Atomic Habits · IN SHORT
Use the Atomic Habits skill to connect an everyday behaviour with a clear cue, a small starting action and a weekly review. It examines the surroundings and reward instead of treating every missed attempt as a lack of willpower.
Your brief
After the final meeting, a fictional user repeatedly refreshes the inbox. A possible replacement starts with writing one task for tomorrow, then closing email.
Possible draft
A visible card supplies a cue. The weekly review asks whether this helped the person finish work, rather than assuming the routine has already become a habit.
01 / THE FOUNDATION
The plan covers identity, cue, craving, response and reward, with practical changes based on the four laws of the framework.
02 / SEE HOW IT WORKS
After the final meeting, a fictional user repeatedly refreshes the inbox. A possible replacement starts with writing one task for tomorrow, then closing email.
A visible card supplies a cue. The weekly review asks whether this helped the person finish work, rather than assuming the routine has already become a habit.
There is no universal habit-formation deadline or promised rate of improvement. The skill designs a routine; it does not carry it out or track it automatically.
03 / GET STARTED
Describe the cue, craving, response and reward without blaming yourself.
Apply the four laws and choose a first action that takes two minutes.
Use an existing routine as the cue, then review what helped and what needs adjusting.
04 / MAKE IT YOURS
The English ZIP contains the SKILL.md instructions and is free to download without an account. The file declares the MIT licence; retain its source and licence notices when adapting or sharing it. Need help applying this skill? Book a call.
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File language: English
Explore the details at your own pace.
You describe the habit you want to build or want rid of, and what you get back is not a pep talk but a system: an identity claim, your own habit loop pulled apart into cue, craving, response and reward, the four laws of behaviour change turned into behaviour for tomorrow morning, a habit stack on a habit you already have, and a warning about the dip that arrives around day twenty to forty. That last part is not a footnote. It is exactly where most people stop.
the lines above come from the zip on this page · SKILL.md is 9,281 bytes
This is the worked example that sits literally in the SKILL.md, shortened here. Watch the first line of the answer: what comes out is not a goal but an identity. Everything that follows is derived from that one sentence.
The AI Atomic Habits Coach is a free skill from the skill library of TheSEO. A skill is an instruction file, SKILL.md, that gives an AI assistant a fixed method for one kind of question. Not software you install, no subscription, no link to an app: one text file of 1,590 words that tells Claude how to apply the habit framework of James Clear to your situation, in which order it does that, and where it has to stop. You download the zip at the top of this page, put the folder in your AI environment, and from that moment on Claude answers habit questions according to this logic instead of with the first motivational text that comes to hand.
The problem the skill solves is familiar enough. You want to get up earlier, scroll less, exercise more often or finally finish that book, and you start with plenty of energy. Two weeks later it is gone, and the conclusion you draw is about yourself: apparently I have too little discipline. The framework turns that round. You are not broken, your system is broken. The cue is invisible, the friction is too high, the reward comes too late, and nobody warned you about the phase in which the work is being done but there is still nothing to see.
The skill is meant for personal use: someone who wants to build or drop a habit and would rather have a system for it than encouragement. The frontmatter itself names the openings on which Claude picks it up, and that is a broad list: from "I want to build a habit", "how do I stop doing X" and "habit stacking" to sighs such as "I cannot keep going", "I fall back into old patterns", "stop scrolling", "get up earlier" and "deep work routine". Say something like that to Claude while the skill is loaded and you get it automatically, without having to remember a command.
It belongs to the skill library of 100 free skills that we make available from the AI and automation service, with no account and no sales email afterwards. If you are not sure yet what a skill is, start at what Claude skills are. Want to write such a file yourself, then writing a SKILL.md explains the structure you see in this very file.
One thing up front, because the skill says it too: this is not therapy and not a magic potion. It calls Atomic Habits literally an operational framework leaning on behavioural psychology, and it forbids Claude to turn it into pseudo-science. If there is a deeper problem underneath, it does not build a habit plan that tidies the symptom away, but points you on.
It states a position at the top and holds on to it for the rest of the file: goals lose to systems, and identity comes before behaviour. Read that as a working instruction and not as a slogan, because it literally decides the first question you get. Not: what do you want to achieve. But: who do you want to become.
The difference is in the sentence you say to yourself. The example the file itself uses is that of someone quitting smoking. "No thanks, I do not smoke" is an identity claim. "No thanks, I am trying to quit" is a goal claim, and that second sentence leaves the behaviour hanging in mid-air: you are still a smoker gritting their teeth. In the output of the skill the identity claim therefore sits at the top, in one sentence, in the first person and in the present tense. Everything below it has to fit.
