Atomic Habits

For me the advice in this book amounted to things I had already been doing, without the names the author has been attaching to old concepts. The one actionable takeaway I found was to list the daily activities you already do out of habit and the ones you either want to do in the future or want to avoid. Doing this periodically is a good part of a discipline to accomplish what you want to do. He goes through a process of breaking a habit into its components and telling the reader how to facilitate this (for habits one wants) or to try to hinder this (for bad habits). He draws from other books the thinking about about the rewards system of the mind so these can be used to improve the habit. Accompanying the text is a set of very simple worksheets online. He talks about how to track habits to reinforce them when attention flags.

Unfortunately he does not mention whether there is a way to make activities on another automatic habits. For instance, if I need to pay off a list of bills once a month, what kind of one can I devise to kick that off? It would require another list of chores with deadlines which I had to habitually check daily in a way to serve as a cue for the chain that would happen at that time. To me a simple description of how to set this up would have been more valuable than some of the rest of the topics he covers.