There were a couple of good things in here but it mostly didn't work for me due to medical issues. But, I can see the advice working for a lot of people! 😊

While I appreciated the thought process surrounding this book, I would have liked a format that spoke more specifically and in chapter form about what tactics work best for each of the Four Tendencies. Better still, to do a more thorough job of grouping Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel with Lark/Owl, Starter/Finisher, Competitive/Non-Competitive, Over-Buyer/Under-Buyer, etc.This book felt more about Gretchen and her family than it did about actually coming up with strategies for people t...

27 July 2015I'm a big sucker for time management and self-improvement books, but style of this one made me gag a little. Rubin tells a story about a woman who was robbed, and when the thieves forced her to open her safe it contained her jewelry, cash, and chocolate. She explained to the robbers it was so she wouldn't be tempted to eat more than a little at a time.Should you have a safe, a job as a TV show runner, and an overflowing bucket of privilege, you may find Rubin's writing style is for y...

This is a book that I read slowly, re-reading sections, underlining passages, absorbing. Gretchen Rubin's take on habits is fresh, wise, and utterly engaging. Better Than Before will have a profound effect in my life, and truly, it already is. I will regularly re-read highlighted passages and will likely post several in places I'm sure to see them daily.

In Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin discusses habits as “the invisible architecture of daily life.” As life is made up of seconds, “how we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.”By choosing the habits we create, we consciously decide how we spend our lives. We eliminate time wasted on indecision because we already made the commitment early on. Once we establish our habits, our time and energy can be used for the activities that make our lives meaningful. As Rubin states “A habit requires...

How we spend our time is how we spend our life. Quite a few years ago I had a temporary job working as an assistant to the owner and principal attorney of an estate planning law firm. One of my tasks was to fetch his lunch every day from the deli off the office building lobby. There were two things I could bring him, the exact same options always: a particular sandwich or a particular salad, both of which they offered every day, and he didn’t care which it was, plus a certain V8 beverage. He did...

This is such a wonderful and inspiring book. Gretchen Rubin's advice seems to find me just when I need it most.Better Than Before is all about our daily habits and how we can improve them. Rubin describes habits as "the invisible architecture" of our life. "We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives."She writes that if we practice good habits, it can reduce stress and increase your produ...

Should've been subtitled "First World Problems."Unscientific, clichéed twaddle wrapped up in the usual publishing/lifestyle guru gimmick. Branded. A vanity project from a bored dilettante (and 1%er, to boot). The author comes across as exhausting and insufferable. I didn't actually finish the book (taking the advice she gives in her podcast to stop reading books you don't like! Zing!); it became unbearable. I came here to read reviews to see if I was crazy.One thing I did get out of it, though:

I have to confess that I have this really bad habit of reading self help books. I am really grateful for this book because it just made crystal clear how incredibly banal and superfluous this book is, along with trying to learn anything from the utterly materially privileged life, as well as the perfectionist best but boring girl in the class attitude of Rubin. Which is quite symptomatic of this genre, I have FINALLY understood, even if I quite liked the brilliant and fun business idea of Eat Pr...

I received an advance copy of this ebook from NetGalley.I wanted to love this book. I read it very quickly, which is why it got the third star. However, it just felt...all over the place. There were no tips that I felt I could apply to my own life. There was nothing life-changing. There were some interesting categorizations...Upholders and Rebels and Obligers and all that. I thought it was interesting to read about how different people respond to internal and external accountability. As a teache...

I don’t pay much attention to self-help literature – in fact, a book on how to deal with clutter is currently cluttering up my groaning bookshelves!But hey, it’s a new calendar year, and it seemed like a suitable time to try to break some bad habits (procrastination, unhealthy eating, lack of exercise, book and DVD clutter, unfiled paperwork) and maybe pick up some better ones. This book – by Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project – was so helpful that shortly after beginning a library

I'm going to stop reading this because I find it a bit tedious and the Charles Duhigg habit book is much more compelling right now. That said, there are some intuitive truths in here, particularly the commonsense notion that everyone's habit forming tendencies are different. At least, this validates my feelings about all those krazy articles that try to convince you that the first bite of dessert is the most satisfying so you can just take a bite and pass it along. Um, that last bite of dessert

“Better Than Before” is a book I bought, as opposed to getting at the Library. Gretchen Rubin is gifted in providing her research into the quandary of habits: good and bad. Why is it so hard to change a bad habit? Why is it difficult to successfully start a new habit? The failure of New Year Resolutions is common, but why?I loved “The Happiness Project”. This novel is just as inspiring. I’ve gained some self knowledge about why my resolutions fail, and how I can set myself up to successfully beg...