Habits: How to Build Good Habits and Get Rid of Bad Ones?

In our efforts to become more productive, we often download new apps, improve our schedules, eliminate distractions, and try a host of other productive things. However, have you ever thought about the role your basic daily habits play in your success?

Habits are powerful productivity tools since they can greatly reduce the time and effort that we have to invest in the performance of our routine responsibilities. This allows us to devote more attention to activities that add meaning to our lives. 

Habits help you fight limited willpower:

The first factor that limits our ability to achieve our goals - of any kind - is not our abilities, financial resources, or circumstances. Rather, it is our willpower. If you have unlimited willpower, no challenges you face will hinder your path because you have the strength to overcome them or find an alternative solution.

The problem is that no one has an unlimited will. Several studies, including several official references, have shown that willpower is like a muscle, the more you use it, the more you exhaust it. Eventually, you will reach the breaking point. You will not have the energy to continue making the effort, then you refuse to do anything in order to lie in front of the TV.

You can also enhance your willpower over time - like muscles - and this happens while forming habits that can be a powerful tool. This is because acquiring habits reduces your dependence on your willpower levels since it limits the number of decisions you need to make to do the things that make you successful. The more habits you have, the more willpower you have for tasks that cannot be turned into habits, such as solving special problems and caring for your relationships.

Think of all the various tasks that you do regularly on a daily basis. Once you have a list of these tasks, take action to carry them out the same way each time until they become habits. This method is a great starting point for your morning routine. Follow it every day, so you don't waste your time or willpower on simple things.

How do you acquire new habits that last?

Research based largely on the habit-forming abilities of amnesiacs has discovered that our brains have a simple, yet powerful mechanism for developing new habits. Also, it turns out that habits work a lot like memory. Your mind and body do it with a little conscious thought.

1. Choose a simple and daily motivation: 

For example, if you want to start running in the morning, make your daily motivation to get out of bed and see your running shoes waiting by your bed. 

2. Give yourself a reward:

Your reward may be intrinsically linked to the activity or something you give yourself after you finish the habit. For example, most people feel that the endorphins they get from running are a reward to them. Others use physical rewards, like grabbing a healthy snack or a little relaxation, so they have a goal to look forward to when the run is over. Nonetheless, you need something to motivate you to stick with the habit.

3. Develop a crisis management plan:

Habits are fragile. Taking a day off or dealing with stress when you're supposed to complete your habit can easily derail it. You might be committed to exercising for months, and then take a day off to do chores instead, which leads to another day off, then another day, and you end up breaking the habit. 

You can prevent this from happening by having plans to deal with scenarios that might break your habit. One example used by the American journalist Charles Duhigg in his book “The Power of Habit” involved a group of orthopaedic patients.

Most people do not recover completely because they are unable to get past the pain of persevering with their physical rehabilitation habits. There is one group of patients who have made a full recovery more than any other group, and some patients make plans - without guidance - to deal with the most painful moments in their rehabilitation routine.

The same reason made others break their habits, and patients' plans often included reminding themselves of the reward they would receive immediately after their rehabilitation exercises.

So, to maintain habits, you need commitment and plans to do whatever it takes to make it happen. However, there is another problem. Duhigg's research reveals that no matter how closely you follow the rules for creating new habits, you can only do so if you believe in the possibility of change. If you don't believe your habits will change, this psychological deterrent will prevent new habits from forming.

How do you get rid of a bad habit?

To gain new habits and achieve your goals you often need to replace your bad habits. Notice how you said replace, not quit. It is very difficult to end bad habits with a decision to do so because whether it is rational or not, our brains crave the reward of a bad habit. In moments when your willpower is low, your passion will cause you to fall back into bad habits. 

So, reduce your craving to replace your bad habits by limiting your exposure to the things that trigger them, and find an alternative reward that satisfies the same desire as the bad habit.

For example, if your bad habit is going straight to junk food when you get home from work, you can reduce those cravings by eating a healthy midday snack and having another healthy snack with a flavour similar to your favourite fast food flavour - sweet, salty, etc. - which awaits you at home.

The role of habits in relationships among team members:

Habits don't just affect individuals. In his book, Duhigg describes how habits can form over time across teams, and even entire organisations. If you are a leader, it is important to be aware of everything so that you can monitor the habits that govern the behaviour of your team.

One example Duhigg uses is a poor workplace culture in a hospital. Relationships between nurses and doctors were so fractious that nurses developed the habit of coding doctors' names on whiteboards based on how difficult it was to deal with the doctor and other ways of sending messages and taking action without the doctors' knowledge.

After the hospital came under attack from the press and fined hundreds of thousands of dollars following a series of malpractice cases due to physician negligence, management stepped in to fix the team's habits, including inculcating all new habits with checklists, additional cameras, and other monitoring. This is to ensure that hospital staff implements these habits.

While your team's bad habits may not be extreme, they affect everyone's productivity and performance levels.

When it comes to changing the habits of a group of people, the key is to focus on basic habits that influence people's behaviour in multiple ways. So, think about the tasks your team finds difficult to complete because of stress or a lack of organisation, and replace them with habits that eliminate the problem or reduce its impact.

In conclusion:

Create a habit loop after you've identified the key habits you'll target in order for your employees to act in a positive habit, so many times that their response becomes automatic. As with other goals, track progress from individual and team habits to be able to constantly identify areas for improvement.