7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People
By Henrik Edberg
With a twist to the common list of habits that are useful to establish, here are 7 habits that you do best to avoid.
Just like finding habits that can be useful for you it’s important to find habits that are holding you back. Most of these 7 habits can easily become such a normal, everyday part of life that you hardly notice it (or how it’s affecting you). I’ve dabbled with all of them quite a bit. Not surprisingly I didn’t get much of the important stuff done. I´d also like to add that these are just 7 broad habits you can establish to become highly ineffective in most parts of your life. I pretty sure there are several more.
1. Not showing up.
Maybe you’ve heard this quote by Woody Allen:
“Eighty percent of success is showing up”
One of the biggest and simplest thing you can do to ensure more success in your life – whether it be in your social life, your career or with your health – is simply to show up more. If you want to improve your health then one of the most important and effective things you can do is just to show up at the gym every time you should be there.
The weather might be bad, you might not feel like going and you find yourself having all these other things you just must do. If you still go, if you show up at the gym when motivation is low you will improve a whole lot faster than if you just stayed at home relaxing on the sofa.
I think this applies to most areas of life. If you write or paint more, each day perhaps, you will improve quickly. If you get out more you can meet more new friends. If you go on more dates you chances of meeting someone special increases. Just showing up more can really make a big difference. Not showing up will not get you anywhere.
2. Procrastinating half the day. To keep it short, my 3 favourite ways to get out of a procrastinating state are:
- Swallow that frog. What´s this means is simply to do the hardest and most important task of the day first thing in the morning. A good start in the morning lifts your spirits and creates a positive momentum for the rest of the day. That often creates a pretty productive day.
- How do you eat an elephant? Don´t try to take it all in one big bite. It becomes overwhelming which leads to procrastination. Split a task into small actionable steps. Then just focus on the first step and nothing else. Just do that one until it’s done. Then move on to the next step.
- The Get around to It Paraliminal. I find this guided mediation to be very useful. After 20 minutes of mostly just lying on my bed and listening I’m far more productive for a few days. I don´t feel the urge to sink into that procrastinating state or the need to find out what’s new over at one or five of my favourite websites.
3. When actually doing something, doing something that isn’t the most important thing right now.
One of the easiest habits to get stuck in, besides procrastinating, is to keep yourself busy with unimportant tasks.
To be effective you probably need some kind of time management-system. It might be something really simple, like using the 80/20-rule at the beginning of each day. The 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle as it´s also known, says that you´ll get 80 percent of your results from only 20 percent of your tasks and activities. So you need to focus most of your energy on those few important tasks to be effective.
When you have prioritized using this rule just write down the top 3 most important things you need to do that day. Then, from the top, start doing them. Even if you just get one of the things done, you have still done the most important thing you could do today. You may perhaps prefer some other system, such as GTD. But however you organise your work it’s still of highest priority to find the most important tasks so you don’t spend days, weeks or months doing busywork that isn’t that essential anyway. Just getting things done faster isn’t that useful if the things you get done are unimportant to you.
4. Thinking too much.
And thereby seldom taking action. Paralysis by analysis can waste years of your life. There is nothing wrong with thinking before you do something. Do some research, make a plan, explore potential upsides and problems.
But compulsively thinking and thinking and thinking is just another way to waste your time. You don’t have to examine everything from every angle before you try it. And you can’t wait for the perfect time to do something. That time never comes. And if you keep thinking you’ll just dig yourself down deeper and deeper and taking action will become more and more difficult. Instead you just need to stop thinking. Shut of your mind – it just helps you up to a point – and go do whatever you need to do.
5. Seeing the negative and downsides in just about anything.
When you see everything from a negative perspective you quickly punch a hole in your own motivation. You find faults everywhere and problems where there are really none. You cling to details. If you want to find a reason to not do something then that’s no problem. From a negative viewpoint you can find ten reasons every time.
And so very little gets done, you whine to anyone who wants to hear – and many who don’t – about how crappy your job, life and boss is. Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as you create the life that is appropriate considering how think and see your world.
A solution is to realise the limits of a negative perspective. And that your perspective isn’t some kind of 100% true picture of the world. Then try other perspectives. For instance, trying to establish a habit of seeing things in a more positive and optimistic light can be quite useful. In that vein, you may want to try the Positivity Challenge. It´s not easy, but if you do the challenge and try to only think positive thoughts for 7 days it can give you an insight in how much your perspective and beliefs changes how you interpret your world. And what results you get.
6. Clinging to your own thoughts and being closed to outside influences.
It can be hard to admit that what you thought or believed was not the best alternative. So you cling to your thoughts harder and harder and keep your mind closed. This makes it hard to improve and for instance to become more effective. Even really considering the possibility that you can change your life can be difficult in this position.
One solution, obviously, is to open up more. To open up and learn from the mistakes of others, from your own mistakes and from other sources like books. This is easy to say though. It can, as almost anything, be harder to do. One suggestion I have is to, like I said about the previous habit, realise the limits of what you know and the way you going about things. And then just try something new.
Another tip is to read A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and especially look at the chapters about the Ego. If you stop identifying so much with your thoughts and your Ego, as Tolle prescribes, it becomes a whole a lot easier to let new ideas and thoughts come into your life. And to let go of old thoughts that aren’t useful to you anymore. On the other hand I’d like to add and counter-balance with these tips: don’t get stuck in reading, in just taking in new information either or you might become a self-help junkie. Use the new information, put what you have learned in to action and try it out.
7. Constantly on information overload.
With information overload I don’t just mean that you read a lot. I pretty much mean an overload in all input. If you just let all information flow into your mind it will be hard to think clearly. It’s just too much stimulation. A few more potential downsides to this habit are:
- Some of the input you receive will be negative. The media and your surroundings often put a negative spin on things for various reasons. If you aren´t selective in what input you want in your life then you’ll be dragged into this negativity too. This affects how you think, feel and act.
- It creates an urge to keep up with what’s happening but there are always ten more things happening so you can’t keep up. This makes life stressful.
- It becomes hard to make decisions and take action if your mind is constantly bombarded with information or trying to sort through it all. Personally I find that if I get too much information it leads to a sort of paralysis. Not much get´s done. Or you get stuck in habit #3 and keep busy, busy, busy at high speed with low priority activities.
To be able to focus, think more clearly and take action it´s useful to be more selective in what you let into your mind. When you work shut out as much distractions as possible. Shut off the phone, internet and shut the door. It is strange how much you can get done when you aren´t interrupted every fifth minute or have the opportunity to procrastinate by checking your RSS-feeds or favourite websites.
Now I´m not suggesting that you should stop reading all blogs or newspapers. But think about what you really want to read and what you read just read to fill your time. And have a look at other areas of input where the doors are wide-open.
For instance, you don´t have to let in all the negative emotions from your surroundings. If everyone else are procrastinating or are anxiously keeping themselves busy by doing low-priority tasks at warp speed it´s easy to be influenced by that mood. If you have a door, then it might be good idea to shut it and focus on doing more important things.
