Key Takeaways from the Atomic Habits — Part I

Shubham Sonthalia
2 min readMar 11, 2023
  • What is a habit — Habits are activities that we can repeatedly do without much cognitive effort.
  • Creating a new habit — The way to create a new habit is to clearly define the time and place of the act, e.g., in my room before going out for lunch . Precise, isn’t it? The key is it should augur well with our existing habits (taking lunch).
  • Sandwiching — We can also try sandwiching the new habit between two existing habit: like between drinking a glass of water and brushing teeth, I will do 10 pushups. Note: The existing habits must be an irreplaceable part of your routine.
  • Motivation is crap, environmental cues matter more — We are lazy and we like to do the easy thing (given a choice). True for all. More than worrying about the inner will (motivation) to do something, we should work hard on building environmental cues to do it easily, or without much friction, e.g., if I want to read a book daily, I should keep one next to the bed — make it easy.
  • Breaking bad habits — 1. Make it hard. 2. Make it look bad. Eg, to reduce TV time, I should unplug the TV, remove the remote batteries after each usage — increase friction. Or better, get rid of it 😂. Tell yourself all the bad results of watching TV and make it unattractive/ look bad.
  • The 2-minute Rule — As simple as that — aim to do 2 minute of any new habit that you want to install into your life. The key is to show up everyday. This changes our identity internally. We become the kind of person who “shows up” daily and meditate for 2 minutes. “Be that guy”. The next stage is to optimize that habit.

This is what I have so far. I will create a part II for key takeaways as I read along.

Thanks for you time.

--

--

Shubham Sonthalia

Backend Software Engineer. Learning and building scalable systems. Languages - C#, Java, Python, English (for blogging ofc)