The key to establishing the right priorities in your life.

Information on how to optimise ourselves, performance and indeed lives has never been more abundant or easy to come by. But why, when we know or can find out effective workouts, diets or morning routines, do we struggle so hard to pick the right ones for us, or, when we do, follow them?

“We are more likely to fall into behaviours that are obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying,” says Mr James Clear, author of new book Atomic Habits. For example, your smartphone is almost always within reach and therefore obvious; it requires only a press or two of your thumb for an attractive and satisfying dopamine hit from social media or emails. Good intentions meanwhile often fail for precisely the opposite reasons: “Behaviours that are invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying are unlikely to stick.”

But what does the title of Mr Clear’s book actually mean? Habits, he says, are “mental shortcuts that allow you to get to a solution with less effort and attention”. (Research suggests that 40 per cent of our daily actions are on autopilot.) “Atomic” meanwhile is used to mean “small” behavioural changes that, over time, can have a powerful impact – as Mr Clear’s own trajectory demonstrates. After being accidentally struck by a flying baseball bat in high school, he was placed in a medically induced coma and, over months of rehabilitation, relearnt basic functions such as walking in a straight line.

The good habit of forming good habits that he acquired during rehab served Mr Clear well at college, where he went to bed early, kept his room tidy and lifted weights. In his first year, he earned straight As; by the time he graduated, he’d been awarded his university’s loftiest academic prize and named in the ESPN Academic All-American Team. In 2012, Mr Clear began writing about his experiments in habit-forming at jamesclear.com, which now counts millions of monthly visitors and 500,000 subscribers to his weekly newsletter; he has had articles published in Time, Entrepreneur and Forbes, while his methods – also imparted via his Habits Academy training platform – have been adopted by team leaders from the world of business to the NFL, NBA and MLB.

If you assume that highly successful people such as Mr Clear must possess uncommon discipline, you’re giving them too much credit. “It’s not that they are trying harder, it’s that they are tempted less,” he says. “Redesign your environment so you face fewer temptations. Remove sweets from your kitchen. Take the television out of your bedroom. Leave your phone in another room while you work.” While Mr Clear wrote Atomic Habits, his personal assistant reset all his boss’ social media passwords every Monday, only revealing them on Friday. (Ask friends, family or colleagues to oblige.)

As a rule of thumb, if you want to avoid doing something, create friction; if you want to do something, remove it (friction, not the thumb, though that would certainly cut your smartphone use). One of Mr Clear’s favourite strategies for the latter is to scale down the desired behaviour so that it only takes two minutes: read a single page, take out your yoga mat, fold one pair of socks. Once you’ve started, it’s much easier to continue, and besides, you can’t optimise a habit that doesn’t exist: first, you have to establish it.

Make it easier to start something, and you will have a higher chance of continuing whatever it may be. (Habit tracking, even if as rudimentary as marking an X on the calendar, makes any behaviour more obvious, attractive and satisfying.) You also reinforce your new identity, says Mr Clear: “In the beginning, we’re so focused on finding the best diet plan or the ideal workout programme or the perfect business idea that we get locked into this all-or-nothing mentality and fail to learn the most basic and important thing: how to show up each day.”

Mr Clear’s “cardinal rule of behaviour change” is that what is immediately rewarded is repeated; what is immediately punished is avoided. Alas, good behaviours such as going to the gym often take time to pay off, while bad ones like smoking cost little, money aside, in the short term. So up the ante. Every time you work out, transfer £5 into a savings account for new clothes or a holiday. Every time you light up, give £5 to a friend. The reward or punishment doesn’t have to be financial, but money talks persuasively.

All habits will slip every now and then, but Mr Clear’s mantra is “never miss twice”: if you binge-eat, ensure your next meal is healthy; if you skip a morning meditation, reinstate your starter for Zen tomorrow without fail. Atomic habits can be destructive, too: “It's never the first mistake that ruins you. It’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows.”

Atomic Habits (Random House Business) by Mr James Clear is out now