Stop these 5 things to be more successful

Stop these 5 things to be more successful

via Inc.com by Jory MacKay

According to researchers at Duke University, up to 40% of our behaviors on any given day are driven by habit.

That’s half your life spent on autopilot. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you’ve put in the work and been diligent about building good habits.

Unfortunately, most of us haven’t. We watch Netflix when we could be working on our business strategy. We eat junk food when we know healthier meals will give us the energy to get through the day.

Bad habits are everywhere in our lives and they’re hard to get rid of it. But if you’re willing to put in the work, modern research has a few things that you need to stop doing now if you want to build better habits.

Focusing too much on the end goal and not enough on the process.

Marketing guru Seth Godin calls this a ‘crash diet’–where we put all our energy into looking for the quickest route to our goal or behavior change, rather than starting small and building good habits.

If you want to make real, sustainable change it means breaking down your new habit into the smallest chunks possible and working through them. Studies have shown the momentum you get from making these small changes is much more likely to help you build that new habit.

Or, as Sonia Thompson, founder of TRY Business School, says:

“Setting the bar too high can serve to demotivate and discourage you from ever getting started.”

Taking on too much change at once.

According to research by psychologist Ray Baumeister and John Tierney, the average professional has 150 tasks to be done at any given time. This might sound ridiculous, but look at your own to-do list. I’d bet there’s more jobs listed than you could do today, let alone in the next two days. It’s no wonder research from the startup iDoneThis found that 41% of the to-do list tasks their users inputted were never accomplished…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE