This is my second read through Atomic Habits (my original review) and I didn’t come into it thinking it would be all that great. I expected that all these years later I’d look at it like many productivity books I read, simplistic and missing so much context for anyone that wasn’t a white dude.
I’m surprised to say that I’ve made changes in my life based on the second reading of this book. I’ve hidden the cookie jar on a shelf and frozen all but the cookies the family should be eating during the day. This has had me loose a few pounds in the weeks before Christmas until today.
I still think that you need to have a bunch of stuff solved in your life to dig deeply into the advice Clear provides. If you’re barely making ends meet then Scarcity would say you probably don’t have the mental bandwidth to make these higher level quality of life decisions. Clear doesn’t address this scenario at all, and I’d love to see something about how to get started when your bandwidth constrained.
Unlike many productivity authors, Clear does acknowledge that if you’ve got young kids or work two jobs you need to bite off small pieces and that habit forming may be harder. It’s a glimmer but a whole chapter could be devoted to that topic alone.
I’ll likely read the book again at some point.
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