Sharpen Your Habits in November with the Copyblogger Book Club

Did you ever have one of those book clubs where you spend most of your time drinking wine and talking about anything other than the book?

Yeah, we have no idea what that would be like. Ahem.

OK, OK, we admit it, the Copyblogger book club has been a little … unfocused. We’ve had lots to put together in the past months, and getting on Facebook wasn’t always at the top of the to-do list.

But, as luck would have it, James Clear has written a genuinely useful new book about improving habits.

So, because we enjoy being meta at Copyblogger, we’re going to use James’s habits book to tighten up our book club habit!

Yes, our November book club book is Atomic Habits by James Clear. It’s smart, it’s thoughtful, and it’s full of solid, pragmatic advice.

“… the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom”

That’s one of many quotes I copied out from Atomic Habits, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a few things in their life they’d like to improve.

If you have a book club habit that you’ve been trying to get going, but so far you haven’t made the progress you want … James has very specific suggestions.

To get started, just hop into our Facebook group and look for the announcement at the top of the group.

(If you hate Facebook, we get it. In my experience, groups are the best thing there at the moment. So if you’re willing to dip a toe in, you might find you enjoy the platform a lot more if you mainly stick to a handful of good groups.)

We’re going to be looking at James’s four areas of focus for improving habits.

1. How can I make it obvious?
2. How can I make it attractive?
3. How can I make it easy?
4. How can I make it satisfying?

If you’ve read other good books on habits, James has distilled a lot of that advice into this book — but for me it feels fresh and helpful. James has also identified lots of ways to troubleshoot problems we run into when improving our habits.

So if you want to write more often, improve your exercise routine, eat better food, be nicer to your family / pets / colleagues, or improve any other habit, come hang out with us! It’s free, and the group is genuinely supportive and nice.

Important Note: To keep spammers away, there are three questions you need to answer to get into the group. The team deletes join requests from folks who don’t answer the questions. You won’t be graded on your answers, we promise, but they do have to be there.

Whether or not you join us (we would love to have you in the conversation), do yourself a favor and pick up the book. It’s a strong, useful distillation of a lot of research and sound advice, and I think you’ll get a lot out of it.