In his New York Times bestseller, The Power of Habits, Charles Duhigg demonstrated how good habits powered the success of business leaders and Olympic champions and how easy it can be to change bad patterns.
Yet every day, millions of professionals around the world engage in the same repeated bad habits, including unnecessary meetings, overwhelming inboxes and ineffective collaboration.
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Duhigg identifies a powerful psychological pattern called the habit loop as the driving force behind this behavior. The habit loop is a three-part process — a cue, which triggers an automatic behavior; the routine, which is the behavior itself; and a reward that tells our brain to continue with this pattern of behavior.
Once you know it exists, you start seeing the habit loop everywhere, especially on creative projects. The cue might be the ping of a new email featuring feedback on your work. The routine is reading and responding to the feedback, and the reward is the feeling of having done something.
But this kind of reactive habit isn’t efficient for creative work, which demands a more proactive and focused approach that takes into account the context and goals of the project. And what happens if more feedback arrives later? You’ll spend more time reassessing or reaffirming your first response.
So how do you break out of the bad habit loop? We look at four common bad habits that affect your productivity and offer some practical tips on how to break them.
1. Think outside the inbox.
In a recent survey, 66 percent of respondents said that their creative projects are managed primarily within email, despite the fact that 70 percent admitted email is an ineffective tool for managing projects of this kind. What’s more, independent data estimates that more than $600 billion was lost in 2016 due to email inefficiencies, such as the context switching that typically happens when you’re reacting to an always updating inbox. Each time you’re distracted by an incoming message, it takes 25 minutes to get back on track.
If this sounds familiar, you may need to start identifying ways to take certain types of communication out of email. Is it more efficient to simply call someone? Can you use collaboration software to get updates on a project or to provide feedback on…