James Clear On How To Review Your Habits And Make Adjustments

Atomic Habits by James Clear has become the go-to book on understanding, breaking, and forming habits. Often times it's obvious when you’re participating in a bad habit. In general, we know what is good for us and what is bad for us. However, just because we are participating in good habits, it doesn’t mean we are making the right kind of progress.

That’s where reflection and review come in.

Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement. Without reflection, we can make excuses, create rationalizations, and lie to ourselves. We have no process for determining whether we are performing better or worse compared to yesterday.

Habits can be better viewed as tools that you use to accomplish your goals. Your typical toolbox has screwdrivers, hammers, tape measure, pliers, utility knives and extra blades, and adjustable wrenches. But not all tools work for the task at hand.

In the same way, even all good habits don’t fit neatly toward your planned goals. So, you have to pick and choose correctly and the only way you can know you picked correctly is by running mini-experiments and reviewing the results to see if you made the right kind of improvement.

Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge is one of the greatest marathoners of all time and an Olympic gold medalist. He still takes notes after every practice in which he reviews his training for the day and searches for areas that can be improved. Similarly, gold medal swimmer Katie Ledecky records her wellness on a scale of 1 to 10 and includes notes on her nutrition and how well she slept. She also records the times posted by other swimmers. At the end of each week, her coach goes over her notes and adds his thoughts.

So, the goal is pretty simple. You have to bring your habits to the forefront of your mind. You can’t mindlessly or unconsciously go through life and hope that you end up hitting your goals. Instead, when we have a methodical approach toward our habits where we break down which ones are benefiting us and which ones are keeping up stagnant and which ones are actively deterring us from achieving our goals.

Improvement is not just about learning habits, it’s also about fine-tuning them.

When we study our actions and habits, we come closer to nailing down our own identity, which James Clear believes is the foundation of building good habits.

Reflection and review offers an ideal time to revisit one of the most important aspects of behavior change: identity.

More on the importance of identity and habits here.

The overall message of this technique is simple. Every so often, whether that be at the end of each month or every 3 months or 6 months, sit down with a pen and paper and go through your current habits and determine if they have helped you step closer to your goals. If they have, then great, continue doing what you’re doing with maybe a few minor adjustments. If they haven’t, key into one or two small changes you can make which will bring about larger change. And then run that experiment and review it at an appropriate time.

Originally published at http://learnedliving.org on June 15, 2023.