A goal is also an end point, and a habit is not. Anyone who loses weight to hit a goal falls back afterwards into the behaviour that put the weight on. Someone who sees themselves as a person who respects their own body has no end point at all, only a direction. So it asks explicitly for wording at that level, and not for figures at all.
The second reason systems win: scale. The framework counts on small, repeated improvements, the familiar 1 per cent better a day, which compounds over time. That suddenly makes the size of your opening ambition unimportant and repeatability decisive. Hence the two-minute rule further on: better a habit so small that it can hardly fail than an ambition that holds out for three days.
And the third reason is the reason most people drop out: results lag behind behaviour. The plateau briefing further on, in section 03, is about precisely that. Without that warning up front you read the silence in week four as proof that it is not working, while the proof is simply not visible yet.
For anyone who wants to apply this line of thinking more widely than habits: the SMART goals coach sits on exactly the other side of this debate and sharpens goals instead of replacing them. Using both is fine, as long as you know which tool you are holding. And if the habit you are building is learning something properly, the AI Feynman Technique Coach is the method that tests whether you really understand it.
Every habit, good or bad, runs the same four links. Before it changes a thing, the skill maps those links, because you can only rebuild a loop once you know which part you are taking hold of. Below them sit the four laws attached to those links, in two directions: building up and breaking down.
A skill is no more than its instructions, so we simply describe them here. The file opens with frontmatter: name, version 1.0.0, MIT licence and a long description that decides when Claude picks the skill up. Then comes the role: a coach who applies the framework of James Clear from Atomic Habits (Avery, 2018), holding on to three convictions. Goals lose to systems, identity comes before behaviour, and 1 per cent better a day delivers exponential gains over time.
The core consists of four ideas. Identity-based habits, the habit loop with four links, the four laws of behaviour change in two directions, and the plateau of latent potential. Those four do not just pass by as theory, they decide the structure of the answer you get.
The method counts six steps, in order, with no skipping. Step 1 establishes the identity: who do you want to be in essence, and that gets written down literally in the output. Step 2 is the diagnosis of your existing loop, written out as a table with four columns. Step 3 turns the four laws into concrete actions, and the file is strict about that: no vague advice, but workable behaviour for tomorrow morning.
Step 4 is habit stacking with the formula after this existing habit I will do that new habit, because an existing habit already runs automatically and can therefore serve as a cue. Step 5 is the plateau briefing, with the days attached. Step 6 agrees a weekly review with three questions: what worked, what did not, what will you do differently this week.
The output format is fixed. Inside it sits a complete template with fixed headings in a fixed order: Identity, Loop diagnosis as a table, The Four Laws applied with a subheading per law, Habit stack, Plateau warning and Weekly review with three lines to fill in. That way you get the same kind of document for every question, and not a list one time and an essay the next. Under that template sits the full worked example that you see shortened in FIG.01 above.
Then comes the part that most decides how the coach sounds. Be direct and concrete, avoid vague motivation. Address the user on their identity, not on their willpower. Never give plans longer than two weeks. Point to the book when someone wants to go deeper, because a book summary in the chat is not the intention. And on relapse: never shame, a relapse is data. Ask what the cue was, how the surroundings should have looked and what friction was at play, and only then adjust the system, not the goal.
Right at the end it names four sources it leans on. Deliberately so: you can read them and decide for yourself whether you agree with them. They are set out below in DOC.04.
Step 5 of the skill consists of nothing but a warning, and it is the step that makes the difference between a plan that lasts and a plan that dies in week four. Results are a lagging indicator of habits: you are doing the work long before you see anything come back. Its own name for that period is the valley of disappointment, and it says roughly where that valley sits.
What the skill does here is strikingly simple and yet rare: it tells you in advance that it is going to disappoint. Not as an excuse afterwards but as part of the plan, with the days attached, so the dip becomes an expected part of the system instead of proof that you cannot keep it up again. Anyone who thinks on day 28 that it is not working is right about what they see and wrong about what is happening.
The source list in the file counts four titles, and together they explain why the skill does what it does. They are not there for show: the file says explicitly that this is not a magic potion but an accessible synthesis of existing behavioural research.
James Clear, Atomic Habits (Avery, 2018), is the main source. From that book come the four laws, the idea that identity comes before behaviour, habit stacking, the two-minute rule and the plateau of latent potential. Clear did not write a scientific work but a practical framework, and it is that practical form which makes him suitable to pour into an instruction file: every part is an action.
Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit (Random House, 2012), supplies the loop. Duhigg popularised the thought that behaviour sits in a recognisable cycle you can take apart and rebuild. The diagnosis table in step 2 of the skill is directly derived from it: first make the loop visible, only then intervene.
BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits (Houghton Mifflin, 2019), supplies the small step. Fogg researched at Stanford how behaviour comes about and arrived at shrinking the action instead of raising the motivation. Which is precisely what the two-minute rule does. To use the model behind that thinking on its own, there is a separate Fogg behaviour model coach skill for it, which splits behaviour into motivation, ability and prompt.
B.F. Skinner supplies the foundation. His classic work on operant conditioning explains why the fourth link, the reward, closes the loop and strengthens the behaviour. It also explains why the skill is so strict at law 4 about which reward you choose: a reward that contradicts your identity strengthens the wrong loop.
What is deliberately absent is at least as relevant. Nowhere does it claim success rates, no number of days after which a habit would supposedly become automatic, and no research figures about who keeps it up and who does not. We do not adopt any either. What you get is a framework with a provenance, not a promise with a number.
At the bottom of the SKILL.md sits a block of principles for the coach. Six of them limit what it may do: four are worded literally as prohibitions, one is a referral that weighs heaviest in practice, and one restricts what the skill says about the source itself. In conversation those rules play out like this: on the left what you could ask, on the right what the skill does according to its own instructions.
The zip is 4.2 KB and contains one folder, ai-atomic-habits-coach, with the file SKILL.md inside it. Nothing else: no README, no scripts, no attachments. Installing is therefore no more than putting that folder in the right place, and that place differs per environment. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same file also works in Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI. You are not downloading a Claude file but a working instruction that any modern AI assistant can read.
~/.claude/skills/ or in .claude/skills/ inside your project./ai-atomic-habits-coach..agents/skills/ in your project, or in ~/.agents/skills/ for all your projects.AGENTS.md or pointing to it from that file. It is no longer necessary.After that, use is simple: describe the habit you want to build or want rid of, in plain language. The more concrete your situation, the more usable the diagnosis, because the skill can only take apart a loop whose parts you name. If you do not know where to start, simply name the moment: where you are, what time it is and what you did before. It asks for the rest itself.
If you get stuck on the installation itself, the full explanation per environment is in installing Claude skills. And if you want to understand why this kind of file works the way it does, what Claude skills are is the best starting point. The broader articles about working with AI are in the knowledge base.
The skill is at its strongest when you have a concrete behaviour in mind and it just will not stick. Reading every day, getting up earlier, scrolling less, exercising weekly, a fixed block for concentrated work. Right there the whole machinery comes into its own: an identity that fits, a loop you recognise, four laws you can carry out tomorrow morning and a stack that hooks onto something that already runs by itself.
It works just as well the other way round, on habits you want rid of. It then inverts the laws and looks not for more discipline but for less opportunity. Note how far that sits from the average advice: the answer to too much scrolling is rarely more willpower and usually a phone lying in the hallway at a quarter to nine.
There are also situations where you are better off leaving it alone. The first is named by the frontmatter itself: do not use it for loose motivational quotes or one-off coaching. Anyone looking for a lift gets a system here, and that feels barer than expected. The second limit is heavier. If there is a problem underneath the habit such as depression, addiction or an eating disorder, the skill refuses to build a habit plan that tidies the symptom away, and refers you to professional help. That is a limit the file draws itself and one we do not soften here.
A third limit is practical: it does not plan more than two weeks ahead. Want a plan for the whole year? Then a habit coach is the wrong tool and what you need is a goal framework instead. And the last honest limit: the skill does not change your behaviour, it designs the system in which that behaviour becomes easier. Showing up stays your job. What it does do is stop you giving up at the moment when the system was in fact already working.
If the subject fits focus better than habits, look at the Getting Things Done coach or the Eisenhower matrix coach. If it is about intentions and obstacles in advance, the WOOP method coach is the logical neighbour.
This skill is the free do-it-yourself version of how we use AI. The skill stays complete and free of catches, but understand what a skill is. It teaches your AI how to do something, while every new session starts empty. It is not the engine and it is not the memory. You prompt, you supply the context again every time, you check. Want that differently, and there are two next steps: hand over the engine, or sort out the memory.
Step 3 deserves more than a paragraph, because this is where the difference sits between a clever chat and a system you can build on. Jarvis is the organisation brain: it remembers what your AIs need to know, divides the work and keeps track of what happened. With a habit coach you feel that difference straight away, because a habit is by definition a matter of several weeks and a loose chat starts at zero every time.
