Don’t Confuse Your Routines for Habits

If you’ve read Atomic Habits by James Clear you may fall into the large group of people that tried to implement everything in the book and failed.

It’s not a bad book, in fact it’s really good but it does suffer from one major flaw. It doesn’t make a clear enough distinction between habits and routines. So we go ahead with the best of intentions starting our mornings with something positive and productive.

We think we can make these things into good habits to overwrite our bad ones by following all the tips for habits.

The problem is that although many use the terms synonymously a routine is not a habit.

A routine is how a habit can start, especially if you’re consciously trying to produce good habits. We’re trying to ease and train ourselves into making that routine automatic and then it becomes a habit. The problems comes from the type of routine.

A habit can only work when it’s a simple task that doesn’t actually need conscious thought or decision-making.

By the nature of many routines they can never be habits.

I write every day but that’s not a habit as there are too many actions to take and even if I automated everything to the point of only focused on my conscious thoughts for writing, this isn’t the same repeatable task in the content of that task. I’m having to put conscious thought into it, even when it’s not very much thought it’s still a routine and can’t ever be a habit.

If you want to create good habits you have to set the right expectations and identify what can become a habit. Anything else you want to do will have to be a routine.

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