One of the greatest investors of all time, Warren Buffett, once said, “The chain of habit is too tight to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” When things don’t work, the immediate response of most people is to exert more effort into the strategy they already have. However, the best thing you can actually do is step back and analyze the habits you have and weed out the bad ones.
Bad habits are extremely dangerous because they are nearly impossible to comprehend when they cost you your progress. Most of the time, making changes to your habits is all you need to do in order to grow and develop into a better person.
1. Lack of Routine
Define your work properly if you want to make significant progress. Have you ever found yourself answering work emails while you are at home watching television? Or have you ever jumped into conference calls at the time of your vacation.
If you don’t draw a clear line between rest and work, you won’t make much progress in the long run. The most satisfactory way to counter blurred boundaries is to create and stick to a routine.
A person who has a healthy routine has time for a workout, breakfast, and other essential daily activities. You will be able to focus on the things you must do if you have a healthy routine.
2. Perfectionism
You won’t be able to give your everything into whatever you do if you would always strive for perfection. It can make you have impractically high standards that will hinder your progress. Moreover, they tire you out mentally and put you down into a position where you will be able to finish the task you have instituted.
A person who always aims for perfection has the tendency to shift the blame every time things don’t go as planned. Perhaps, it’s a defense mechanism to make up for the failure of your perfect plan inside your head.
When you strive for perfectionism, it will be so difficult for you to accept your mistakes and proceed in coming up with realistic plans to consolidate those weaknesses you have.
3. Staying Up Late and Not Getting Enough Sleep
Admit it. You are guilty of this — who isn’t anyway? We are all guilty of binge-watching our favorite series and putting up extra hours of work, ending up going to bed late. This isn’t a problem if you only do this once in a blue moon, but if you do this enough time that your brain doesn’t get enough rest before the next day, it’s a foolproof way to get out of sync and kill your progress.
Not getting enough sleep can greatly impact memory, cognitive performance, and the ability to concentrate. Avoid pulling off that all-nighter because sleep is a vital part of preparation.
4. Multitasking
Multitasking is a plague that will immensely decrease your efficiency, slowing down cognitive processing and straining a person in the long run. Although multitasking can make you feel like a hard worker, it would only makes you end up with several incomplete tasks.
Something that you could do satisfactorily could end up being a down-at-the-heel job because you try to do three things all at once.
The best way you could sidestep multitasking and sabotage your progress is by dividing similar tasks together before cruising to your next agenda.
5. Planning Over Complicated and Long To-Do List
The gospel of the to-do list has been sermonized over and over again. However, if you overdo your to-do list, you will only end up killing your progress.
Some people spend more time creating and planning a to-do list than actually spending time carrying out tasks. Rather than being productive, you might end up being overwhelmed. If you are unlucky, it may even lower your morale. The optimum to-do list is about one to five tasks with subtasks that fit into any one of them.
6. Procrastination
Benjamin Franklin once said, “You may delay, but time will not.” Hence, there is no need to put off big projects in spite of knowing the dangers of doing so. In many instances, the habit of procrastination is linked to underlying reasons like fear of criticism or failure and lack of interest.
Procrastination is a very common thing among students and even working professionals. Even though you might succeed in finishing the task, you will find it haphazardly done, ending up tired and stressed from all the haste.
7. Indiscipline
Discipline may be challenging, but it is what will keep you going, especially when you just don’t feel like working and when there is no motivation to follow regulations tenaciously.
For instance, reading regularly is crucial in order to understand topics truly, but only a few people are actually consistently doing it — not because they want to pass, but because they don’t have the self-discipline to read when they aren’t in the mood.
8. Comparison
Comparing your growth to others will sabotage you, so if you have the tendency to compare yourself to others, stop it. We are all given unique quantities and unusual ideas for getting things done.
Comparing yourself to other people can distract you from your goals as you try to mimic the evolution curve of another person. Unneeded competition can also usher you into an unhealthy competition, which could put you into situations where you would rather fail to save face than ask for help.
9. Not Learning from Mistakes
Mistakes aren’t bad. They are actually crucial to growth since they provide you with hands-on experience of the best actions to take in particular situations. The best thing people can do is accept their mistakes without making justifications.
When you make excuses, your mind does not fasten the right reasons for your situation, putting you at risk of committing the same mistakes repeatedly. And the worst mistake you can make? It’s not learning from your mistakes. Just like an adage has said, “Mistakes aren’t good or bad. They are signposts that tell us what we are yet to learn.”
