Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of James Clear by Allison Beard for Harvard Business Review (December 2019). He shares his thoughts about how better habits can help to produce high-impact results. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain information about deep-discount subscription rates, please click here.

Credit: Jason Ferruggia

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For almost all of us, certainly for people who are spending their time doing knowledge work, or who are paid for the value of their creativity, the ideas you come up with are often a product of where you allocate your intention. So, what you read and what you consume often is the precursor to the thoughts that you have, or to the creative or innovative ideas that you come up with.

So by improving your consumption habits, or your attention habits, you can dramatically improve the output that you have at work as well. And we all live in this world that has a firehose of information. And so the ability to curate, to edit, to refine, to filter your information feed, whether that be the people that you follow on Twitter, or the articles that you read each day, or the news sources that you select, or the books that you read. Those are very important decisions that determine the downstream output. That’s about what you’re bringing in.

But there are also other habits you can build, that kind of the purpose of them is not to bring things in, but to cut things out. It’s to reduce the distractions. So, for example, one habit that I’ve been following for the last year or so, I probably do it about 90 percent of the days. I’ll leave my phone in another room until lunch each day.

And so, I have a home office and if I bring my phone in with me and it’s on the desk, well I’m like everybody else. I’ll check it every three minutes just because it’s there. But if I leave it in another room, then it’s only 30 seconds away, but I never go get it. And what’s always so interesting to me is did I want it or not? In the one sense I did want it bad enough to check it every three minutes when it was next to me, but in another sense I never wanted it bad enough to walk the 30 seconds to go get it.

And I think we see this so much with habits of technology and convenience and modern society that particularly with smart phones or apps. Actions are so frictionless, so convenient, so simple, so easy that we find ourselves being pulled into them, just like at the slightest whim, just the faintest hint of desire is enough to pull us off course.

And so if you can redesign your environment, whether it’s your desk at work, or your office at home, or the kitchen counter and make the actions of least resistance the good and productive ones, and increase the friction of the things that take your attention away. I think you often find those habits of attention start to be allocated to more productive areas as well. But I would probably say habits of energy and habits of attention are the two places to focus if you want to increase your work output.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Writer, Entrepreneur and Behavior Science Expert. James Clear is a writer and speaker focused on habits, decision making, and continuous improvement. He is the author of the no. 1 New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits.

Alison Beard is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review. She focuses on leadership, organizational behavior, and self-management content across its platforms and oversees the Experience section of the magazine, as well as its How I Did It and Defend Your Research departments.