Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

by Gretchen Rubin

The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.

Make it easy to do right, and hard to go wrong.

With “if-then” planning, we try to plan for every habit challenge that might arise, so we don’t make decisions in the heat of the moment—we’ve already decided how to behave.

“What I do most days matters more than what I do once in a while.”

A study showed that when people were trying to form habits, perfect compliance wasn’t necessary, but the earliest repetitions of the habit helped most to establish it. With time, the gains became smaller. The bottom

Once a good behavior is broken, we act as though it doesn’t matter whether it’s broken by a little or a lot.

any one instance of an action is almost meaningless; yet at the same time, the sum of those actions is very meaningful.

The habit of the habit is more important than the habit itself.

a Secret of Adulthood: To keep going, I sometimes need to allow myself to stop.

sources of intrinsic motivation: