I recently finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. For me, it served as a good collection of many “productivity” tactics I’ve read over many years.
Sadly, the mere act of reading this book won’t magically solve your problems. The book is only a recipe. And reading is only step 0 on your journey to build better habits.
This isn’t one of those books that give you a ton of benefit only by reading them. In other words, it didn’t completely transform my thinking. Maybe it will for you, though.
Don’t get me wrong—I did enjoy the book and I certainly learned new things from it. But I’ll only be able to say whether or not this book is great after I’ve tried following its recipe. And it seems like a good recipe indeed.
Interestingly, I enjoyed that last few chapters that focused on self-knowledge more than the actual tactics about building habits, so make sure to stick around until the end of the book. Or if you get bored and decide to abandon the book, try jumping forward to chapters 18 & 19 and see if there’s something you like in there.
Here’s the takeaway for you, dear reader: if you care about self-improvement at all, you should probably read this book and try to follow its recipe. Maybe it’ll be a transformational book for you, or maybe it won’t be. But it’s a short, easy read and it’ll be time well-spent.
If you don’t like reading, I can also recommend the audiobook version of this book, which is how I ‘read’ the book. It’s read by the author himself, which isn’t always a good thing—lots of authors just aren’t good narrators—but James Clear did a good job of reading his own book.