Better Than Before Quotes

“For instance, if it’s 9 a.m. and I have an appointment at 11 a.m., I’ll think ‘Oh, I have to go somewhere in two hours, so I can’t really start anything serious’ and then end up wasting my whole morning waiting for one thing to happen.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“Arranging to Fail Loophole:”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“People who feel less guilt and who show compassion toward themselves in the face of failure are better able to regain self-control, while people who feel deeply guilty and full of self-blame struggle more.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“It’s a Secret of Adulthood: The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“When the Schiphol Airport put the image of a housefly above the drains of urinals, men began to aim at it—a change that reduced spillage rates by 80 percent. “Gamification” is used in the design of devices and apps to help people improve their habits.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“For this reason, we should pay close attention to the convenience of any activity we want to make into a habit.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“Like Dr. Johnson, I’m an Abstainer: I find it far easier to give up something altogether than to indulge moderately. And this distinction has profound implications for habits.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“Jamie has a transition habit when he comes home from work. He gives everyone a hello kiss, then disappears for twenty minutes or so. He changes out of his suit, sends one last round of emails, glances at a magazine, and then he’s ready to join the family.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“He gave his assistant a stamped, addressed envelope with a check he’d written to an “anti-charity,” an organization whose policies he passionately opposes, with the instruction to mail the check if he had a drink before the time was up.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“Then I wonder if some people need a coach more than a therapist,” I said, thinking of Obligers.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“When scheduling a new habit, it helps to tie it to an existing habit, such as “after breakfast,” or to an external cue, such as “when my alarm rings,”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“An unmade bed is a common broken window, which is why “Make the bed” is one of the most popular happiness-project resolutions, and in fact, as Charles Duhigg points out in his fascinating book The Power of Habit, the habit of bed making is correlated with a sense of greater well-being and higher productivity.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“When you cannot express it in number, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“In their thought-provoking book Focus, researchers Tory Higgins and Heidi Grant Halvorson argue that people lean toward being “promotion-focused” or “prevention-focused” in their aims.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“novelty. I’m definitely in the familiarity camp. I love to reread my favorite books and to watch movies over and over. I eat the same foods, more or less, every day. I like returning to places I’ve visited before. Other people thrive on doing new things. For familiarity lovers, a habit becomes easier as it becomes familiar. When I felt intimidated by the library when I started law school, I made myself walk through it a few times each day until I felt comfortable enough to work there. When I started blogging, my unfamiliarity with the mechanics of posting made me dread it. But I forced myself to post every day so that the foreign became familiar, and the difficult became automatic. Novelty lovers may embrace habits more readily when they seem less … habit-like. A guy told me, “I feel stale when I go to work every day and see the same faces all the time, so once a week I work in a different satellite office, to shake thing up.” In”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“Obligers may find it difficult to form a habit, because often we undertake habits for our own benefit, and Obligers do things more easily for others than for themselves. For them, the key is external accountability.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“Habit makes it dangerously easy to become numb to our own existence.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“making. A habit requires no decision from me, because I’ve already decided.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“Researchers were surprised to find,” write Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their fascinating book Willpower, “that people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people did.… people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work.” In other words, habits eliminate the need for self-control.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“The Strategy of Scheduling is a powerful weapon against procrastination. Because of tomorrow logic, we tend to feel confident that we’ll be productive and virtuous—tomorrow. (The word “procrastinate” comes from cras, the Latin word for “tomorrow.”) In one study, when subjects made a shopping list15 for what they’d eat in a week, more chose a healthy snack instead of an unhealthy snack; when asked what they’d choose now, more people chose the unhealthy over the healthy snack. As St. Augustine famously prayed, “Grant me chastity and continency,16 only not yet.” Tomorrow.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: How to Make and Break Habits - and Build a Happier Life from the no.1 New York Times Bestselling Queen of Self-Help

“Read the news every morning" or "Call one client each day" are easy to monitor, while vague resolutions such as "Be more informed" or "Cultivate better client relationships" are hard to monitor....Accurate monitoring helps determine whether a habit is worth the time, money, or energy it consumes.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

“These tasks weren't urgent (which was the reason they didn't get done), but because they weighed on my mind, they sapped my energy.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

“Audiences = expectations. If he thinks you're not watching, he won't need to rebel against your expectations.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

“Obligers may find it difficult to form a habit, because often we undertake habits for our own benefit, and Obligers do things more easily for others than for themselves. For them, the key is external accountability.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

“a stumble may be helpful, because it shows me where I need to concentrate my efforts in order to do better next time.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

“there is no Future-Gretchen, only Now-Gretchen.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

“Upholders may struggle in situations where expectations aren't clear or the rules aren't established. They may feel compelled to meet expectations, even ones that seem pointless. They may feel uneasy when they know they're breaking the rules, even unnecessary rules, unless they work out a powerful justification to do so.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

“We can build our habits only on the foundation of our own nature.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I’ve never forgotten: “Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life

“I feel too anxious to tackle my bad habits, but my bad habits are what make me anxious.”
― Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life