The ULTIMATE Guide to Atomic Habits: 7 Easy Steps
If you’re aren’t DOING Atomic Habits, this will fix that.
“I loved Atomic Habits…!”
“…But I’m not using any of it,” my friend lamented.
After reading Atomic Habits, I understood why.
It’s filled with great ideas. But it’s not clear how to get started.
That’s why I created this step-by-step guide.
What You Will Learn
This guide will teach you, step by step, how to build an Atomic Habit.
At the end of this guide, you will
- Have learned Atomic Habits
- Have a kick as* plan for your new habit!
(If you prefer a formatted version of this content, you can download my free PDF workbook instead. It has space for each exercise and clear formatting.)
Contents:
- Atomic Habits Overview
- Tactic #1: Start Small to Make Your Habit Easy
- Tactic #2: Build a Habit Stack to Make it Obvious
- Tactic #3: Make Your Habit Attractive and Satisfying
- Tactic #4: Make Habit Success Easy
- Tactic #5: Make Habit Failure Harder
- Tactic #6: Track Your Habit
- Tactic #7: Find Your Habit People (and I don’t mean nuns)
Atomic Habits Overview
“Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.” -James Clear, Atomic Habits
Goals, goals, and more goals!
That’s what we’re told are the keys to success…
But Atomic Habits says that the importance of goals is overblown. It’s the systems you have that matter.
Think about it: winners and losers have the exact same goal.
So the goal can’t be the deciding factor.
We need to focus more on our systems. “Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results,” writes James Clear.
To be clear: goals are important! Goals set your target.
But systems are even more important. Systems are what get you to the target.
Your System for Change
If you struggle to build good habits or to avoid bad habits, the problem is not you. It’s your system.
You have a bad system for changing habits.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals,” Clear writes. “You fall to the level of your systems.”
Using a Better System
The Atomic Habits system for habits is built on these Four Laws of Behavior Change:
- Make it Obvious
- Make it Attractive
- Make it Easy
- Make it Satisfying.
These “laws” should be followed to create successful behavior change. Many of the core tactics in Atomic Habits satisfy several of the Laws. For instance, tactics used to make a habit attractive also can be used to make it satisfying.
So, this guide is structured around the core tactics from Atomic Habits that show you how to build a powerful habit from start to finish. Where relevant, I’ll call out the applicable Laws.
Tactic #1: Start Small to Make Your Habit Easy
Habits are all about consistency, and one of the biggest barriers to consistency is not starting small enough.
Going from zero minutes/day of meditation to 30 minutes/day will be nearly impossible for mortals. Even if we can pull it off for a while, maintaining such a big change consistently is not realistic.
To get around this pitfall, we want to start small with a habit and then ramp up.
Think about building a fire
A great analogy is that of starting a fire.
What do you do to get the fire going? You use small kindling which catches fires easily.
Then what?
Add some larger pieces of wood.
And finally…?
Add the big logs that we all picture in a good fire.
The takeaway
What happens if you put the big logs on first?
Nothing. No fire.
It suffocates before it can start.
To get a roaring fire with the big logs of your dreams, start the fire with some easy stuff first!
After that, ramp up to the big logs and you’ll be enjoying the warmth and glow of your goals being achieved.
How to Start Small to Make Your Habit Easy
James Clear uses the term Habit Shaping to explain how to work your way up to big goals.
You simply take a goal (which we’ll identify shortly) and break it down to a series of smaller habits that will lead there.
You may not spend long at the first stage of your plan. Maybe only a week. After a week or more, you can ramp up to the next stage once you have no trouble doing the current stage consistently without much willpower.
For instance, once you can meditate for 2 minutes every day and find that easy to do — which may happen after the first week, but it may take longer — you can then move on the next phase of your plan (say 4 minutes daily).
Likewise, once doing that consistently is easy, you can the difficulty the following week. Here are additional examples of how to do this:
If you have trouble creating a Habit Shaping plan, you can use the Two Minute Rule to identify your first step (aka, the kindling). The Two Minute Rule simply states that a new habit should be doable within, you guessed it, two minutes. Here are some examples:
Side note: I love the fire analogy but I can’t help but laugh writing it. I know my wife will turn big logs into a bathroom joke (she has the humor of a ten-year-old boy). Maybe TMI, but I felt compelled to share that. You’re welcome.
