We all have bad habits says Travis Bradberry* who believes some are minor and some can have a damaging effect on your work life. He lists some of the worst.
Nothing sabotages your productivity quite like bad habits.
They are insidious, creeping up on you slowly until you don’t even notice the damage they’re causing.
Bad habits slow you down, decrease your accuracy, make you less creative, and stifle your performance.
Getting control of your bad habits is critical.
A University of Minnesota study found that people who exercise a high degree of self-control tend to be much happier than those who don’t.
Some bad habits cause more trouble than others, and those that follow are the worst offenders.
Impulsively surfing the Internet:
It takes you 15 consecutive minutes of focus before you can fully engage in a task.
Once you do, you fall into a euphoric state of increased productivity called flow.
Research shows that people in a flow state are five times more productive than they otherwise would be.
When you click out of your work because you get an itch to check the news, Facebook, a sport’s score, or what have you, this pulls you out of flow.
You have to go through another 15 minutes of continuous focus to re-enter the flow state.
Click in and out of your work enough times, and you can go through an entire day without experiencing flow.
Perfectionism:
Most writers spend countless hours brainstorming characters and plot.
They do this because they know that ideas need time to develop.
We tend to freeze up when it’s time to get started because we know that our ideas aren’t perfect.
Yet how can you ever produce something great if you don’t get started and give your ideas time to evolve?
Author Jodi Picoult summarised the importance of avoiding perfectionism: “You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank page.”
Meetings:
Meetings gobble up your precious time like no other.
Ultra-productive people avoid meetings as much as humanly possible.
They know that a meeting will drag on forever if they let it, so when they must have a meeting they inform everyone at the onset that they’ll stick to the intended schedule.
This sets a clear limit that motivates everyone to be more focused and efficient.
Responding to e-mails as they arrive:
Productive people don’t allow their e-mail to be a constant interruption.
They set alerts for the messages they know will be important and save the rest until they reach a stopping point in their work.
Hitting the snooze button:
When you sleep, your brain moves through a series of cycles, the last of which prepares you to be alert at your wake-up time.
When you hit the snooze button and fall back asleep, you lose this alertness and wake up later, tired and groggy.
Worst of all, this grogginess can take hours to wear off.
So force yourself out of bed if you want to have a productive morning.
Multitasking:
This is a productivity killer.
Research at Stanford University confirms that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time.
People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information.
When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.
The Stanford researchers compared groups of people, based on their tendency to multitask and their belief that it helped their performance.
They found that heavy multitaskers — those who felt it boosted their performance — were actually worse at multitasking than those who did a single thing at a time.
The frequent multitaskers performed worse because they had more trouble organising their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information.
Putting off tough tasks:
We have a limited amount of mental energy, and as we exhaust this energy, our decision-making and productivity decline rapidly.
This is called decision fatigue.
When you put off tough tasks till late in the day because they’re intimidating, you save them for when you’re at your worst.
You must tackle complex tasks in the morning when your mind is fresh.
Eating too much sugar:
Glucose functions as the ‘gas pedal’ for energy in the brain.
You need glucose to concentrate on challenging tasks.
With too little glucose, you feel tired, unfocused, and slow; too much glucose leaves you jittery and unable to concentrate.
Research has shown that the sweet spot is about 25 grams of glucose.
The tricky thing is that you can get these 25 grams of glucose any way you want, and you’ll feel the same — at least initially.
The difference lies in how long the productivity lasts.
Donuts, soda, and other forms of refined sugar lead to an energy boost that lasts a mere 20 minutes.
Oatmeal, brown rice, and other foods containing complex carbohydrates release their energy slowly, which enables you to sustain your focus.
Some of these habits may seem minor, but they add up.
Most amount to a personal choice between immediate pleasures and lasting ones.
After all, the worst habit is losing track of what really matters to you.
Are there any productivity-killing habits that I missed?
*Travis Bradberry is the co-founder of TalentSmart, a provider of emotional intelligence tests, emotional intelligence training, and emotional intelligence certification. He can be contacted at TalentSmart.com.
This article first appeared on the TalentSmart website.
