Balancing atomic habits with a deep focus to accomplish big projects.

The book Atomic Habits by James Clear is a beautiful piece of literature that helps us see how small actions compound into lasting change. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport brings the other half — how to defend long blocks of focused attention for the kind of work that consumes a lot of energy, like a big research project.

Today I want to think out loud with you about work-life balance and how these two ideas combine. The outcomes I am hoping you leave with are:

• How to combine Atomic Habits and Deep Focus to tackle big projects.
• A new perspective towards reaching big goals — without the pressure of constant Herculean effort.

This post is part of a series of reflections about ideas and techniques that are useful in my work nowadays. These are the things I wanted to know when I started my academic career seven years ago. The series is not about me — it is about how I can help you. Please feel free to suggest anything you are struggling with right now in your career. I would be delighted to bring insights, or at least dig into the papers and books that address it.

Two books, one system

In 2022 I first picked up Atomic Habits. I read it on repeat because I found it absolutely amazing — it felt like Clear was talking directly to me. At that stage I was a few months into my PhD, excited and motivated to get results and fulfil my academic expectations. The stories in the book let me immerse myself in this new idea of tackling big projects through small, consistent habits. But, honestly, I kept asking myself:

“Would this actually get me the results I want? Am I capable of finishing big projects with daily habits alone?

The belief that held me back

Those questions came from a belief that I needed to make a Herculean effort on every project until it was perfect. You are probably already thinking poor Gabriel — that man had no work balance. You would be right.

That belief had me working through weekends and overnight until the problem matched my own definition of perfect — which usually took a very long time to satisfy. It is uncomfortable to write this in public because it was such a deep belief that I did not even know a different way was possible. I cannot imagine living that way today.

While I write these words, I am reflecting on how I felt back then and how much pressure I put on myself to be perfect, working nights and nights to get the job done. In a way, it served a purpose — I delivered multiple projects. But I did not feel genuinely fulfilled. That gap is what motivated me to keep learning and adapting my strategies, so I could finish good work and enjoy the other parts of my life that matter to me.

A five-minute thesis experiment

The first project where I tried this new skill was my PhD thesis. I love going to the gym to lift, so I stacked the new habit onto an old one: after the 9 am lift, I would write as much as I could for five minutes. That is it. Five minutes.

It was not as easy as it sounds. The first two days I did it. The third day I had a meeting I could not miss, and the streak broke. The day after, I started again. My consistency looked roughly like the figure below.

I needed to be more consistent at the start, and the chart highlights exactly that — but it also shows enough hope to believe a streak was possible. I was not happy in the middle of this stretch. I was being hard on myself, which never helps. Then, after a few months, I experienced something James Clear had warned me about:

“We often expect progress to be linear. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realise the true value of the previous work. This is the valley of disappointment — but the work was not wasted. It was simply being stored.

The valley of disappointment

He was talking directly to me, and I needed to do something about it. So I stayed in the journey. Eventually I could start my day and automatically write a few words in the thesis document. My introduction was ready. The literature review was ready. The joy of seeing that first chunk of the thesis was indescribable, and it motivated me to take on bigger blocks of writing time.

Adding deep work to the habit

That motivation pulled me into Cal Newport’s Deep Work — a real eye-opener. His suggestion to isolate yourself for hours of deep work mapped perfectly onto the habit I was building. The other half — avoid shallow work — meant treating reactive tasks like email differently. The point of avoiding constant inbox checks is that the time you reclaim can be poured into the hard task you have been protecting. That gained time felt like a fresh breeze of joy.

I immediately started to adapt the schedule and remove distractions in every way I could: changing when I started, turning off notifications on my phone entirely, refusing to check email every five seconds. Combining deep focus with the atomic-habits frame helped enormously. I still apply it on every project I work on today.

A surprising result of this journey is that I now love writing — to the point that I am writing blog posts about writing. I used to hate writing as an undergraduate; even a few sentences felt like a fight. The strategies above completely changed my perspective and turned the PhD into something I enjoyed working on.

Four principles that actually stuck

• Be compassionate with yourself. Do not feel bad for missing a streak. Restarting is part of the protocol.
• Redefine success. Raise the bar on what counts as failure. If failure means “I did not learn anything from the experience”, you can never fail. More attempts = more experience = more eventual wins.
• Remove distractions. Phone notifications, email pings, browser tabs. Each removed distraction returns time you can spend on what matters.
• Respect your time. Get serious about the boundary. Reframing failure was the single thing that changed the most for me.