Action Steps (5–10 minutes)
- If you want to do the exercises in this guide, select a goal to use for them. You can also download a PDF version of this guide here.
Topic examples: Starting a habit (meditation, exercise, better sleep) or eliminating a bad habit (smoking, drinking, junk food, too much screen time). Completing a personal project (scrapbook, create an app by date, write the next great American novel). A learning goal (read # books this month, complete an online course) - For the goal you selected, create a five-step Habit Shaping plan so you can Start Small. If you can’t identify all five steps, at least identify the first step using the Two-Minute Rule.
Tactic #2: Build a Habit Stack to Make it Obvious
How do you remember to do a new habit?
The easiest way is to piggyback on an existing habit, what the book calls Habit Stacking.
With habit stacking, all you say is: After [current habit], I will [new habit]. For example:
- After I pour my morning coffee, I will meditate for one minute
- After I take off my work shoes, I will change into workout clothes
- After I sit down to eat dinner, I will say one thing I’m grateful for today
- After I put on my running shoes, I will text someone where I’m running and for how long (for safety purposes)
The reason habit stacking is so effective is that you already do the existing habit. And once your brain learns this small added step, your new habit inherits the consistency power of your existing habit!
And there are even more opportunities once you get skilled at habit stacking.
Advanced Habit Stacking (for the future)
First, once you get good at habit stacking, you can build powerful multi-level stacks:
- After I pour my morning coffee, I will meditate for one minute…
…After I meditate for one minute, I will write my daily plan…
…After I write my daily plan, I will begin my first task. - After I finish eating dinner, I will put my plate directly into the dishwasher…
…After I put my plate away, I will wipe down the countertop…
…After I wipe down the countertop, I will set out my coffee mug for tomorrow morning.
Second, you can begin using less “obvious” existing [habits] like the following:
- When I [see an elevator], I will take the stairs if my destination is less than 10 floors up
- When I [walk into a party], I will introduce myself to someone new
- When I [want to purchase anything over $100], I will set an alarm for 24 hours away and then purchase it (if I still want it)
- When I [purchase something new], I will give away something else
- When I start to [make myself a plate of food], I will put vegetables on first
- When I [hear my phone ring], I will take one deep breath and smile (then answer)
How to Build a Habit Stack
Step 1: Identify an existing habit, after which you’ll do your new habit.
Existing habits you might consider:
- When you get out of bed
- Turn on the coffee maker
- Pour your morning cup of coffee
- Brush your teeth
- Take a shower
- Get dressed for the day; Get undressed for the evening
- Eat breakfast
- Take kids to school
- Start work
- Writing your daily to-do list or plan
- Eat lunch
- End the workday
- Sit down to dinner; Finish eating dinner
- Get into bed; turn off the lights
- Meditate
- Exercise
- Receive a text message
- Open the refrigerator
- Walk into a room
Step 2: Write out the sentence: After [existing habit], I will [new habit + where].
Write the existing habit out with specificity.
- Clear says he didn’t follow this advice when he created the habit stack “When I take a break for lunch, I will do ten push-ups.” He knew he made a mistake because he wasn’t following through. The language gave him wiggle room so he debated if he could do the pushups after he ate, for instance. Clear rewrote the first part as: “When I close my laptop for lunch…”
Also say where you will do the habit.
- Why the added step? Because when you say where you’ll do the new habit, it forces you to think about this new habit in reality, not just as a wishful plan.
- To continue Clear’s example, he rewrote the second part of his habit stack to say where he would do it. So, the rewritten habit stack which worked was: “When I close my laptop for lunch, I will do ten pushups on the floor next to my desk.”
Action Step (5 minutes)
- Pick an existing habit to stack your new habit on. Then write out the sentence: After [existing habit], I will [new habit + where].
Example: After I pour my morning coffee, I will do 1 pushup on the kitchen floor.
