Becoming Effective: Habits

Being effective requires taking action. We can think things through and resolve to address issues or improve upon something, but nothing will ever get done if we only think about it. We must act. Unfortunately, most of our daily actions are taken out of habit. If we want to be more effective, we must first examine our current habits and work accordingly to create ones that work better.

Example: The alarm goes off at 6:30…then again at 6:40…another at 6:45…6:50…suddenly it’s 7:00 and you have to be out of the door in an hour. You rush to get ready and make it to your appointment at 8:00 am. You have a busy morning of meetings and fires to put out. It’s now noon and you’re starving, but wait! You didn’t have time to make your lunch this morning. You’ll have to either rush out and get something or go hungry. After lunch, you have meetings with clients and your team until 4:30pm. It’s time to go home and yet you’ve accomplished nothing on your to-do list. You’re tempted to skip your gym session in favor of getting some work done and you already know you’ll be going to bed late. But at least your team got things done, your clients are happy and you managed your business successfully another day, right?

WRONG! You’re not getting any sleep and you’re forgetting things that prevent you from optimizing your time and talent. As an entrepreneur, your business’s effectiveness correlates directly to your personal habits. In the example above, there are several instances during which effective habits could have led to greater success.

Could you have prepared your lunch the night before? How much of your day was spent reacting to emails or distractions? Were the meetings you held or participated in productive? Can you even recall the details from those meetings or were you distracted by the thought of all of the things you still needed to get done? Are you excited about tackling your to-do list at the end of the day? Will the snowball effect of having to get things done later and going to be later cause another instance of you hitting the snooze button too many times tomorrow?

All of these are questions you can begin to ask yourself in order to examine your current habits. The secret to developing effective habits is to be honest with your introspection and be open to making adjustments. Being busy does not always mean you’re being effective. Sometimes your level of busy is because you have bad habits and could actually be costing you time and possibly money.