How to Break Your Worst Work Habits

January 27, 2023January 26, 2023 by Meriah dominique

A habit, wrote B.R. Andrews for The American Journal of Psychology waaay back in 1903, “is a more or less fixed way of thinking, willing, or feeling acquired through previous repetition of a mental experience.”

What we’ve learned more recently is that habits — 카지노사이트 whether personal, organizational, or societal — are a subconscious loop. Acting “without thinking,” writes psychologist Jeremy Dean in Making Habits, Breaking Habits, “or ‘automaticity,’ is a central component of a habit.”

All of us can admit to a poor work habit that holds us back. Maybe we’re always interrupting people, or we’re chronically late to meetings, or we’ve got an excuse for everything that goes awry.

These subconscious loops, as Charles Duhigg notes in his bestseller The Power of Habit, more or less follow the same pattern: a cue (or “trigger”) that sets your brain on autopilot, the routine you act out, and the reward you get from doing it, which reinforces acting upon the cue the next time it appears. 바카라사이트

My own worst work habit, for example, is ping-ponging between email, Slack, Trello and Twitter notifications while heavier and higher-priority tasks (like, oh I dunno, writing this article) get put off.

The cue is finishing one task — like replying to an email — which signals a desire to move on to the next thing (“what now?”). My routine is to check all my applications and immediately address whatever new stuff is waiting for me there — often, a Slack message or another email. The reward is the satisfaction I get from feeling productive by checking off a number of tasks. The problem, of course, is that I haven’t tackled my priorities, and my to-do list hasn’t changed at all.

“Over time,” Duhigg writes, “this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. Eventually … a habit is born.” 온라인카지

Despite my best intentions at the outset of each day, the dopamine rush that comes from checking my notifications is difficult to ignore. It seems no number of well-meaning articles I read about how “context-switching kills productivity!” can counteract the neurological trench this habit has carved deep into my basal ganglia.

No doubt you’ve felt captive to some habit that’s holding you back, too. So how do you fix it?

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