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Atomic Habits is an excellent book, highly recommend it to anyone struggling to fix patterns of behavior. I’ve started to curate any environment I use to avoid

Atomic Habits is an excellent book, highly recommend it to anyone struggling to fix patterns of behavior. I’ve started to curate any environment I use to avoid unintentional triggers. For example, when you reach for your iPhone to open up Medium or Kindle, you are forced to see all the different notifications and home screen icons. If there is a social media app or Safari icon happen to be there, your craving to open it and check the feed will get triggered unconsciously. There will be no “decision to check news” — you’ll just find yourself scrolling through the feed. So what I have now is a clean setup which makes sure screen pages with valuable apps are not arranged together with distractions. I also try to keep my phone away on the other end of the room, so that reaching for it would require more efforts, breaking down old habits of mindless browsing. I find ideas from Atomic Habits interesting as they suggest improving your life through pre-defined policies and good habit design, not through conscious decisions made in the moment. Made me look at many other things (e.g. management, teamwork environment) in a different way.

dr_kiszonka 5y ago
Maybe Kindle app should have a notification dot until we read some number of pages on a given day?
- smugglerFlynn 5y ago
  Interesting idea! Most productivity apps have some kind of a nudge built-in (for example, DayOne sends periodic reminders and even writing prompts to keep you journaling). It rarely works for me, though, as they pop up at times when I’m focused on something else. What usually works is a physical reminder that something I have planned to do is not complete. Two examples: - For a couple of years I had that large sticky note posted on my fridge on which each day I would draw a stick every time I drank a glass of water. Simply seeing this note with no sticks drawn for particular day was enough of a motivation to drink my recommended daily number of glasses. I made sure an empty glass was always strategically positioned nearby. I had many attempts to track that electronically, with reminders and such, but only after reading Atomic Habits I was able to design this simple ‘off-the-grid’ solution, and it just worked. (I have since stopped tracking exact number of glasses, but I still set an empty glass on my kitchen counter, which is enough to trigger my habit and drink more every time I see it) — Similar thing with vitamin D which I take during the winter. At my kitchen table I have this pill case with seven transparent cells per each day of the week, so any time I go to the kitchen and notice the case, and it’s not empty, it motivates me to take this day’s pill. Just keeping a bottle full of pills on the table was not enough to build a habit, but as soon as I made “lack of progress” visible, it worked.

dr_kiszonka 5y ago

Maybe Kindle app should have a notification dot until we read some number of pages on a given day?

smugglerFlynn 5y ago
Interesting idea! Most productivity apps have some kind of a nudge built-in (for example, DayOne sends periodic reminders and even writing prompts to keep you journaling). It rarely works for me, though, as they pop up at times when I’m focused on something else. What usually works is a physical reminder that something I have planned to do is not complete. Two examples: - For a couple of years I had that large sticky note posted on my fridge on which each day I would draw a stick every time I drank a glass of water. Simply seeing this note with no sticks drawn for particular day was enough of a motivation to drink my recommended daily number of glasses. I made sure an empty glass was always strategically positioned nearby. I had many attempts to track that electronically, with reminders and such, but only after reading Atomic Habits I was able to design this simple ‘off-the-grid’ solution, and it just worked. (I have since stopped tracking exact number of glasses, but I still set an empty glass on my kitchen counter, which is enough to trigger my habit and drink more every time I see it) — Similar thing with vitamin D which I take during the winter. At my kitchen table I have this pill case with seven transparent cells per each day of the week, so any time I go to the kitchen and notice the case, and it’s not empty, it motivates me to take this day’s pill. Just keeping a bottle full of pills on the table was not enough to build a habit, but as soon as I made “lack of progress” visible, it worked.