Atomic Habits, James Clear: my three takeaways

My top three takeaways:

I challenge you, after reading this, to pick one of these and find a way to apply it to your life. Just make it happen, stick with it with 40 days, and see the impact!

There was so much talk about capacity at my last company. Capacity was not allowed to be a barrier to missing deadlines, or detail being skimmed. The best performers were ‘high capacity’. And all this meant was that as more and more work was poured on, no push back was allowed on grounds of being overloaded. Or, push back was allowed, but then you would no longer be considered a top performer – they have high capacity remember! So, finding ways to constantly increase capacity is absolutely crucial.

Reading Atomic Habits showed me that establishing habits is the key to building capacity. Habits are ‘rituals and behaviours that we perform automatically’ and anything automated requires less brainpower than conscious actions. The more we can move daily actions to habits, the more subconscious and less draining they become. This releases more energy for the bigger challenges.

There are many repetitive tasks in the corporate world. Finding the most important and converting them a habit can make a significant difference to your capacity and energy flow. Let me give an example. I work in Sales, so it is very important for me to always know how much I have sold. Everything flowed from how my sales compared to my forecast. But, accessing this Sales data was painful, it came from a convoluted system, and it changed every day. To begin with I was getting the data ad hoc – when requests came, or when I needed it for a piece of work - but I was spending a lot of time each go to get the data and then arrange it to show the insight I needed. Instead I established a habit. I spent time setting up a worksheet with all the data I needed and then every morning as soon as I opened my laptop, before checking my emails, I would pull the sales data out and analyse it. This took me 10 minutes, but the impact was significant. I could proactively share good news, I was ahead of bad news, and I could anticipate the questions that would come to me through the day. Soon the task became automatic and I was no longer using brainpower worrying about it, I had capacity for bigger things.

James Clear gives an amazing insight in his book that a 1% gain everyday over a year is a 37% improvement. The maths is simple 0.01 x 365 = 36.5. Yet I had never thought of it like that. He shares a second analogy that I love. If a stone mason is chiselling away at a piece of marble he may strike the chisel 100 times and only on the 101st time does he get a crack. So often I have given up because I haven’t yet seen a result.

Right now, I am applying these two ideas to yoga. I have always wanted to be better at yoga. Specifically, to be more supple and to get my head to the floor with my legs in a triangle in front of me. I have tried stretching, I have tried weekly classes, but generally I’ve not stuck at much. So, after reading the book I have taken a new approach. I downloaded an app and every day, first thing in the morning, I do 45mins of yoga. I am now on week 5 and the impact has been remarkable. I am nowhere near getting my head to the floor, but I am closer than I have ever been. And what is amazing is that for the first 2 weeks almost nothing changed. Every day I tried to inch 1% further and then suddenly around the end of the second week there was a bigger move, like the first crack in the rock. It worked! 

If I think about applying this to work and take a simple example of clearing emails, if every day I cleared my inbox 1% faster I am sure that in 3 months it wouldn’t seem an overwhelming task!

With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become. It is much more powerful to say I’m the type of person who is this rather than I am the type of person who wants this. And in the corporate world your identity becomes your personal brand and is crucial for success.

To make habits your identity you need to pinpoint the attributes of colleagues, managers and leaders you admire the most and define the behaviours that make them who they are. Then you can build these behaviours into habits. The goal is to become more like them. I will caveat this: it is unusual to get 100% of your inspiration from one person, and this is why it is important to surround yourself with as many inspirational people as possible. 

I will give a personal example. I had a previous manager who was brilliant at seeing the good in people. I have a bias to see the negatives and would whinge e.g. ‘Mike is really slow at replying to my emails’. This manager would flip me and find ways to highlight the good e.g. ‘Mike is brilliant at designing slides’. This was helpful because we couldn’t change the team, and so rather than focusing on the frustrations, seeing where people could add value was very helpful. I tried to make this a habit too, I didn’t stop seeing the bad, but I pushed myself to look closer for the good. I credit this training with my ability to develop people well as I can leverage their strengths to improve their opportunities.

I will give another example. One of my colleagues was a demon at replying to email. She could clear her inbox in half the time and had an identify of being fast, reliable and efficient. I wanted that reputation and so I asked her how she did it. She was flippant ‘oh I just one touch each email of course’. This is how I started the habit of one touch email…

Finally, the best time to act is immediately after being inspired. So, before you move on, pledge now, one thing you will do differently because you read this…