When we talk about productivity and how to improve it, habits are never far from the discussion. The more you can turn something into a habit, the less you need to plan.
What we can conclude therefore is that good habits are the key to an organized and productive life. Next Level Daily, a company producing planning tools (including a daily journal planner and habit trackers) say that creating good habits takes time, both to carry them out diligently at first and for them to become second nature afterwards.
But here’s something of a curveball – there are all sorts of habits that negatively affect productivity. These can also be included in a habit tracker, specifically with the intention of cutting them out. The problem is though that it’s not always exactly clear which habits are wrecking your productivity.
Some habits that might seem positive (and which were created and reinforced in the first place for precisely that reason) actually have an insidious dimension that could be making your overall planning more difficult and in turn negatively affecting your productivity.
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Getting Rid of Bad Habits
Without saying too much about how good habits are formed, it is important to go over how bad habits can be eradicated. A habit is created because of a repeated mental pattern and the corresponding actions that you carry out. Do something often enough and it will become a habit. It follows then that getting rid of a habit is a matter of refraining from doing it.
This is something that anyone who has tried to give up smoking will be intimately aware of. In that case, however, there is a physical addiction to overcome too. The type of habits that interfere with productivity don’t involve any substances and are purely mental patterns. But what can we do about them?
The aforementioned habit tracker is a good idea. Not only will this give you a clear picture of the extent of the problem, but it will also allow you to instill good habits that can hopefully replace the bad ones.
Nevertheless, getting rid of the bad habits is still importantand the first step towards doing so is to learn what they are.
Bad Habits for Productivity
It sounds obvious, but not planning is a pervasive habit, precisely because certain people are not natural planners. There’s not enough space to go into the psychology, but we can say for sure that some people love order whereas others find it restrictive. Nonetheless, if you want to get anything significant done, you need to plan. This is therefore a habit to break if you want to increase your productivity.
The Wrong Routine
Routines are made up of habits. A routine is all the things you do “automatically” in a day, and at the same time each day. Sometimes this routine can become so ingrained that it no longer serves you well, especially when circumstances in life change. Just because you get a new job does not mean that your old routine automatically updates. There will be some sticky habits to break.
Doing Everything Yourself
The “delegator” is one of the main personality types you will meet in any project setting. That’s because this is a skill and a habit. On the flipside, there’s the habit of trying to do everything yourself. In the majority of cases, you can’tand in the rest your productivity would increase if you could seek help where it is best employed. You only have a limited amount of energy.
In the end, human beings are habit-creating creatures. It’s important to create good habits because the only alternative is bad ones filling the void.