Get rid of your bad habits

By the time we reach the peak years of our career, most of us have picked up a deadly collection of time-killing habits. Each one eat into our capacity to focus on success. TV and the morning newspaper are two of the worst. Devotees watch their days dawn stillborn, suffocated in the awful banality of pulpy events and canned banter.

Long juicy phone chats with friends and enemies are deadly. If you need a ten minute chat every hour to get through your workday, you should feel lucky you even have a job. A phone chat costs you not only the time it takes to dial and talk, but also the time and energy to restore your focus to the effort at hand, not to mention the lost momentum caused by the interruption.

Coffee or snack breaks rob precious minutes from prime work hours while adding flab and lowering energy levels. Grabbing coffee and a donut seems like it should take a minute or two. In fact, a donut break is more likely to cost 20-30 minutes, especially when you consider the time it takes to refocus on what you were doing. If you must nibble, bring a snack to work and keep it on your desk so you can munch without breaking stride. Just make sure it's energy boosters like baby carrots or trail mix, not slothmakers like donuts, cookies or breads. Anything starchy makes you drowsy and costs you the keen edge you need for focus.Bad habits can turn a highly effective person into a hopeless bumbler.

The trick to dealing with bad habits is to substitute a good habit in their place. Substitute a morning run or swim in place of TV or the morning paper. Substitute a call to a few key clients or associate in place of a chat with friends or a coffee break. Use the impulse to indulge a bad habit as the stimulus that triggers a good habit. The next time you feel the urge to get your third cup of coffee, consciously replace it with the desire to make a business call to a favorite client, or at least reach for a carrot or glass of water. The next time you feel the urge to call your significant other to engage in a long gripe session about your lazy, stupid, ugly boss, condition yourself to call your boss instead and suggest ways to add to the bottom line. That way you're actually using the conditioned power of your bad habits to trigger a good habit. If Pavlov could do stimulus-response conditioning with canines, you can train yourself to do the same.

Obviously, relaxation and entertainment must have a place in your life. The key is to save them for the end of the workday, after hours or weekends when they help us unwind rather than indulging in them early in the day and causing our workdays to start stillborn.