Atomic Habits' Paper Clip Story Left Out the Office Around It

Does the paper clip strategy from James Clear’s Atomic Habits work? As a way to count effort and feel each unit of it, yes, and the research on tracking backs Clear up. As a way to make you start on a morning when you would rather not, the story offers less than it seems to, because the most useful thing in it isn’t the jar.

The story opens Chapter 16 of the 2018 book, “How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day.” Clear first told it on his blog, TIME ran a version on May 1, 2015, and a long tail of other sites has copied it since. Read slowly, it also contains a detail that carries more weight than the paper clips do.

What happened in the paper clip story?

In 1993 a bank in Abbotsford, British Columbia, hired a 23-year-old stockbroker named Trent Dyrsmid. On his desk he kept two jars: one held 120 paper clips, the other was empty. Every morning he started dialing, and after each sales call he moved one clip across. He stopped when the first jar was empty.

According to Clear, within 18 months Dyrsmid was bringing in $5 million to the firm. By 24 he was earning $75,000 a year, which Clear puts at about $125,000 in current dollars. Other firms came recruiting, and he moved to a better-paid job elsewhere.

Clear’s sourcing is better than most of the anecdotes in self-help books. The quotes come from an email exchange he had with Dyrsmid on April 1 and 2, 2015, and Dyrsmid’s own words are plain: “I would start calling at 8 a.m. every day. I never looked at stock quotes or analyst research.” About the news he skipped, he added: “If the news was really important, it would find me from other ways.” The figures have drifted slightly between tellings, so check which version you are quoting.

Version	Where	Later job and results
TIME’s version of the story	May 1, 2015	“a $200,000 job with another company”; book of business “grew to $5 million in assets”
Clear’s posted excerpt of Atomic Habits, Chapter 16	jamesclear.com	“a six-figure job with another company”; “bringing in $5 million to the firm”

The book version is the more cautious one. Neither version is independently checkable, since the only source for any number is Dyrsmid himself.

What the book gets right about tracking

Clear’s claim is that a visible record does three things: it reminds you to act, it shows progress, and it gives a small hit of satisfaction right away, which matters because the real payoff of a sales call (or a run, or a page of writing) arrives months later.

The research mostly agrees. A meta-analysis by Benjamin Harkin and colleagues, published in Psychological Bulletin in 2016, pooled 138 randomized studies and found that prompting people to monitor their progress improved goal attainment at an effect size of about 0.40. That is a respectable, moderate effect in behavioral research. The abstract adds two moderators that matter for the rest of this piece: the effect was larger when progress was physically recorded, and larger again when it was reported to someone else or made public. There’s a fuller breakdown of those 138 experiments elsewhere on this blog, including the caveats about comparing across studies.

Clear also hedges his own advice, which the jar story tends to crowd out when people retell it. The same chapter warns about Goodhart’s law, the economist Charles Goodhart’s point that a number stops being a good measure once it becomes the target, and it introduces “never miss twice,” the idea that one lapse is an accident while the second one starts a new pattern. (If you want the psychology behind why a single slip so often turns into a lost week, the 1975 milkshake study on dieters is a good place to start.) He even names the limit of his own example: the paper clips reset to zero every morning, so they say nothing about whether you showed up last Tuesday.

What the story quietly leaves out

Look again at Dyrsmid’s quote. “I would start calling at 8 a.m. every day.” He was not deciding each morning whether to begin. He was a new hire at a bank, at a desk, during business hours, at a firm that had taken him on to sell and could see whether he was on the phone. The jars sat inside an arrangement that already expected him to show up.

That reading is mine, and the book doesn’t argue against it so much as skip past it. Clear presents the jars as the reason the behavior stuck. A fair alternative is that the jars made an already-required behavior satisfying, and helped Dyrsmid push call 80 when he wanted to stop at 60. That is a real and useful job. It is a different job from getting a person out of bed and to the first call.

Harkin’s moderators point the same way. A jar on a bank desk is physically recorded and, most likely, visible to coworkers. A jar on your kitchen counter at 6 a.m. is physically recorded and seen by nobody. On the research’s own terms, those are not the same intervention.

Clear is still right about tracking. The anecdote is simply a weaker argument for the solo version of the habit than it first appears, because the person in the story was never doing the solo version.

The one thing the book leaves to you

Atomic Habits does get to other people eventually. Chapter 17, the next one, is “How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything,” and it suggests a written habit contract with a penalty and co-signers. So the gap here is not that Clear forgot about outside pressure. It is that the book treats the jar and the witness as two separate chapters, two optional tools, and the most famous story in the tracking chapter quietly had both.

The part left to the reader is the morning you don’t feel like it. On that morning the paper clips are still in the first jar, which is accurate and changes nothing. A tracker records what you did; it has no say over what you do next. “Never miss twice” helps on day two, and only if you were willing to read the rule on day one.

What Dyrsmid had at 8 a.m., and most people building a habit alone don’t, was a consequence that came from outside his own head and that someone else would see. For work, that is usually a boss, a client or a quota (sales teams build exactly that, as in this piece on making calls before motivation arrives). For a personal habit, you have to borrow one. For waking up, DontSnooze does the borrowing for you: if you haven’t filmed a few seconds of yourself awake and out of bed in time, a picture you didn’t pick from your phone goes to friends you named in advance.

A home version of the jars, with the office put back

If you want to try the paper clip strategy, keep the clips and add back what the bank supplied.

1. Pick a fixed start. Name the time the first clip moves, the way Dyrsmid named 8 a.m. Write it on the jar.
2. Set a target you can hit on your worst day. 120 suited a full-time broker paid on volume. Five pushups or two pages is a better first number for most people.
3. Give the count a reader. Once a day, send a photo of both jars to one person who has agreed to reply. Harkin’s data suggest the reporting is where the extra effect comes from.
4. Attach a consequence that doesn’t need your permission: a small donation, a message that goes out on its own, or a partner who has agreed to say something when the photo doesn’t arrive.

Then put the empty jar where whoever you report to would see it if they walked in, and send tonight’s photo even if it shows only three clips moved.