Atomic Habits Revisited: A Two-Year Late Update on My 2021 Goals

The first time I read Atomic Habits by James Clear, I wrote a book review in the form of a life update in which I excitedly outlined all the ways I was going to use Clear’s principles to recalibrate post-2020. 

I committed to writing another update in a year and report on the goals I laid out for myself, but I never did. A month after I shared the review on my blog, I accepted a job offer that would return me to corporate life after about six years of contract work⎯four of which I’d spent almost exclusively rewriting a novel for my dad. 

After starting my new job, I struggled to reserve time and energy for my own writing projects, including my blog. (My goal of posting monthly became, “At least don’t let a year go by without posting something.”)

But that’s just an excuse. Clear might say that after setting my lofty goals, I failed to change my systems in a way that couldn’t be disrupted by a life event like starting a full-time job. To be fair to myself, I did hit near the bullseye on some of my targets⎯for example, I wanted to start sewing again and I’ve finished several fun projects in the last two years. But my personal writing goals remain elusive. Most days they feel impossible to achieve.

This month, however, I agreed to participate in an “Atomic Habits Challenge” as part of a work project, and I’ve been coaxed back into the orbit of Clear’s firebrand, virally well-marketed approach to self-improvement. Here’s how it went!

The Challenge

An employee from each division of the company was asked to pick a habit they wanted to develop and then⎯following the principles outlined in Atomic Habits⎯perform that habit every day for 30 days. On the 30th day, when I’ll publish this post, we’ll meet to discuss our individual experiences with the challenge.

The habit I picked to ingrain is “journaling.” Here’s what I hope to get out of it:

1. To write something, anything for myself every single day. Writing professionally means I spend most of my creative energy producing for others and not myself, and that’s not what work-life balance is about. What I’ve found so far is that even if I’m just retaining a few stand-out details of the day, journaling almost invariably turns toward musing about something that might help me realize my second goal…
2. To figure out what to write next. The past couple years have been riddled with false-starts⎯stalled out essays and poems I’ve either reworked to oblivion or abandoned entirely. By day 13 of the challenge (April 6 according to my journal), my new habit sparked the idea to write this essay, so it’s already working.
3. To continually improve as a writer. There’s a passage in Joan Didion’s The White Album where she itemizes her traveling essentials for her reporting job. “Notice the typewriter for the airport,” she writes. “The idea was to…check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.” The day’s notes. She’s journaling. Every day requires notes and I need to keep them too, more consistently and with better organizational habits, if I want to be a better writer, especially a nonfiction writer. 
4. And finally, to show up for myself in the same way I’d show up for a friend who needs to talk. Journaling has been like talking to a friend who may have guidance about the things I’m trying to process or accomplish, especially when I’ve consulted with AI to generate emotionally or topically relevant writing prompts.

The Book

The Brené Brown of habits, James Clear is fiercely optimistic, his writing ripe for memeification and Insta-feed psychologizing. And that’s not shade⎯Clear has a fantastic way with words, which makes the book both approachable and abundantly quotable:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

James Clear, Atomic Habits

Legions of life coaches undoubtedly have this quote in their email signatures right now, and for good reason. It’s a banger. And there’s more just like it in the book⎯pithy, structurally well-balanced aphorisms that just make sense and are fun to say, especially when you say them grandiosely to your spouse after they catch you working out another day in a row and say something like, “Wow, you’re real serious about this habits thing, huh?”

Me, curling my little 10 pounders: “It is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”

But yes, this habits challenge has been a catalyst for a lot of much-needed change and direction in my personal and professional life. 

I was given a Clear-branded habits tracker that’s just as fun to mark up as it is to handle and look at. I’ve re-opened an old workout tracker to start filling with new data almost every morning. And I’ve re-embraced the promise of Atomic Habits since my first read-through⎯that by changing and directing my habits in their minutiae, by changing my systems, I’ll get where I want to go, and continue becoming who I want to be. 

The Principles

I covered “cue, craving, response, reward” (Clear’s four-step model of habits) in my previous essay on the subject, but I didn’t really get into “the four laws of behavior change.” These are:

1. Make it Obvious
2. Make it Attractive
3. Make it Easy
4. Make it Satisfying

Clear’s instruction is to apply these laws to each habit you want to form and maintain, and invert them for the habits you want to break. 

Here’s how I applied the four laws to my new journaling habit:

• I started the challenge by journaling freehand, but soon switched to digital. This made it easy in more ways than one: digital entries are easier than physical notebooks to search and organize.
• I make it obvious by keeping my personal laptop charged and at the ready on my work desk.
• I make it attractive by doing my journaling in my favorite space (my home office) while listening to whatever matches the morning’s mood (sometimes music, sometimes silence).
• Making it satisfying feels trickier. Staying tactile with my habits tracker gives me the satisfaction of marking off the completion of my habit for the day, and watching the line of Xs grow longer and longer is highly motivating. I don’t want to break the chain. But I don’t know if that counts as a “reward” per Clear’s four-step model, or if I should get more creative. I’m still thinking on this one.

