5 Habits Hurting Career Goals | Make the Decision to Improve Your Career

There are 5 habits hurting career goals and impeding productivity at work. Most people automatically think habits are always bad, but they aren’t. The truth is we have many habits in our life that help us get through the day without suffering from complete brain exhaustion by lunchtime.

Habits are powerful routines that the brain loves, but they can be either extremely good or harmful for you. There are many habits we can delve into but that would distract me from the goal of this post (see what I did there? – pun intended).

Habits Hurting Career Goals

Honestly, there are many more habits I could add to this list but these 5 habits hurting career goals are most important. These habits will most likely affect more than just your career goals but the goals of the company if many employees suffer from these habits.

Negative Attitudes and Influences
Over-committing
Multitasking
Cluttered office space
No time for regular self-assessments

Negative Attitudes and Influences

Negative attitudes range from the “I’m not a morning person” to “It’s not my job” or even “We’ve always done it this way”. The bottom line is negativity anywhere is 4x more toxic than a single positive action. Take a moment to think about that.

Finding ways to lift your spirits in the morning and throughout the day will not only help your own outlook on your career but it will improve others’ perceptions of you. No one likes working with a “Debbie Downer”.

Resisting change or being inflexible in helping others doesn’t promote teamwork. Companies need to find creative ways to improve productivity at work and this may require a change to something you do or something that affects you. Being open to the suggestions or even better being helpful in making those improvements will not only improve the company but you will become a team player in the eyes of the company.

Engaging in the negative discussions, including office gossip, isn’t healthy either. Those negative influences not only affect the way you think about your job and the people you work with, but they will also negatively affect the perception people have of you. It is always best to distance yourself politely from those negative influences.

How Reducing Negativity Improves Productivity

Spending time being a positive influence and less time around negative influences improves your focus on the tasks required at work. You are clearing out that negative brain clutter and making room for the productive activity that keeps you focused on the tasks required. In addition, when you are open to improvements you are improving your overall growth mindset.

Over-committing

Are you the “Yes” or “Sure can!” person? Do you love to help people? Do you work a lot of overtime, just to get YOUR work done? Over-committing yourself can hurt your career goals in a few ways.

When you are overly helpful towards others then you can lose focus on what needs to be done to get your own goals accomplished in a timely manner. Others become the focus instead of what the company needs you to accomplish. Being a team player is important but there is a balance between over-committing and focusing on the career goals you have already committed to accomplishing.

Are spending your most productive time of the day in meetings or helping other people? By doing that you may be finding that regular tasks take you much longer to finish than before. What is the best use of your time?

Are you saying yes too much and can’t meet those commitments. Not good. When people start seeing that your word doesn’t mean anything, they start losing trust in you. The best way to handle this is, to be honest with the situation and find ways to reduce the commitments while keeping their trust.

How Selective Commitment Improves Productivity

The key to selective commitment is valuing your time and finding ways to balance helping others and still scheduling your important tasks for your most productive times of the day. Consistent overtime hours are a clear sign that over-committing your valuable time requires change. Your family will thank you for digging into this one!

Multitasking

I wrote a lengthy article on multitasking and how it hurts the brain. Multitasking is one of the worst habits many people suffer from. For years people prided themselves on being able to multitask. The truth is multitasking trains the brain to lose focus easily.

Have you ever been in a meeting with a person that was on their laptop doing other work, or on their phone? Was the meeting productive? Chances are they were asked to be at the meeting for a reason and not having them fully focused made that meeting an inefficient use of everyone’s time.

This is the end result, every time you decide to distract yourself by multitasking. You are making yourself more inefficient and it is taking you more time to complete individual tasks. Work build-up because of long-term inefficiency will result in feelings of overwhelm and anxiety.

How Eliminating Multitasking Improves Productivity

When you practice “single” tasking you are becoming more mindful of yourself and others around you. Tasks will become easier over time and your productivity will improve. Being able to accomplish this new habit is one of the best ways to clear the clutter in the brain and focus on what matters.

Cluttered office space

Physical clutter is a sign that mental clutter is happening as well. Clutter is a vicious cycle that can start small and grow out of control over time. It leaves your feeling overwhelmed, drained, stressed, and hopeless.

Cluttered office space is more than files that aren’t put away. It is truly about how you value your time. Do you enjoy having to search for something before working on it? How about the time you waste being distracted by everything around you?

How Clearing Clutter Improves Productivity

A clutter habit is hard to break. Start small and be consistent with the changes. It can mean making the commitment to file away work when the task is done during the day. Or making sure the electronic files are stored consistently.

Every small change that clears clutter for your workspace will clear mental clutter and improve your productivity. You will start to value your own time and others as well.

No time for regular self-assessments

This is BIG! I can’t stress enough how this habit will have very long-term effects on your career goals and the company’s goals. The company may have annual or quarterly employee assessments. How often do you prepare for your employee assessments?

Do you procrastinate until the week of the assessment and then struggle with figuring out how you met the goals? Are you tracking your progress?

Here’s the kicker. Regularly checking your progress against your goals, measuring your successes and failures, will improve your chances of meeting those goals. If you are blindly working towards the goals, how will you know how you met them?

How Weekly Self-Assessments Improves Productivity

Making time in your week to do quick self-assessments on your goals keeps you focused on what matters for your career success. Understanding how to measure your goals and being able to track the progress will allow you to have data proof that goals were achieved.

Improving Productivity Improves Personal Brand

You may have discovered that one or more of the 5 habits hurting your career goals listed in this article apply to you. That is great! Wait! Hear me out. Recognizing the habit and acknowledging it is the first step to making that change.

The next steps for breaking that habit take a bit of work, but I know you can do it! The key to breaking that old habit and replacing it with a positive habit is creative thinking and consistency.

Find positive ways to help you stop doing the old habit when you find yourself in the situation, and replace the old habit with the new positive habit. Be consistent and make it a personal game for yourself. Rewarding yourself for using the new routines instead of following old habits.

The end result will be fewer overwhelming moments, improved productivity at work, and most of all you will improve your personal brand within the company and your fellow peers. It is never too late to start making small changes to sort through the chaos of life. Making small changes bit by bit will have long-term positive impacts and will simplify life.

How will you improve your life at work?