Tactic #3: Make Your Habit Attractive and Satisfying
“It’s the anticipation of a reward — not its fulfillment — that drives us to take action” -Atomic Habits
New habits have delayed rewards.
You can eat healthily for a month and not see the scale move much. You can meditate daily for a month and not notice benefits.
Likewise, you can work out / express gratitude / practice a musical instrument every day and not notice changes for a while.
The rewards come weeks and months after you execute your new habit consistently. This is very demotivating for us humans!
And if you’re like me — not good at staying disciplined when you don’t see progress — it’s a recipe for disaster.
Thankfully, there’s a solution…
Reward yourself immediately for doing your new habit.
How to Make a Habit Attractive and Satisfying
Step 1: Brainstorm rewards that you enjoy
- Massages, bubble baths, fancy coffees, milkshakes (one of mine!), ice cream, video games, alcohol, shopping, watching TV, reading novels, playing on social media, reading news, surfing articles on the internet, watching funny YouTube videos.
- You can also transfer money to an account designated for a future purchase such as a manicure, AirPods, or a European vacation. When you do your new habit, move a certain dollar amount into the special account.
- Note: Clear cautions against rewards that directly contradict your new habit. So, ice cream wouldn’t be a good reward for eating a healthy meal. But it could be a fine reward for reading more books, making sales calls, or any non-health-related goal.
Step 2: Write a rule that says you get that reward for doing your new habit.
- After I say 1 thing I’m grateful for, I’ll get to check Facebook
- After I call three potential clients, I will check ESPN
- While I am working out, I get to read gossip magazines
- While I am processing my overdue emails, I get to have a pedicure.
Action Step (5 minutes)
- Write out the statement: After I [new habit], I immediately will [reward].
Or the statement: While I am doing [new habit], I get to [reward].
Tactic #4: Make Habit Success Easy
Atomic Habits says that humans obey the Law of Least Effort.
We don’t want to waste energy foolishly, which makes evolutionary sense. As a hunter and gatherer, given the choice between a low-hanging piece of fruit and one way up in the tree, it makes sense to pick the low-hanging one.
Better to save the extra energy in case you need to escape from a tiger or hunt for more food later.
So… rather than berate ourselves for being lazy, we can pat ourselves on the back for being evolutionarily-wise.
Or something like that.
In short, just recognize that laziness is (1) not a bug, but a feature and (2) hardwired so not going away.
Once you accept that, it actually creates big power.
Why?
Because you can design your habits following the Law of Least Effort!
You can make your new habit easy to do by “removing friction” (effort) from the process.
This is how habit-forming products are designed
Look at the most habit-forming products you use. They are easy to use and they make other things in your life easier to do:
- Meal delivery services reduce the friction of picking up takeout
- Grocery delivery services reduce the friction of shopping for groceries
- Ride-sharing services reduce the friction of getting to Point B
- Facebook reduces the friction of staying in contact with people
And if an easier product hits the market, people will change and start using that. “Easy” = “change” for humans.
A multimillion-dollar example
The British government was looking to improve their response rates on certain tax forms. For years the response rate to a particular email was 19%. Then suddenly it improved to 23.4%.
What changed? They eliminated one mouse click from the process.
One mouse click is enough to change the behavior of thousands of tax-paying citizens.
How to Make Habit Success Easy
Just ask yourself the question, “How can I design a life where it’s easy to do my goal?”
Here are some examples of what this looks like in practice.
Action Step (5 minutes)
- Brainstorm at least 2 ways to make your new habit easier by eliminating friction.
Tactic #5: Make Habit Failure Harder
Did you know that flashing an image of cocaine for 33 milliseconds — not long enough for the conscious brain to register it — triggers a dopamine release in an addict’s brain?
After an unconscious trigger, an addict will be fighting an uphill battle.
While you may not be addicted to drugs, you have addict-like responses to certain triggers: chocolate, beer, pizza, TV, Facebook, the ding! of a text message, and so on.
Knowing that your brain is constantly reacting to triggers in your environment — even when you’re not consciously aware of it — is important.
