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.
Justlike finding habits that can be useful for you it’s important to findhabits that are holding you back. Most of these 7 habits can easilybecome 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´dalso like to add that these are just 7 broad habits you can establishto become highly ineffective in most parts of your life. I pretty surethere are several more.
1. Not showing up.
Maybe you’ve heard this quote by Woody Allen:
“Eighty percent of success is showing up”
Oneof the biggest and simplest thing you can do to ensure more success inyour life – whether it be in your social life, your career or with yourhealth – is simply to show up more. If you want to improve your healththen one of the most important and effective things you can do is justto show up at the gym every time you should be there.
Theweather might be bad, you might not feel like going and you findyourself having all these other things you just must do. If you stillgo, if you show up at the gym when motivation is low you will improve awhole lot faster than if you just stayed at home relaxing on the sofa.
Ithink 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 canmeet more new friends. If you go on more dates you chances of meetingsomeone special increases. Just showing up more can really make a bigdifference. 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 andmost important task of the day first thing in the morning. A good startin the morning lifts your spirits and creates a positive momentum forthe 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 taskinto small actionable steps. Then just focus on the first step andnothing else. Just do that one until it’s done. Then move on to thenext step.
-The Get around to It Paraliminal. I find this guided mediation to bevery useful. After 20 minutes of mostly just lying on my bed andlistening I’m far more productive for a few days. I don´t feel the urgeto sink into that procrastinating state or the need to find out what’snew 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.
Tobe effective you probably need some kind of time management-system. Itmight be something really simple, like using the 80/20-rule at thebeginning of each day. The 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle as it´salso known, says that you´ll get 80 percent of your results from only20 percent of your tasks and activities. So you need to focus most ofyour energy on those few important tasks to be effective.
Whenyou have prioritized using this rule just write down the top 3 mostimportant things you need to do that day. Then, from the top, startdoing them. Even if you just get one of the things done, you have stilldone the most important thing you could do today. You may perhapsprefer some other system, such as GTD. But however you organise yourwork it’s still of highest priority to find the most important tasks soyou don’t spend days, weeks or months doing busywork that isn’t thatessential anyway. Just getting things done faster isn’t that useful ifthe things you get done are unimportant to you.
4. Thinking too much.
Andthereby seldom taking action. Paralysis by analysis can waste years ofyour life. There is nothing wrong with thinking before you dosomething. Do some research, make a plan, explore potential upsides andproblems.
Butcompulsively thinking and thinking and thinking is just another way towaste your time. You don’t have to examine everything from every anglebefore you try it. And you can’t wait for the perfect time to dosomething. That time never comes. And if you keep thinking you’ll justdig yourself down deeper and deeper and taking action will become moreand more difficult. Instead you just need to stop thinking. Shut ofyour mind – it just helps you up to a point – and go do whatever youneed to do.
5. Seeing the negative and downsides in just about anything.
Whenyou see everything from a negative perspective you quickly punch a holein your own motivation. You find faults everywhere and problems wherethere are really none. You cling to details. If you want to find areason to not do something then that’s no problem. From a negativeviewpoint you can find ten reasons every time.
Andso very little gets done, you whine to anyone who wants to hear – andmany who don’t – about how crappy your job, life and boss is. Whichbecomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as you create the life that isappropriate considering how think and see your world.
Asolution is to realise the limits of a negative perspective. And thatyour perspective isn’t some kind of 100% true picture of the world.Then try other perspectives. For instance, trying to establish a habitof seeing things in a more positive and optimistic light can be quiteuseful. 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 thinkpositive thoughts for 7 days it can give you an insight in how muchyour perspective and beliefs changes how you interpret your world. Andwhat results you get.
6. Clinging to your own thoughts and being closed to outside influences.
Itcan be hard to admit that what you thought or believed was not the bestalternative. So you cling to your thoughts harder and harder and keepyour mind closed. This makes it hard to improve and for instance tobecome more effective. Even really considering the possibility that youcan change your life can be difficult in this position.
Onesolution, obviously, is to open up more. To open up and learn from themistakes of others, from your own mistakes and from other sources likebooks. This is easy to say though. It can, as almost anything, beharder to do. One suggestion I have is to, like I said about theprevious habit, realise the limits of what you know and the way yougoing about things. And then just try something new.
Anothertip is to read A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and especially look at thechapters about the Ego. If you stop identifying so much with yourthoughts and your Ego, as Tolle prescribes, it becomes a whole a loteasier to let new ideas and thoughts come into your life. And to let goof old thoughts that aren’t useful to you anymore. On the other handI’d like to add and counter-balance with these tips: don’t get stuck inreading, in just taking in new information either or you might become aself-help junkie. Use the new information, put what you have learned into action and try it out.
7. Constantly on information overload.
Withinformation overload I don’t just mean that you read a lot. I prettymuch mean an overload in all input. If you just let all informationflow into your mind it will be hard to think clearly. It’s just toomuch stimulation. A few more potential downsides to this habit are:
-Some of the input you receive will be negative. The media and yoursurroundings 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’llbe dragged into this negativity too. This affects how you think, feeland act.
-It creates an urge to keep up with what’s happening but there arealways ten more things happening so you can’t keep up. This makes lifestressful.
-It becomes hard to make decisions and take action if your mind isconstantly bombarded with information or trying to sort through it all.Personally I find that if I get too much information it leads to a sortof paralysis. Not much get´s done. Or you get stuck in habit #3 andkeep busy, busy, busy at high speed with low priority activities.
Tobe able to focus, think more clearly and take action it´s useful to bemore selective in what you let into your mind. When you work shut outas much distractions as possible. Shut off the phone, internet and shutthe door. It is strange how much you can get done when you aren´tinterrupted every fifth minute or have the opportunity to procrastinateby checking your RSS-feeds or favourite websites.
NowI´m not suggesting that you should stop reading all blogs ornewspapers. But think about what you really want to read and what youread just read to fill your time. And have a look at other areas ofinput where the doors are wide-open.
Forinstance, you don´t have to let in all the negative emotions from yoursurroundings. If everyone else are procrastinating or are anxiouslykeeping themselves busy by doing low-priority tasks at warp speed it´seasy to be influenced by that mood. If you have a door, then it mightbe good idea to shut it and focus on doing more important things.
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