Bad habits you need to break to be more productive

Observe your cubicle long enough and you'll start picking up on a slippery pattern of inefficiency. Letting go now and then is fine, but if your bad habits are getting the better of you and you don't even notice until the damage is done, it's time you sit down and figure things out before your creativity takes a serious hit.

Here are nine of the most common behaviours you may be exhibiting. Get a hold on these pesky troublemakers and enjoy the high, professional and creative, that comes with improved self-control.   

1. Surfing the web like a zombie

In positive psychology, "flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity." How do you achieve that? 15 consecutive minutes of focus. Research suggests the workers in a flow state are five times more productive. But every time you log in to Facebook, you effectively pull out the flow state and it'll take another 15 minutes to get back into it. Pull out enough times a day and you can go through an entire day without experiencing flow.

2. Stubborn perfectionism

Writers like Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut and Haruki Murakami are self-professed early risers who started their mornings with writing. Writers will spend countless hours and pages on material they might never in put in the book. And yet, the average person becomes paralysed at the very thought of starting on something. We tell ourselves it's no good" before we've even written a line or jotted down an idea. So quit the overanalysing and give your ideas time to incubate.

3. Multiple meetings in a week

While a lot of us are reformed meeting-addicts, many are yet to change their ways. Nothing wastes time like meetings, especially in the age of e-mail and Facebook Messenger. Meetings are time-consuming and draining. If absolutely unavoidable, inform members well in advance so they're prepared to give their fullest and participate. Stick to the schedule, don't go over time and you'll find that people are a hundred times more focussed.

4. Replying to e-mails right away

Yes, it's good to be alert and not delay work-related communication. But a lot of people, especially those who deal with a high volume of correspondence, allow their e-mail and messages to be a constant companion of their work lives. It's pretty obvious how this can be counter-productive. If you're on one these people, set aside a specific time(s) every day to respond to messages. And if you're worried about offending a customer or a client, set up an auto-responder to notify their sender when you'll be checking your e-mail again.

5. Five more minutes in the morning

How many times have you woken up and hit the snooze button and woken up again to be groggier than the first time? Chances are your brain was in the middle of a new cycle and your second alarm messed it up. You might end up going through the day without ever shaking off the grogginess. So get into habit of getting up at the scheduled time if you want to have a non-excruciating morning and a more productive day. 

6. Multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is a hoax. In fact, substantial research confirms that multi-tasking or attempting to multi-task, which is in fact what we actually do, is less effective than doing a single thing at a time. Researchers at Stanford found that when you try to do more than one thing at once, your brain loses to ability to perform either successfully. They even found that test subjects who believed that multi-tasking works for them were doing worse than those who were doing a single thing. Multi-tasking can severely disorganise your thoughts because you're dealing with multiple channels of information, which might not even be connected.

7. Delaying the difficult stuff

As you go through the day, you exhaust your reservoir of mental energy. If you keep putting off tough tasks for later in the day just because they're scary, you're basically saving them for when you're at your productive worst. Even if you're not a morning person, if you don't put in time into prepping yourself for work that requires extra effort, you will never be satisfied with your output. So dig into the difficult stuff early in the morning or with plenty of time in hand.

8. Taking your phone to bed

We're all guilty of this one. For some reason, we feel that watching YouTube videos is the best sleep-time routine, whereas it's probably the thing keeping us up till odd hours. Blue light emitted by tabs, laptops and smartphones plays an important role in our mood, energy level and sleep quality. Sunlight also contains blue light and when we're directly exposed to it, it halts the production of melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone. That's why we get sleepy as we go through the day. But if you're still getting exposed to blue light at 12 in the night, it's going to interfere with your ability to fall asleep. Result: lethargy all throughout the next day.

Best thing you could do for yourself is to stay away from your devices right after dinner. TV is okay as long as you're seated far enough from the set.

9. Over-indulging your sweet tooth

You can't function without sugar. Too little and you're tired; too much and your mind is all over the place. Scientists advise you to limit your intake to around 25 grams pre-work. This doesn't mean that you should take these 25 grams any way you like. Refined sugar in junk food like soda and processed foods give you an energy boost that lasts only 20 minutes or so. Brown rice, lentil, whole-grain and potatoes contain complex carbs that release their energy slowly, allowing you to retain your focus for longer lengths of time.