The internet is chock full of daily habits that will help your routine, but what about bad habits? Because habits are so ingrained into our daily routines, we often don’t notice how harmful ones sneak in and ruin our success.
Try eliminating the following habits from your life and see how your success in business and in life improve:
It’s time to end procrastination.
When “tomorrow syndrome” starts to rear its ugly head, it’s easy to get caught up in its effects and delay projects till the last millisecond. Before you know it, procrastination can cause looming deadlines to snowball, and destroy productivity and motivation in the process.
Instead of procrastinating, the experts recommend you take on bite-sized chunks of a project. This can remove the intimidation factor and get the ball rolling towards productivity with minimal effort. For instance, if you have to build a whole website, consider setting a simple goal of designing the logo. It will be hard to go back to your bad professional habits once you start being productive instead.
You need to (actually) listen.
With a million and a half things going on, it’s easy to get distracted when listening to others (especially if it’s a boring topic). However, as uninteresting as the conversation might be, you should know that listening has been called one of the make-or-break factors for successful leadership.
So if you want to up your success, replace these bad professional habits with active listening. Instead of nodding off, consider both showing the speaker that you’re interested (nodding, agreeing, etc.) and actually making an effort to understand (by asking questions and clarifying). Even if you aren’t actually interested, you’ll absorb the information and look highly professional.
Stop being too agreeable.
We’re all told that being agreeable and saying “yes” is polite and desirable. While that might be true during a dinner party, in the business world, it can have drastic consequences. You’re only human (sorry to break it to you), and with limited resources, you’ll eventually end up making a false promise by taking on everything. Plus, you’re an amazing individual, and you need to put yourself first.
Instead of saying “yes” to everything and following one of the most destructive habits, learn to turn up your turn down skills. It’s perfectly acceptable to ask a boss what should be prioritized, or to put yourself first over an acquaintance’s needs.
Do you have any destructive habits that you’ve eliminated from your daily routine? I’d love to hear about it–give me a shout out on Twitter!
