A Review of Atomic Habits and The Checklist Manifesto

James Clear the author of Atomic Habits proposes that the difference between success and failure is a series of small habits stacked into a sequence of actions that keep a person engaged in reinforcing desirable behaviour. Small steps lead to great leaps forward, he suggests. He describes how small changes can result in significant transformations in lifestyle, productivity and general well-being: from quitting a bad habit, like smoking, to developing an identity key to realising consistency in effort, attention and devotion to a specific process.

In a similar vein, Atul Gawande presents a compelling case for using checklists to ensure consistency. Gawande illustrates just how effective checklists are for highly complex and routine tasks, alike. Running through a list of steps, actions and decisions can be the difference between life and death, regardless of whether they are used for piloting the biggest aircraft ever built, or conducting highly specialized and technical surgery.

Both of the authors are quite remarkable people. James Clear is an All-American Baseball player and weightlifter, both of which lay the foundation for his interest in habit formation. He defines habit as the small decisions we make and the routine actions we perform every day. His thinking follows on from Aristotle’s notion that “We are, what we repeatedly do.” This means the our daily lives are the consolidation of all our habits, good and bad. What Clear wants from his reader is to develop a conscious understanding of how habits form and how they are sustained over time.

Every habit, he writes, passes through four stages: Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward. By way of example picture this: You are sitting at your desk attending a Teams meeting on Friday the 18th of September at 11:00. It is a week before payday and you are looking forward to the next long weekend. It occurs to you that you need to be sure you have enough vitamins to last the rest of the month. After the meeting ends, you walk to your kitchen where your vitamins are kept, but along the way you forget why you were going to your kitchen in the first place. You find yourself standing in the middle of your kitchen, confused and possibly frustrated. What do you do? Well… You open the fridge. Why? Because it is a habit. We go to our kitchens for food, not vitamins. And the moral of the story is either to keep your vitamins in the fridge, or to remind yourself that its not inside, its on top.

The cue is simply being in the kitchen. The craving is to see what’s inside the fridge. The response is to eat all the cheese before your wife does. And the reward is that you’ve had enough calcium for the day. Clear explains that the cue triggers the craving, which in turn solicits a response. The response is always met with the reward, which amounts to satisfying the craving and becomes associated with the cue.

Here is a quote from Clear’s blog:

Habits are like well-trodden paths that lead up a mountain. They are easy to walk and navigate. There is reliability to them. However, it is possible to find better, more scenic and safe paths. Clear recommends 5 steps for creating new habits.

Step 1: Start with an Incredibly Small Habit. Recently, I decided to wake up 15 minutes earlier every day. This has increased the time I spend on research or general writing in the mornings. Those additional 15 minutes have opened up an additional hour for me. The reason is that I wake up really, really, really early, and it takes me at least an hour to be fully awake before I can do something constructive.

Step 2: Increase your habit in very small ways. In other words, don’t make big changes, make small adjustments. Tiny changes will lead to significant improvements in the long term. It works like compound interest essentially. If the small changes and the tiny improvements are consistent everyday, they will lead to significant transformations over a long period of time.

Step 3: Break your habits into small chunks. If your goal is to read for an hour a day. Read for a half-an-hour in the morning and half-an-hour at night.

Step 4: When you slip up, get back on track quickly. Clear’s golden rule is to ensure that you never miss performing the habit twice in a row. Step 5: Be Patient. Consitency is key, but so is having faith in the process you are developing.

He goes on to suggests that these 5 steps need to adhere to what he refers to as the 4 laws of behaviour change. When you are trying to form a new habit (to read for an hour a day) ensure the following:

(1) the Cue must be Obvious,

(2) the habit must be attractive, in order to facilitate craving,

(3) the habit must be easy to do, the jump from cue to reward need to be as attractive and as uncomplicated as possible, and

(4) it the habit must be satisfying.

Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Bringham and Woman’s Hospital in Boston, a writer for the New Yorker, and an academic at Harvard’s Medical School. His book The Checklist Manifesto is less about the virtues of checklists than it is about interesting cases where checklist were used to save lives, or where they could have been used to save lives. In motivating for the importance of checklists Gawande distinguished between errors that result from ignorance and those that result from ineptitude. He focuses specifically on preventing errors resulting from ineptitude. He studied the way checklists are used in large scale construction sites, and wrote the following:

However, it is necessary that checklists are not only useful for complex, highly specialized professions and projects, but can also be used to facilitate a more interactive form of team work. When it comes to complex work, we rely on a division of labour and knowledge. In a surgical setting, the team consists of a number of people performing specific tasks: the surgeon performs the surgery, but only with the help of a variety of specialists: a surgical assistance, a scrub nurse, a circulating nurse, an anesthesiologist, and so on. Gawande explains that in most instances the people performing specialized tasks are highly trained and competent.

This is where checklists come in. The facilitate discussion and the collective, mutual attention to process and detail. If we can accept that checklists are important and useful, the next question is: how do compose them?

Firstly, we need to decide between a do-confirm checklist or a read-do checklist. A do-confirm checklist entails doing something from memory or habit, and when the work is done to pause and tick off whether every task has been performed. A good example of this will be doing a vlookup in Excel. It may seem banal, but if you don’t follow the steps correctly, it is possible for you do get something wrong and receive the dreaded error message from Excel, which never shows you how to fix your mistake. With a read-do checklist people read out every step and perform its concomitant action. This is very important for the aviation, construction and medical professions where a step skipped, can result in lives lost.

I recently downloaded and installed Microsoft To-Do and set up the following checklist to allow me to focus without distraction and disruption.

I find both book interesting not for increasing productivity but for conceiving a system to organise my day better and to develop a personal process that bring structure to my day. To this end, I am convinced that we can read hundreds of books like these and still find ourselves confused about how to structure our time. We ultimately need to borrow from Clear and Gawande as we establish our own systems.

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