We have been running our own shop on this system for months. Every agent session, every task and every decision is logged in it and can be read back afterwards. So a new session does not start blank: it first fetches the recorded decisions, the running projects and the latest changes, and picks up exactly where the last one stopped. Call that a habit at company scale rather than a promise, because it is simply how the work goes here on a Tuesday morning.
All plans are at jarvis/pricing. You pick your own plan. Paying online opens as soon as the last checks are done; until then we set your account up on request. For business agreements and bespoke work there is a conversation.
A habit rarely stands alone. An intention comes before it, a day has to be built around it, and a behaviour model sits underneath it. These are the direct neighbours from the same library, each with the reason why it belongs beside this skill.
A habit needs room in your day. These three make that room.
Getting Things Done coachGets your loose ends out of your head first, so that there is something to automate.SKILL Eisenhower matrix coachSeparates urgent from important, because habits almost always fall in the important box.SKILL Flow state coachFor the block of concentrated work you want to land the new habit in.SKILLTwo frameworks that tackle the same question differently.
Fogg behaviour model coachSplits behaviour into motivation, ability and prompt. The theory under the two-minute rule.SKILL WOOP method coachWorks with intentions and obstacles in advance, exactly where the implementation intention comes from.SKILL SMART goals coachFor when you do need a sharp goal alongside the system.SKILLHabits make sure you show up. These two decide what you do then.
Deliberate Practice coachIf the habit is practice: it designs the practice session itself, with feedback per repetition.SKILL Growth mindset coachFor the conviction under the behaviour, especially relevant around relapse.SKILLWhere this skill comes from and what else there is.
The whole skill libraryAll 100 free skills in a row, sorted by subject.HUB AI and automationThe service behind it: from separate skills to working automation.SRV AI trainingIf your team wants to learn to set up this kind of work themselves.SRV Knowledge baseArticles about SEO, AI and online visibility, searchable.DOCNothing. You download a 4.2 KB zip containing one folder and a single file, SKILL.md of 1,590 words. The frontmatter names MIT as the licence, so you may adapt the file, reuse it and even put it in your own product. No account is needed, no email address, no paid version and no sales email afterwards.
Yes. SKILL.md has been an open standard since December 2025, so the same file works in Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and other tools that follow the standard. In Codex you unzip it into .agents/skills/ in your project, or into ~/.agents/skills/ for all your projects; Codex has supported SKILL.md directly since the open standard of December 2025. Pasting the contents of SKILL.md into your AGENTS.md still works too. The instructions are plain readable text, so any assistant that accepts instruction files can handle it.
Six, and they stand as separate step headings in the file. Establish the identity, diagnose the existing habit loop, apply the four laws, stick the new habit onto an existing one with habit stacking, give the plateau briefing and agree the weekly review. The file says explicitly that you keep to that order and skip no steps.
Yes, and that is the same machinery mirrored. For building, the four laws apply: make it obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. For breaking, the skill inverts them: make it invisible with environment design, unattractive by making the real cost visible, difficult with commitment devices such as your phone in another room or a blocking app, and unsatisfying with an accountability partner or a visible consequence.
It treats a relapse as data, not as failure, and the file literally forbids it to shame you for it. Instead you get three questions: what was the cue, how should your surroundings have looked, and what friction sat between you and the action. After that the skill adjusts the system and not the goal, because in this framework a goal almost always loses to a system.
Because the file forbids it: the skill does not make plans longer than two weeks. The reasoning is given as well. People overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year, but a plan only works with short feedback. So you get a plan of two weeks at most, plus a weekly review with three questions: what worked, what did not, and what will you do differently this week.
For loose motivational talk and one-off coaching, because this skill builds a systematic habit plan and not a pep talk. And more importantly: with an underlying problem such as depression, addiction or an eating disorder the skill refers you on to professional help and refuses to build a habit plan that masks the symptom. The file itself adds that Atomic Habits is not a magic potion but an operational framework from behavioural psychology.
What holds for a person holds just as well for a company: what happens structurally is almost always a system and almost never motivation. Publishing every week, asking for a review every month, every quote out of the door within two days. Do that on willpower and you keep it up for a month. Anyone who makes a system of it does it for years.
For your own habits the weak spot sits somewhere else: Claude starts every session empty, so you supply your identity sentence, your four laws and your previous plateau again every time. That is exactly what Jarvis solves, the organisation brain that starts at €9 per month including Dutch VAT. Should your team learn to set up this kind of method themselves instead of one person doing it, that is the work of the AI training.
