When Bad Habits Infect Your Culture

Do you have any bad habits that impact your work output?

Have you tried to overcome your bad habits?

Are there bad habits other team members have that impact output?

Following up on time optimisation training, I asked the team in front of me how well they had succeeded at time blocking. Rather sheepishly they admitted they had not stuck to the agreed action plan. I then asked if interruptions were still a major challenge for them individually. The rapid and resounding affirmation left no doubts that their time was not being optimised.

Bad management of time is often seen as an individual problem. People are sent on “Time Management” courses. The growing challenge is that it is not ‘time’ that needs to be managed but rather attention. As the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” so well portrayed - high tech companies employ whole teams of people to capture and hold your attention. Ever got lost is social media? Started a search and wound up chasing links down some dark ‘rabbit hole’? Picked up your phone for something and 20 minutes later you put it down only to realise and remember why you picked it up in the first place? These are well known and highly relatable personal bad habits. I am sure we can all plead guilty to them to some degree. The insidious effects are subtly multiplied when these ‘personal bad habits’ become an organisational habit.

A habit is defined as “a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up,” and, “something that you do often and regularly, sometimes without knowing that you are doing it.”

As personal bad habits erode time, focus, attention, energy and mental capacity, team members will often find themselves with rapidly approaching deadlines. This creates pressure to get things done which often requires interrupting other team members. (One of my favourite office signs reads “A crisis on your behalf does not constitute an emergency on my behalf”) This habit, and acceptance, of constant interruptions throughout the day becomes ‘the way we do things around here’ - in other words your culture!

In fact, according to time management figures published by dovico.com, many of us spend more than half of our working day being interrupted!

Can you relate:

– The average person gets interrupted once every 8 minutes. That = 7 times an hour, or  50-60 average interruptions per day!

– An average interruption takes 5 minutes to deal with. That = 3 minutes of productivity out of every 8 minutes we work – i.e. around 4 hours of each working day is spent being interrupted.

– 80% of interruptions are unimportant. That = a saving of 3 hours and 12 minutes per day in lost productivity. 

Multiply those figures by the number of team members you have and put their average salary against the time - that financial figure should spur some action! 

Here’s to your success!