Something to readGetting ahead
The Power of Habit
A journalist's book on how habits form, and how to rework one by changing only its routine
Why it’s worth your time
If a work habit keeps beating your willpower, The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg, offers a way to take it apart instead of fighting it. He treats a habit as a loop, with something that sets it off and a payoff at the end, and shows how to find both in your own day. He applies the same lens to companies, which can make it useful for team routines as well as your own.
Finding what sets off a habit
The book · About 6 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read the reader's guide at the back first.
The appendix, A Reader's Guide to Using These Ideas, sets out the book's method in about a dozen pages, and Duhigg posts it free as a PDF on his site; he calls it a place to start. Then go back to the chapters that interest you; part two is about habits inside companies.
- Note five things when the urge hits.
Pick one work habit you'd like to change, such as checking the news after every meeting. For three days, each time the urge comes, write down where you are, the time, how you feel, who's around and what you just did. Look for the one that repeats.
Good moments for this: when the same afternoon detour keeps happeningbefore trying to change a team routinewhen a new routine at work keeps losing to an old one
Keep going with Truest
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
A meeting wrapping up, a message sent, a file uploaded: the moment just after one task can be when the urge arrives. Duhigg counts the action right before a habit as one of his five kinds of cue.
What might make this harder
Note only the time and what you'd just done, for a single day.
Questions people ask
What is The Power of Habit about?
A 2012 book by the journalist Charles Duhigg on how habits form and change in individuals, companies and societies. Built from research and case studies, among them Procter & Gamble and Alcoa, it argues that habits can be changed once you understand how they work.
What is the habit loop?
Duhigg's picture of a habit: a cue that sets it off, a routine you carry out, and a reward at the end, which over time runs almost without thought. In his account, wanting the reward is what drives it.
How do I change a bad habit at work?
Work out what sets it off and what it gives you, then plan a different routine for the same moment that gives you something similar. Writing the plan down, the moment and the new routine, can make it easier to follow.
What is a keystone habit?
Duhigg's term for a habit that, once changed, tends to set off changes in others. His main example is Alcoa, where a new chief executive set out to change how employees approached worker safety, which in Duhigg's account led to wider changes across the company.
What it says, and how it holds up
In Duhigg's telling, drawn from neuroscience research he traces to MIT, a cue sets the habit off, a routine follows, and a reward closes it, with a craving for that reward holding the loop together. The change he recommends keeps a habit's cue and its reward and swaps the routine between them. The book follows that idea from individuals into companies and then into whole societies.
The reader's guide at the back shows the method on Duhigg himself. He had a habit of walking to the cafeteria every afternoon for a cookie. The guide has you test other rewards in its place, such as a walk, an apple or a chat at a colleague's desk, checking fifteen minutes later whether the urge is still there, and Duhigg's own tests showed the cookie wasn't the point. It was the break and the company, and the cue was the time, around half past three. So the plan became a ten-minute chat with a friend at that hour. It didn't stick at once, he admits, but after a few weeks it ran on its own.
The appendix's four steps are built for changing a loop that already exists. If what you want is a behavior you've never had, such as speaking up early in meetings, there's no old routine to swap. The book's second chapter takes up creating new habits, and BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits, which starts from a very small new behavior attached to something you already do, can be a good next read for that.
Bill Miller, a pastor, recommended it in the Journal of Applied Christian Leadership with reservations: Duhigg sometimes uses habit and addiction as if they were the same thing, without engaging the wider literature on the difference, and his remedies aren't a cure for everything. From the field, the 40 percent figure the book cites for how much of daily life runs on habit comes from Wendy Wood's research, and her own book, Good Habits, Bad Habits (2019), puts more weight on the setting around a habit than on the reward. Once a routine is set, making the old one harder to reach and the new one easier may do more than chasing the payoff.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.