Atomic Habits Part 3 : Law 3: Make it Easy
Atomic Habits Part 4 :Law 3: Make it Easy
Quantity most times trumps quality when changing the reps,It is better to walk slowly than to stand still at a given point. While focusing on Quality we are too intent on ” Being in motion” which means that we are too busy perfecting the plan, eliminating the probability of failiure and safegaurding our interest,so much so that we fall in to an endless loop of procastination and are unable to get any work done,it is most often confused as “taking action” which actually gets us the gradual improvement we desire “The best is the enemy of good”,so if you want to start a good habit the key is repitition and not perfection.
The more you repeat an activity,the more the structure of brain adapts to grow efficient at it.This is called long term potentiation.The process of an activity moving from effortful behaviour to automatic response is called automacity (ability to perform an activity without thinking on the next steps,when the unconcious brain takes over).The time needed to perfect an activity is not as important as the amount of times an activity is practiced.
Human nature Follows law of least effort which states that when selecting between two similar options,one usually is inclined towards choosing a path that requires the least amount of work.Every Habit we try to learn poses as an obstacle to where we want to be or what we want to be,excercising seems like a obstacle to achieving fitness.Thus we have to make the behaviour as convenient as we can so that it becomes effortless and eventually we can achieve automaticity required to master the habit.Habits are easier built when they are an integral part of the flow of your life. We can use the friction with respect to habit, to eliminate the bad ones and by minimize friction associated with formation of good habits we can form new habits in an easier manner.Priming and modifying our environment to illicit good behaviour can prove crtical part of habit formation.
The key to a good day and habit formation are the actions one take in the decisive moments,a good decision can lead to several other good decisions whereas a bad one can lead to others and eventually a bad day.Using a “Two minute rule” you can break down your actions for a hard habit to very easy steps which can help ritualize the.
The inverse of the third law of making a good habit is making it difficult. If you want to get past temptation to create a template for a good habit go ahead and create a commitment device. A commitment device enables you to take advantage of good intention by curbing your temptations like if you are at a restaurant you can half the waiter pack half your dinner and eat only half to cut down on calories as a commitment device. The best way to break a bad habit is make it impractical to do, create as much friction that it becomes impossible to follow through on the cue. Using technology you can transform your arduous activities and tasks in to rather painless and easy behaviors like cutting down on social media browsing using a website blocker. This can also be counterproductive and create a bad habit but by making Strategic One time Decision one can improve upon the behaviors such that it makes good habits inevitable and bad ones impossible relatively.