Our daily life is full of unproductive habits and rituals that we execute – whether on a conscious or unconscious level. This makes us less efficient and productive than we could potentially be.
Obviously, just listing some avoidable habits is not enough. Because of this, I encourage you to check out Donald’s article on how to break bad habits. It gives a good foundation on how to actually start changing your habits from bad to good.
Here are 17 unproductive habits that you should let go:
1. Consuming the information you don’t need
Unsubscribe from as many mailing lists as you can. This way you can cut down the amount of incoming e-mails and prevent distraction.
Also, stop watching news. If there is an event that is newsworthy, it will catch you anyway (mostly by other people).
2. Letting others to run your life
Steve Jobs said it right: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
You are the master of your life and it is a shame if you live your life by pleasing others.
Naturally, it is wise to listen for advice from other people every now and then. However, ignore those people who say you can’t reach your dreams, it is impossible to do something or that your vision is foolish.
In your heart you know that it is not true.
3. Reinventing the wheel
Before you start working on your task or project, prevent reinventing the wheel.
Spend some time on research to find out if there are already solutions that help you to complete your task faster.
4. Being perfect
Although striving for perfection may be a noble principle for some, it is still a huge time and energy waster.
Instead of spending too much time on tweaking something, create a checklist to go through on your finalization phase. When you realize that all the items on your list are checked, you can finish your work and move on.
Not only are you relieved of your accomplishment, you will also give room for your brain to focus on other things instead.
5. Letting television to overrun your passion
When television is preventing you to take action on your passion, maybe it is time to rethink your priorities.
Save your TV show to your digital set-top box for later viewing instead. If you do this operation a couple of times you will form a new success habit – working on your passion first and watching television second.
6. Multitasking
Stop working on multiple tasks at once. You are spreading your focus and effort on too many places at once. Although you might be able to proceed on many fronts at once, it is still a very slow and error-prone way of working.
Instead, when you focus solely on one task, you get all the work done much faster. You can put your mind fully to that task, complete it fully and move to the next task.
7. Neglecting your body
You should take utmost care of your body. Feed it nutritious food, keep it fit by exercising on a regular basis and give it enough sleep.
When doing these the quality of your life rises considerably, you feel good and in some cases you are able to prevent some diseases to break out. Also, your energy levels are higher and you are more productive.
8. Promising too much
Control your “yeses”. If you feel you have too much on your plate, be selfish and just say no! You have a right to decline from requests presented to you. Don’t feel bad about saying no.
If another person has a right to ask something from you, you have an equal right to say no.
9. Reacting to every distraction that comes along
The number of distractions has grown radically over the last few years. The main problem is that you are expected to be reachable all the time.
When you are distracted, it causes unnecessary stress and makes you procrastinate on your work.
Instead of being reachable, shut down the communication devices when you want to concentrate on your work. If this means shutting down your phone or even taking the network cable out of your computer, then do it. This way you can cut down your temptations to be distracted too easily.
10. Thinking that the more the better
More is not necessarily better. In fact, in many cases the quality beats the quantity.
Strive for mastering or focusing just the few, but not everything. For example, this could be focusing on just a subset of your clients that bring most of your results or mastering one skill well rather than trying to be good on 12 different things.
Focusing on the things that bring the biggest rewards is a good strategy to be used your in life.
11. Being late on appointments
Stop wasting time of other people. Not only are you giving a bad image out of yourself, you are also showing that you ignore the other person’s timetables completely.
Adjust your own schedule to, for example, 15 minutes earlier, so that you keep the appointment without any delay.
12. Staying quiet when you should ask
When you are stuck and you are not able to move forward with your task, speak up!
It’s not silly to ask a question if you don’t know – rather, the person who doesn’t ask for help is silly.
13. Starting a task but not finishing
Too many people start a task and never finish it. Understandably the task may get postponed sometimes because of the reasons that are not dependent of you. But in majority times this is not the case and it is your responsibility to finish the task.
Make a plan on how to tackle the task: Break it into smaller pieces and execute your plan on a daily basis. Eventually you realize that the task is done and you feel very good about yourself!
14. Working tired
When you work tired, you are not able to focus on your work as well as if you were fully refreshed.
If you feel tired, ponder yourself if you get enough sleep at night and adjust your sleeping time accordingly.
Also, you can take a quick 15-20 minute nap to refresh yourself. Powernap is a great way to restart your day.
15. Waiting others to take action
Sometimes the only way to get something done is to do it yourself. If you are waiting others to take action on your behalf, you get disappointed because most probably nothing gets done.
Take initiative, put your ideas into action and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
16. Failing to admit mistakes and learning from them
Everybody makes mistakes. However, some people learn from their mistakes, while other people complain and never see any positive sides in those situations.
Use mistakes as a feedback and learning mechanism to improve your action further.
17. Fixing the symptom instead of the root cause
When you have a flat tire on your bicycle, you have two options to handle the situation.
You can either pump air to the tire so that you can ride your bike for a while – until the tire is flat again. On the other hand, you can change the tire to an intact one once – and stop wasting time on pumping air to a flat one on a recurring basis.
Strive for fixing the root cause instead of just fixing the symptom. It may take more time, but fixing the symptoms will most likely to take even more time.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are lots of habits on our daily lives that could be improved or replaced with a better one.
If there is a one single area to focus on this list, it is definitely the item #7. When you make your body feel good on all three levels (nutrition, exercise and sleep), it is much easier to change other parts of your life too.
Just take one unproductive habit, crush it and then move on to the next one.
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