The Power of Habits

The disasterous amount of damage done to your business when you create the wrong habits is something many of us tend to overlook. Until it is too late; One day we simply wake up, and there they are.

For a couple of months now, the first thing I did every morning when I woke up was to make me some coffee, and while I waited for that I turned on my laptop, opened my main email account to see if there were any important messages, then a second tab with the morning news, put the radio on for the local news, a third tab with whatever program I work at the moment, drank my coffee while I glanced at the news, answered my mails... And then got to work. Wrote a few short comments on future articles, planned the clicks I was going to do during the day, wrote some stuff to my autoresponders and so on.

Sound familiar? Yes, and it is the way most of us do things. And it is a pretty good way of doing things.

Then I, one day a few weeks back my internet went down. I had a temporary line installed, a much slower one. That led to me having the time to drink my coffee before I even had the connection up and going in the mornings. And it was so slow, that when I finally, after three huge cups of coffee, had it up and going I could only have one tab open at time. So, when I'd read my mail, I read the news, opened another email of mine, and then a third. Having checked all of those, I already needed a break. So everything got late; No articles, all the ideas I woke up with had to be put first on paper, then written into some kind of offline editor and then moved online. Everything that was not immediately needed for my main programs had
to be cut off. All those little things, the "Extras", that I had put a few minutes on every morning were gone.

Well, my internet connection came back. But there I was, still opening one tab at a time, sipping my coffee, staring blank. I had developed a bad habit.

Now, when I'm trying to get back on track, my work feel like work. And you all know the danger of that, don't you? Work is supposed to be fun, or... You quit!

Yes, well. I am NOT going to quit, but as a simple word of advice: Look over your habits. In time!