How to use habits to improve your productivity

(≈4 min read)

When I say the word ‘habits’, most people immediately think of all the bad things they do that they know they need to stop – eating junk food, binge watching TV, staying up until 3am every day.

But habits don’t always have to be negative. In fact, they shouldn’t be. And when used correctly, they can actually serve to give an unordered life a huge degree of structure, leading to noticeable improvements in both productivity and contentment.

Why we’re not designed to thrive

Our brains are biologically hardwired to choose the path of least resistance. Without habits, you’re always leaning towards the activity that provides the most pleasure with the least resistance.

The sad thing is, in today’s society, the things that offer immediate gratification are usually the addictive things that are terrible for us – cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, junk food, your phone…

We live in what’s called a delayed-return environment which means that if you do good things now, it might take months, even years for these small victories to accumulate and produce the appropriate reward.

Think about going to the gym or producing a good piece of work for your boss or meditating. You won’t get healthy in a day; you won’t get that pay rise in a day; you won’t see the positive effects of mediation in a day. Real change requires time.

Mahatma Gandhi – “Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values.”

What makes habits so insanely powerful is the fact that they can occur without your brain even having to think.

When you establish a habit, it requires almost no resistance to carry out. So if you establish good habits, you’ll essentially be carrying out productive tasks daily without even having to think. Sounds great, right.

But do habits even form? To put it simply – repetition. We need to commit to doing something every day without fail.

But as I’m sure you’re painfully aware, doing something daily is pretty damn difficult and that’s why in this article, I’m going to walk you through some tips and tricks to help you out.

Take it slow

Be honest, how many times have you heard someone set the New Year’s Resolution of “to get fit” only to go to the gym for the first two weeks, before saying “I have no time”?

Habits are all about consistency. Being super frenetic and motivated for two weeks only to do nothing for the next few months, while you’re ‘waiting for your motivation to return’ is unfortunately not going to do you any good.

Time needs to be spent building strong and robust systems so that when unexpected events do occur, you’re always defaulting to these positive habits.

It doesn’t have to be for an hour. If even for five minutes, that’s good enough.

If you’re target is to get fit, you might recognise going to the gym daily as being a suitable target (and rightly so). But there’ll be days when you genuinely can’t muster the internal energy to get yourself there. And it’s those days which count. Instead of sitting idle on your sofa, convincing yourself this is a one off, just get your trainers on and go to the gym for two minutes.

That’s all. Two minutes.

And what the hell is the point in doing this? Well changing you is all about changing your identity. To create a new self, you need to destroy your old self (metaphorically [of course]).

And so when you commit to going to the gym, only for two minutes, you’re signalling to your body and reinforcing the idea that you are someone who wants to get fit. And that’s how going to the gym becomes a habit. But this idea of reinforcing a specific identity can be applied to anything else you want to do too.

James Clear – “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.” (From his book ‘Atomic Habits‘)

Make your habits attractive

Sticking to habits that are offering no immediate gratification can be difficult. That’s why a nice trick to get you to be more productive is to construct a reward system where upon completing a habit, you give yourself a reward. The reward can really be anything, from watching your favourite TV program to playing your favourite game.

Accountability can also be used to swing things in your favour. You could tell your wife or partner or friend that if you don’t do that habit you’ll pay them five pounds.

Optimise your environment

The environment you find yourself in plays a key role in determining your behaviour. By making the appropriate changes in your environment, you can improve the odds of you sticking to those habits.

So if for example you lack the motivation to study, you might make the change from studying in your bed to studying on your desk. Your brain tends to link certain locations to certain activities. Your bed should only be used for sleeping; your desk should only be used for working. When you are on that desk, you need to have conditioned your brain to know now is the time to switch into working mode.

You also want to minimise the number of obstacles in your way so that doing a habit is as easy as possible. Sounds obvious, but the more effort required to stick to the habit, the less likely you will.

A good way to do this is through arranging your room efficiently. If you know you want to eat healthily to lose weight, pre-prepare salads for the next day. If you know you want to revise maths, open your textbook to the exact page you’re going to be working on the night before. Have everything ready. Make life easy for your future self.

Use your ‘nothing’ time effectively

Our time is limited. You get around sixteen hours in an average day where you’re able to do things and for most of us, almost half of that time will be occupied at work, doing a job that’s not exactly getting us any closer to the life we want. So how can we go about maximising time efficiency during the day?

In short, the idea is that a huge amount of work can be done long term by turning your ‘nothing time’ into ‘productive time’. ‘Nothing time’ is not that hour in the evening where you just need to lie on your bed and pass out, feel free to continue doing that; nothing time is those five minutes before a meeting when you’re waiting for it to start or those ten minutes on your bus on your way to work or those three minutes waiting in a queue for lunch. When I say ‘nothing time’, I’m referring to these moments in the day that most of us forget even exist.

The natural instinct for most is to pull out our phone and aimlessly tap around until those five minutes are gone and you’re in that meeting.

But imagine if you were able to channel all this ‘nothing time’ into working towards some aspect of your dream. My advice would be to select some task you’ll do every time you notice you have a few spare minutes during the day. That might be working on an article you’re writing or reading that book you know will help you or practising maths (all of which can still be done on your phone).

Create a new habit. Instead of pulling out your phone have this task as your new default. The sum of these sporadic few minutes intervals across the day add up with time.

Having a good system is better than having good goals

Ultimately, the conclusion of the article is this: you are only as good as the systems you create for yourself. Habits can be used to radically improve productivity by turning behaviour that requires thought into behaviour that is acted on a purely automatic basis.

To end, a quote by Will Smith:

“You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.”