Score Your First 90 Minutes With the Atomic Habits Habits Scorecard
How to do James Clear's Habits Scorecard for your first 90 minutes awake: the +, - and = marks, a worked example, and what to do with the minus signs.
In this article6 sections
The Habits Scorecard is the exercise in James Clear’s Atomic Habits (2018) where you write down your daily actions in order and put a plus, a minus or an equals sign next to each one. It appears in chapter 4, and its purpose is awareness: Clear’s point is that you cannot change what you have not noticed, so the first job is to see the list. This post applies it to one slice of the day, the first 90 minutes after you wake up, with a worked example and a plan for the minus entries.
Why do so few people do the scorecard?
Skipping it costs nothing. Nobody checks, nothing breaks, and the chapters that follow offer more satisfying tools, like designing cues and stacking habits. A tool that gives you no new behavior to be proud of is easy to read past, which is probably why the scorecard is the cheapest exercise in the book and one of the least completed.
It is also quick. A morning list is ten to fifteen lines. The first 90 minutes is a good place to start because it is the part of the day with the most automatic behavior in it, and because the early lines affect what follows, a point the first hour post explores from the planning side.
How do you score your first 90 minutes?
- Write down every action, in order. Start at the moment the alarm sounds and stop 90 minutes later. Include the tiny actions. Clear’s sample scorecard in the book begins with entries like waking up and turning off the alarm, so no step is too small to list.
- Mark each line +, - or =. Clear’s test, in paraphrase: does this action help me become the type of person I want to be? A plus helps, a minus works against it, and an equals sign is neutral. He also notes that a mark depends on context and goals, so the same action can score differently for two people.
- Change nothing on the first pass. The book is clear that the exercise is about noticing, not fixing. Resist the urge to rewrite the list as a better morning.
- Circle the first minus and the line right above it. The action before a minus is often its cue.
- Pick one minus to say aloud next time. This is where pointing-and-calling comes in, below.
What does a scored morning look like?
This is an illustrative morning I made up for the exercise, not a real person’s data or a study result.
| Time | Action | Mark |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | Alarm rings | = |
| 0:00 | Press snooze | - |
| 0:09 | Press snooze again | - |
| 0:18 | Turn off alarm, open email | - |
| 0:30 | Get out of bed | = |
| 0:35 | Bathroom, brush teeth | + |
| 0:45 | Glass of water | + |
| 0:50 | Make coffee | = |
| 1:05 | Scroll news standing at the counter | - |
| 1:20 | Put on shoes, walk | + |
Counting the marks gives four minuses, three plusses and three equals signs, and the pattern is more useful than the count. Three of the four minuses sit in the first 20 minutes, and every plus comes after the bed is behind this person. The earliest minus has a clear predecessor, the alarm itself. The good habits in this morning are not in question. They are all waiting on a step that is scored as only neutral.
What do you do with the minus entries?
Here is a distinction that is easy to blur. The scorecard comes first and only observes. The tools for changing a minus come later in the book and have different shapes. Clear’s habit-stacking sentence (“After [current habit], I will [new habit]”) and his implementation-intention format (a behavior at a time and a place) are in the following chapters, and they are plans for what you will do. Neither is the scorecard. Research behind the second one is covered in the implementation intentions piece.
The tool that sits right beside the scorecard in chapter 4 is pointing-and-calling, borrowed from Japanese railways, where staff point at a signal and say aloud what they see. Clear’s suggestion is to apply that to a habit you want to catch: say out loud what you are about to do and what it will lead to, before you do it. Moving a half-conscious action into speech makes it harder to run on autopilot. There is more on the railway practice, and on the other places where starts are announced, in seven places where a start gets said out loud.
Applied to the example, the circled line is “press snooze.” The sentence is something like: “I am about to press snooze, and the next nine minutes will go to the same thing.”
Where does the scorecard stop working?
The scorecard cannot do the step it happens to depend on. Reading your list tells you what you did. The example’s first line is at least partly out of reach of insight, because the person is in sleep inertia, the groggy stretch after waking, and awareness is thinnest right when the first minus gets made. Saying “I am about to press snooze” is hard to do from under a duvet.
That is the one place an outside consequence helps. DontSnooze is an iOS app (Android is on the roadmap, with no date) built for that single moment. When the alarm fires you get 30 seconds to record a short video showing you are up. If you do not, a random photo from your camera roll is posted to your friends in the app, stays up for 48 hours, and cannot be screenshotted. Watching friends is free; posting your own proof and streaks needs Pro. The full flow is in how DontSnooze works. The scorecard supplies the awareness and the app guards the first line of the list.
Franklin ran a centuries-older tracking experiment of the same kind, described in his black-dot grid of thirteen virtues.
FAQ
Should neutral entries go on the scorecard? Yes. Clear’s own sample list includes ordinary actions such as turning off the alarm, and the equals marks are what make the page look like a real morning instead of a highlight reel. They also show where a long run of neutral actions is hiding the one minus that matters, such as a pause with the phone in your hand.
How many mornings should I score? One is enough to start. Two or three give you a better sense of which minuses repeat and which were a one-off bad night. Clear does not prescribe a number of days that I could verify, so treat this as a practical suggestion, not a rule from the book.
Can I score actions that happen before I am fully awake? Mostly not from memory, which is why the first lines are the hardest to fill in. If you cannot remember dismissing the alarm, write that down as the entry. A blank is information, and a friend or a housemate who saw you can fill it in.