‘make your bad habits more difficult by creating… a commitment device’ – Atomic Habits, Chapter 14 Notes

Posted on: July 8, 2022

Last Updated on: July 9th, 2022

Post Category: Book Notes

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About #onepageonepoint

#onepageonepoint aims to summarise new ideas from books on personal and professional development – with (approximately) one point for each page. Read more about this project here.

Today for #onepageonepoint, we have summary notes for Atomic Habits – for chapter 14: ‘How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible’.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Chapter 14: How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

• Making bad habits hard can be achieved through an inversion of the 3rd law of behaviour change: make it difficult.

• One way to make a bad habit difficult is to use a commitment device, which is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It can bind your future behaviour to good habits and restrict you from bad ones. For example, asking yourself to be on the banned list at a casino to impede gambling, and having an adaptor that cuts of the internet at 10pm so you can commit to sleeping early.

• They allow you to take advantage of good intentions before you fall victim to temptation. ‘[They] increase the odds that you’ll do the right thing in the future by making bad habits difficult in the present’ (Clear 2018, p. 171).

• ‘The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act’ (Clear 2018, p. 172).

• Some onetime choices require a bit of effort up front but will add a lot of value in the long run. For example, to improve your sleep, you can buy a good mattress, get blackout curtains, use a more orange light and remove your television from the bedroom.

• Technology can also help us free up time and energy, so we can focus on more meaningful tasks or cultivate more meaningful habits e.g. a website blocker that blocks social media websites, or automations that enhance the speed of our workflow.

• Technology can also be at our detriment, since they can also make it easier for us to work from easy task to easy task. For example, you might have social media apps on your phone with notifications turned on, or have autoplay turned on when watching YouTube. These can distract us from doing more meaningful work.

• You can mitigate bad technological habits by using commitment devices that add friction. For example, setting long passwords for social media accounts and signing out of them every time you use it on a browser, buying a website blocker, and removing social media and gaming apps off your phone.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Interested in reading more? See my notes for Chapter 15.