Atomic Habits

How can tiny changes lead to remarkable results? That’s the question James Clear asks in his book Atomic Habits, which we read for our first PGP project, and I mean first. But you’re probably wondering, what is PGP and why have you waited until grade 10 to make a blog post on it? Even if you aren’t, I’ll tell you anyways.

PGP isn’t technically new; it’s been part of PLP for a while now, just not as a formal class. PGP stands for Personal Growth Plan, and if my timetable is to be believed, it is the PLP-ified version of Career Life Education¹. Despite what you might expect, our first PGP project had pretty much nothing to do with career planning and the like. Instead, we spent our last project trying to become responsible learners and build better habits. Of course, now that PGP has a full class in our schedules, this project was a full-blown… well, project.

This project had two main products. Our learning intentions for the year and an “Artifact” based off of Atomic Habits. Given that around 75%² of the project relied on understanding the book, we had to start reading pretty quickly. Overall, Atomic Habits was a decent book, one of the better books we’ve read for PLP. It has some good information and isn’t particularly long ( around 4-6 hours to read )³. I’ll spare you the details of me sitting around highlighting an ePub, and most of the in-class activities that we’re either reviewing or expanding on the book. Here are some key points from what we learned if you haven’t already read the book.

1. Habits usually follow the loop of “Cue → Craving → Response → Reward”
   • To build new habits, you can translate this into making habits: obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
   • To break a bad habit, invert these to make it: invisible, unattractive, difficult, and unsatisfying.
2. Small incremental improvements can compound over time
   • A 1% improvement every day leads to long term gain.
   • A 1% deterioration is more relatively harmful than improvement or stasis.
3. Systems are more important than goals.
   • Habits are based on goals or results can be discouraging when those goals are not found, and if they are met, habits can easily stop.
   • Systems allow for consistent growth, reduced pressure, flexibility, and are more about long term success.
4. Identity based habits are more effective than outcome based habits.
   • Your actions are based on who you believe you are
   • Changing who you believe you are leads to the habits associated to be stronger.
   • “I want to write a book” vs “I’m a writer”

Once we had finished reading, we started to work on an “Artifact”, as well as our learning intentions. Let’s tackle the learning intentions first, because the artifact is going to be a lot to cover.

Our learning intentions consisted of two parts: the intentions themselves, which would later become a Vision Mission Values document, and a “Pop Art” representing our goals for the year.

The pop art was supposed to be done in the Photos app with the Markup tool, but this presented some problems. First, and let me be very clear with this one: Apple Notes is NOT a drawing app. Apple’s own documentation suggests its uses as “Sketch in your documents” and “Annotate photos”. Markup lacks many of the features customary to digital drawing programs and is a pain to use. Secondly: Markup is glitchy as hell. Line weight is often inconsistent with pressure, lines are jittery and hard to control, basic functionality like undo and erasing routinely breaks, and saving anything more complex than a simple doodle is like gambling on whether or not the app will delete all your progress. ⁴

After having lost more than 3 attempts at making my pop art to Apple’s monstrosity, I finally switched to a proper drawing app and made this:

My symbols of choice we’re a (ironically messy ) folder to represent organization, A rising sun to represent preparation, and gears to represent time management systems. The intention that came along was originally a paragraph, but we later had to redo it as a Vision mission values document, as the paragraphs lacked a bit of direction. The artifact and VMV made up one part of what we would need for our PrePol night, so now its time for the other part:

The Artifact

Almost immediately after finishing the book, we started planning our artifact. Some people immediately had ideas, but I was stuck. All I had was a concept of making some sort of web app, but what that app would be and how it would work was still beyond me. After a bit of thought, I came up with the general concept of a task management tool too. My first concept was something that broke tasks down into smaller, digestible pieces. This idea then morphed into a habit tracker / todo list app. With this, I started on my first proper design and sketched a sort of main page in Figma.

In this, you can see some of the main concepts I had. My idea consisted of 3 parts: Habits would be a standard tracker for long-term habits, Tasks is your run-of-the-mill to-do list for convenience’s sake, and Sprints is a sort of gamified process for temporary habits, or habit formation. I also thought it would be nice to group habits and tasks by categories. Having finished this design, I quickly realized that it was a lot to do in the roughly 1 week we had until prePOLs.⁵ I decided to only focus on one part of the app, the Sprints. Sprints was based off a few other habit games and draws its heaviest inspiration from Zen Habits, by Leo Babauta⁶, one part of which talks about a game where you try to stick to a habit for a month or so, gaining points every day which are reset at the end of the week. I saw this as an interesting device to build habits, and based my version of the game off that. I wanted the potential for a longer timeframe than the 1 month the book suggested, so I removed the weekly score reset to create a better sense of growth and long-term progress. Some other things I wanted to add included habit stacking and temptation bundling, daily reflections, as well as prompts to help make your habits more specific, and even add an identity aspect. This is the flowchart I made for the basic habit creation and tracking flow which informed the rest of the design. (It also includes a concept for an in-task pomodoro-like mode which was also scrapped for complexity. )

I also planned out a flow for creating specific habits, although it is missing some prompts for making habits more identity-based. You can click through the Figma prototype here, which also includes an early dashboard idea.

With a plan and a dream I started implementing basic frontend, but I quickly ran into a problem: I actually needed to make my app work. As pretty as a nice frontend might be, I needed an app that stored habits and could retrieve them wherever the user logged in. ⁷ This meant one thing: databases. I had to scrap most of what I had already made and start again with a base. I used React for this project, so there were plenty of tutorials, templates, and examples which helped me get a basic project ready for auth and a database. Even with this, I had no clue how databases worked or how to implement one.

I started off trying to use Supabase as my provider as it had auth built-in. Unfortunately, I got stuck in setup, which led me to try Neon + Prisma as a provider and wrapper. This also ended poorly, though, so I went back to Supabase, where I would stay. I ended up spending around half of the time working on the site, just getting database and auth working. Auth was especially difficult as I wanted to use Google, because most people don’t have GitHub, but this required setting up a Google dev space and a whole bunch of other stuff that took a very long time. Even though I spent way too much time on this, I wasn’t able to get to all my planned features.⁸

Ironically, not even better time management or effective work habits could have saved this from the plague of scope creep. With that in mind, there is a version live here that you can log into, make habits in, and check them off ( although the stats might not update properly ). If you don’t want to look at the actual site, here are some screenshots.

Despite all the time I spent making my artifact, I did spend the majority of my prePOL on my VMV, but otherwise, everything went well. The demo worked fine, and despite it being a bit broken, I’m still kinda happy with what I was able to get done in a limited timeframe, using new tools.

This project was really an example of the dangers of overscoping projects and underestimating time cost. Either way, I learnt quite a few new things, from James Clear’s lessons in Atomic Habits to how to set up and use a Supabase database. I also now have a set of goals and habits I can follow moving forward in grade 10. This is only the first of many PGP projects, and I’m interested to see where things go next.

Once again, this post is getting too long for it’s own good so I’ll cut things off here. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next post.