The Process

When I journal is a result of habit stacking, which I think is one of Clear’s most effective tips for making a new habit stick. It’s the trick of attaching a new behavior to something you’re already doing. In this case, I was already taking my dog out most mornings for a short jog, but I wasn’t doing much else in between getting back and sitting down to begin my work day. Most days I wouldn’t even change my clothes. 

Here’s how I habit-stacked off my morning runs, and increased them in the process:

• I officialized my dog-jogs in my habits tracker, tacked on lifting and calisthenics immediately after, followed by making the bed and getting dressed. That’s four habits I get the satisfaction of checking off before I’ve even arrived in the space to do my journaling.
• By the time I enter my office, it’s roughly 8:30. I flip open my laptop, pop open the waiting document, and type in the new day’s date. If I’m drawing a blank on what to write, I may do any of the following:
  • Type up what I can remember of my dreams the night before.
  • Use AI to generate a writing prompt, beginning by telling it what’s been on my mind lately. 
  • Pick up where I left off the day before.

Other habits I’ve added to my tracker to be done at any time of the day include:

• Reading
• Doing the dishes
• Getting to bed by 10PM

For my daily tasks, I use a glass clipboard I have propped up next to my computer. On it, I’ve drawn an Eisenhower Box (a task-prioritization method recommended in my habits tracker) in wet-erase ink and I use dry-erase to write in my tasks. This gives me the satisfaction of erasing them as I finish and seeing the board get clearer and clearer as the day goes on. 

Accountability partnering has also been helpful. I’m part of an accountability group with some family members, where we check in with each other daily to share our successes and struggles with our fitness goals. 

The Result

Personally

I’m waking up earlier and with more energy. And as I put more effort into how I show up for myself and the day, I can feel my confidence growing in the same way Clear describes when he changed his workout and study habits in college.

I hadn’t realized how something as innocuous as skipping a jog here and there or wearing the same couple things all the time had been affecting my mental health, or how my mental health had been affecting my motivation to self-care in these minor, but impactful ways.

Clear talks about the compounding effects of small habits, and in the course of this challenge, I’ve certainly felt momentum building as I’ve become more intentional about how I approach the interconnected areas of my life⎯fitness, diet, physical and mental health, career, and relationships. 

Professionally

I do my journaling immediately before I start my workday at 9AM. Sometimes it overlaps with work-time and from there I make a conscious shift toward thinking and journaling about my ongoing work projects. I find the connection between whatever I was journaling about and how it applies to the problems I’m seeking to solve at work. What this does is create a throughline from what I’m naturally passionate about and interested in to what fascinates me about the company’s industry, products, target audience, and mission. 

As a content writer⎯someone who primarily writes long-form, heavily researched content pieces⎯this keeps me engaged and curious, and I believe deepens the quality of my work.

Habits as Identity

Journaling is the only habit in my tracker to maintain an unbroken line of Xs during the course of the challenge. I never missed a day. As a result, I’m writing for myself more consistently and feeling more aligned with my identity as “Writer,” which is another one of Clear’s most resonating concepts about habits.

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”

James Clear, Atomic Habits

What you do is who you are, and vice versa. If you want to be a runner, adopt the habits a runner would have. If you want to be a writer, do what a writer would do. Lead with who you want to be and the outcome will follow.

My Work is Writing and My Writing is Me

I don’t struggle with identifying as a writer. “Writer” became an intrinsic part of my identity around the time I decided I wanted the people who called me “Becky” to start calling me “Bekah.” I was still a kid, in other words, settling into a sense of self as I scribbled my little poems thinking, Okay, yes, this is what I’m supposed to be doing. 

But I do struggle with keeping a professionally emotional distance from work. After all, my work is my writing, and my writing is me. And if I’m not writing or accomplishing what I think I should be accomplishing with my writing, I’m unmoored and restless.

In January of this year, one of my former professors invited me to speak to her class about what I’ve done with my career since graduation. She sent me their questions beforehand and a recurring one was how to make time for writing. I empathize with the question’s undercurrent of existential angst, the pain of creative neglect. 

As Mary Oliver writes in Upstream, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Any creator will feel the truth of Oliver’s words in their bones. She answers the why, and in Atomic Habits, James Clear fills in the how.

Referencing Clear’s take on habits as identity, I asked the students, “What would a writer do? They’d probably carry notebooks around with them to document their observations⎯they’d journal.” I suggested they habit-stack off the things they already do in the morning and create a sort of ritual that guides them into a headspace for writing. 

In participating in this challenge, I finally took my own advice. But the challenge concludes today and while I remain motivated, I’m worried. In forming new habits, Clear describes arriving at the inevitable “valley of disappointment,” or “the plateau of latent potential,” a slump in which desired results don’t feel noticeable yet, or tangible. With the conclusion of this challenge, and despite the mostly emotional results I’ve documented in this post, I can sense myself arriving in the valley.

The real test will be what I do with the next 30 days. So I’ll commit to writing and sharing something new by May 31, and this time I’ll focus on my systems instead of the goal.