You can use this knowledge, and the Law of Least Effort, to keep yourself from falling into bad habits.
Making it Harder to Fail
While the tactics covered thus far help us build a new habit, we also want a strategy to avoid the pull of our unhelpful habits.
The centerpiece of the strategy is to make the unhelpful habits harder to do. It is the opposite of what we did in the last tactic with our target habit.
When your unhelpful habits are harder to do, you’ll be that much less inclined to bother. But if they’re easily accessible and visible in your environment, your brain will start craving them instantly, even if you aren’t consciously aware of the reason (as in the 33 millisecond example earlier).
How to Make Habit Failure Harder
Step 1: Brainstorm 5–10 things that could tempt you into cheating on your new habit or otherwise throw your great plan off course
- For example, if your target habit is to exercise more, you would brainstorm what could tempt you from doing the habit (what would you do instead). Maybe it would be watching TV, having a beer on the couch, or playing a video game
- You would think about what might throw you off course. Maybe you know that if you eat the pint of Ben & Jerry’s in your freezer, you won’t work out because you’ll think ‘what’s the point’
Step 2: Brainstorm a way to make the tempting thing harder to do. For example:
Eating Unhealthily
- Remove junk food from your line of sight when you open the refrigerator or pantry and from your countertop
- Take the candy jar off your desk
- Avoid walking down the street with the irresistible ice cream shop
- Tell the waiter not to bring bread to the table
- Ask the waiter to bring you half your meal on the plate and half in a to-go box
Drinking
- Put liquor or wine bottles out of sight
- Put beer/sugary drinks in the back of the fridge where you can’t see them easily
Screen Sucking
- Delete unnecessary phone apps
- Put your phone in another room or on airplane mode
- Remove shortcuts for distracting apps from your phone’s home screen
- Unplug your TV during the week
- Turn your TV around or cover it to eliminate the cue
- Take the batteries out of your remote control after each use
- Get software that limits the time you can spend on distracting websites. You can even have someone else set the password, so they have to grant you more time
Finances
- To cut down spending on any items (e.g., electronics, furniture, alcohol), unsubscribe from magazines, catalogs, or emails that sell those things.
Self-Image
- Take down posters, magnets, or other visuals that have unhelpful messages (for instance, alcohol paraphernalia, “humorous” items that joke about being lazy)
- Stop following social media accounts that trigger jealousy
Action Steps (10 minutes)
- Make Failure Harder by Adding Friction that Makes Undesirable Behaviors Harder to Do: Brainstorm 5–10 things that could tempt you into cheating on your new habit or otherwise throw your great plan off course.
- Identify an action you can take to add friction to each item — that is, make the undesirable things harder to do.
Tactic #6: Track Your Habit
Sometimes the most profound solutions are the simplest. Habit tracking is one such solution.
It is incredibly easy to do and effective. You need this in your personal growth toolkit.
So what is habit tracking?
On a sheet of paper, you simply write your habit and the days of the week. Then, when you do your habit that day, you put an X on the tracker. Simple enough.
Why is something so simple that effective?
It leverages all Four Laws of Behavior Change:
Makes it Obvious
- By having a piece of paper lying around or taped to your mirror, you can’t help but see whether or not you did your habit today
Makes it Attractive
- Just like crossing items off your to-do list feels good (even if the items are pointless!), putting an X on a tracker feels good. Our brains are weird, right?
Makes it Easy
- Putting an X on a piece of paper — does it get any easier than that!?
Makes it Satisfying
- The accumulating X’s provide evidence of progress on your habit. This is important early on since you won’t be reaping the long-term benefits of your habit yet. Progress is incredibly rewarding and motivating.
Consider Jerry Seinfeld
Jerry Seinfeld is one of the most successful comedians of all time. Once asked for the secret to his success, he said that he writes jokes every day without fail.
How did he do it? Habit tracking.
He put an X down each day that he wrote jokes. After a short time, he had a chain of X’s on his habit tracker.
Then one day he didn’t want to write a joke.
