, and embed a video. I often say to myself, “Just show me the recipe!!!” If the blogger just did that, you would have never found the recipe. There are thousands of copycat recipes for Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. In order for content creators to get you to find their recipe, they have to get Google to rank the recipe well. By the way, my favorite recipe is the one from Damn Delicious.

I do have something for you to try in 2022 that may change your life. Focus on forming habits. Do something on a regular basis. Don’t worry about the what as much as the regularity of it. Just do something on a regular basis. Repeat it. Chain days together, weeks, months, and eventually years. Don’t think in terms of good or bad, just think about repetition. Think about how terrible it will be to miss a day? Have I repeated myself enough? In 2021, I wrote every day, including today. Most of the writing was aimless, but I found a few gems along the way. I focused on the habit of writing not the quality. I was surprised by the results.

If you can do two things in 2022, try writing down the recipes that you find in a notebook. Take some notes while you cook and write down the results. You are going to want those cheddar bay biscuits again and you will be surprised at how hard it will be to find that one recipe that worked really well for you and your tastes. And, you will forget what tweaks you made and you will always feel like you are starting over. If you really want to get good at something, take some notes.

Happy New Year.

Sitzfleisch literally means: sit your butt down and get to work. I struggle with procrastination from time-to-time. This happens because I choose hard things to do: write a screenplay, design a board game, code up a revolution. All of these things have one thing in common. To get them done, they require time to sit and work.

I procrastinate by convincing myself that thinking about the work is part of the work. I am actually just putting off the real work. My screenwriting professor, Robert C. S. Downs, used to say to me, “The easy thing to do in the world is to not write.”

Another habit that I formed was putting up an artificial gate before getting to work on a project. I’ll just wait until I feel inspired!

You could wait a lifetime waiting to be inspired.

Hans Scharler

There are many, many, many, many websites, books, articles, and videos on helping defeat procrastination. I will eventually digest all of those resources, I promise. My best advice: sitzfleisch.

Sitzfleisch boils down to sitting in a chair and doing something on daily basis. To change your procrastination habit, you just start small and repeat it every day. You need 15 minutes of uninterrupted time in front of a notebook or computer. Leave your phone somewhere else. Sign out of websites, social media, shopping apps. Close your email and use a different browser than your main browser (I personally use Vivaldi for the time I need a computer for). Eventually, increase this time and you develop new habits. Instead of procrastination, you will be the person who spends an hour per day on something. What happens in that 15 minutes or an hour is really quite amazing. You start to discover, move forward, and manufacture the inspiration. Not every session is going to be great, but this is the only way to find the great stuff and to get where you going.

Maybe we have to update the word sitzfleisch for those who use standing desks…

Start today.