decision making Archives - Page 2 of 2

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. What a surprising and enjoyable read. James starts with a rather tragic event in his life and the steps he took to succeed. This places a good foundation to establishing a framework to form good habits and break the bad ones.

Right away James provides good documentation for the reader to achieve the steps necessary to be successful. He leverages a successful experience in college baseball as the base (pun intended) to reveal insights to establish good habits.

Seeing a reference to Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow research felt good to see again on display for us to leverage.

Establishing a habit seems simple, but why do so many of us fail? Life gets in the way. Yet some are too oversimplified.

For example reading a book one page a day. Really? Okay…drop the TV remote and read for 20 minutes – not just one page. Reading one page a day is not really making a concerted effort. So this habit plan could use a tweak.

As a matter of fact, Atomic Habits does move us in the direction towards concerted efforts. This may be somewhat harder to establish (a new brand) around concerted effort vs. atomic habit. You must know your audience.

Atomic Habits in a round about way addresses how technology in fact makes it easy to fail at establishing new habits. James provides good insights about human behavior and technology.

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink. This was a very enjoyable read. So enjoyable that I restarted chapter one immediately after finishing the book. And then again, a third read. Maybe this is no surprise. I read in 2007 his book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future and it was also very enjoyable.

In this book Pink provides a lot of scientific data (big data) that provides insights to our lives. This is so broadly appealing that everyone should read this book. Basically Pink shares that we all have a unique hidden patterns. This really impacts our work performance, studies, exercise and even our mood throughout the day.

Pink breaks our day into three periods: Peak, Trough, and Recovery. A morning Peak is when we apply thinking tasks. A Trough sees a decline in the mid-afternoon. This is best for simple tasks. Finally Recovery reenergizes us in the early evening to be creative.

At the same time Pink acknowledges our personality fits into one of three buckets. These circadian rhythms are Lark (morning person), an Owl (evening person), or a middle Third Bird. These rhythms will change over time. While in college I was definitely an owl, programming into the wee hours of the morning. Owls have their rhythms in reverse: recovery, trough and peak.