But when he looked at his habit tracker, he didn’t want to “break the chain.” So he quickly wrote one and moved on.
The point is that your progress starts to fuel itself, like a snowball getting bigger as it rolls down a hill.
How to Track Your Habit
Write your habit on a calendar and mark off each day you do your habit.
Tip #1: Don’t break the chain, but if you do, “never miss twice.”
- It’s not always realistic to keep the chain unbroken. So if you do break the chain, the rule is that you never miss twice. You do the habit tomorrow no matter what.
- Note: your chain doesn’t have to be daily; your chain plan could be 3x per week
Tip #2: If you struggle with sticking to new habits (as I did for years), I suggest rewarding yourself at the end of the first week and the second week if you hit your weekly target (e.g., 4 days of meditating for two minutes).
- When I am struggling for motivation, this helps me counteract the inner voice that tries to tell me I can skip today because “I did so well the past few days.”
- After the first two weeks, I find I have enough momentum that I don’t need as frequent rewards, but I like to stack the odds at the start in my favor.
Action Step (5 minutes)
- Create a tracker for your habit. If you did the exercise for Tactic #1, you can use the first habit on your plan.
A pre-made habit tracker is available in the PDF version of this article.
Tactic #7: Find Your Habit People (not nuns)
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn
Who you spend time with is who you become. We are a social species and are heavily influenced by who we spend time around.
With kids, we know this. Parents — mine included — don’t want their kids to hang out with bad influences. They want to know who their kid’s friends are, what activities they’re into, and so on.
Yet we seem to forget this as adults. We think we are immune to the influence of our peers.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
In an analysis of three decades of health data, medical researchers Christakis and Fowler found that your likelihood of gaining weight or smoking cigarettes is statistically higher if your friend gains weight or starts smoking. So if your friend gets fat, your chances of putting on weight go up statistically.
The scary part is that the effect holds for friends of friends, even those you don’t know. So, if your friend’s friend gets fat, your likelihood of gaining weight still increases statistically, even if you don’t know the other person! Yikes!
The good news?
Just as people can be negative influences, they can also be positive ones. For instance, Christakis and Fowler found that you are more likely to be happy if your friends are happy, too.
So, Find Your People
The point is that the people around us influence our behavior more than we realize. Our social environment forms an invisible field that determines what we perceive as “normal.”
Is drinking a six-pack in a night too much, too little, or normal, bruh?
Is getting up a 5 am to workout weird? Or is not doing that weird?
What about watching TV all weekend? Reading all weekend?
Whatever your social environment defines as “normal” will rub off on you.
The right social environment helps by making your new habit obvious, easy, attractive, and satisfying! Boom!
So, if you want to build your new habit and achieve your goal, spend time in environments where your goal and habit are the norm.
How to Find Your Habit People
Just figure out where people who have your desired habit congregate, and then start spending more time around them.
Step 1: Brainstorm where people who have your habit / have achieved your goal spend time.
Not long ago, I wanted to increase the amount of time I spent around goal-driven individuals. I found a leadership mastermind group, which I joined. I also decided to join a CrossFit gym. The gym gave me an instant community of goal-driven (and health-conscious) friends, as most CrossFit gyms do.
Some potential places to search:
- Mastermind groups
- Local events or classes related to your goal
- Local interest groups on Meetup.com
- Online groups (Coach.me, Facebook, and so on)
The easiest way is to often think of a few people you know with your desired habit. Tell them you are looking to spend more time around people with that habit, and ask if they have any suggestions
Step 2: Brainstorm a way to spend more time around your habit people, even if just a few more minutes each week.
Action Steps (10 minutes)
- List three or more places — online or IRL — where people who have your habit (or have achieved your goal) hang out.
- Then come up with at least one action you will take to spend more time around those people.
Conclusion
All of these ideas are great, but what you need is to get into action. So, if you completed the action steps, write down the top 3 actions you will do next. If you did not, then I recommend downloading my free formatted workbook below.
Call To Action
If you want to eliminate resistance and put great behaviors on autopilot, download the free workbook version of this article. It has clear formatting and space to do each exercise above.
