How James Clear is Writing His Next Book

James Clear is in the creative muck on his next book. It’s currently a 600 page Google Doc—and he’s trying to compress that down into chapters, sections, and sentences. It’s a big task, but he seems more or less undaunted.

“I think if I was earlier in my career, it would be tougher,” he says. He’s in a black shirt, with a shaved head, spatters of stubble on his face, and blue pooled around his pupils.  “I say that, because as you embark on any creative project you explore a lot of dead ends: it's mushy, the vision is pretty foggy, and it doesn't start to crystallize until you keep working on it and iterating and refining and editing.”

This brings up a burning question: how does someone like James break through the creative muck? His last book, Atomic Habits, was a huge best-seller. How is he going about writing a follow-up?

To him, the process is two-fold: both finding what he wants to say, and how to say it so that it will resonate. He has a high-level idea of the book he wants to write, and he’s continually gathering material that relates to it. He collects it into his gigantic Google Doc—and he’s constantly working with it, filling it out and converting it into useful prose.

But as he’s doing this, he’s also running a parallel process: positioning. It’s the most important thing for him at this stage. He wants to know how to package the ideas in his book so that people will pay attention to them. He spends what he calls “unreasonable” amounts of time on this. He uses Twitter as a tool to throw compressed versions of his ideas out into the world to see what sticks. He’s constantly playing with words and sentence structures, trying to figure out what might work as a chapter title or a section heading. 

In short, his process is all about figuring out where his readers currently are—what resonates with them, what they care about—and bringing them where he wants them to go. 

In this interview, I talk to James about his process for the book, how he thinks about positioning, how he uses Asana, Google Docs, and Evernote, and how he keeps perspective as he works on his next project. 

Let’s dive in!