Writing and the Creative Life: 9 Bad Habits You Must Break To Be More Productive

Nothing sabotages your productivity quite like bad habits.

Given all the different things I do in my professional life, I’m always looking for ways to be more productive. So I flagged this article back in the summer, right when I was in the process of moving, and vowed to come back to it: “9 Bad Habits You Must Break To Be More Productive.”

Written by Travis Bradberry, co-author of “Emotional Intelligence” and President of TalentSmart, the author starts with this point:

Bad habits slow you down, decrease your accuracy, make you less creative and stifle your performance. Getting control of your bad habits is critical, and not just for productivity’s sake. A University of Minnesota study found that people who exercise a high degree of self-control tend to be much happier than those who don’t, both in the moment and in the long run.

Check out this list of bad habits and see which ones apply to you:

1. Impulsively surfing the internet.
2. Perfectionism.
3. Meetings.
4. Responding to e-mails as they arrive.
5. Hitting the snooze button.
6. Multitasking.
7. Putting off tough tasks.
8. Using your phone, tablet or computer in bed.
9. Eating too much sugar.

I’m actually not too bad with only 2, 4, and 8 eating away at my productivity, however I’ve taken to turning off the computer late at night and reading in bed, so we’ll see if I can make that stick.

Bradberry drills down into the negative effect of each habit. For example, here are his thoughts on perfectionism:

Most writers spend countless hours brainstorming characters and plot, and they even write page after page that they know they’ll never include in the book. They do this because they know that ideas need time to develop. We tend to freeze up when it’s time to get started because we know that our ideas aren’t perfect and what we produce might not be any good. But how can you ever produce something great if you don’t get started and give your ideas time to evolve? Author Jodi Picoult summarized the importance of avoiding perfectionism perfectly: “You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank page.”

That is the spirit of the Zero Draft approach: Just get the damn thing done! And not just getting started. Here are my thoughts from a previous post — To Edit While Writing or Not: That is the Question! — about editing while pounding out that first draft:

If you are the kind of writer who can HONESTLY say, “I am committed to getting to FADE OUT even if I choose to edit as I go,” then there’s nothing wrong with that. Frankly, that’s what I’m doing, but that’s how I write anyhow, I go over and over and over and over pages. But I’ve written nearly 50 scripts in my life, so I’m confident — based on experience — that I’ll finish this draft.

Each writer has to face this questions square on and take into account their relative degree of experience and confidence. If there’s ANY DOUBT about editing, that it COULD slow you down, then my advice: Don’t edit. Just keep pounding out pages. There will ALWAYS be time to edit. But in a 30 day challenge like this one, it is a zero sum game.

There are literally 720 hours in November. If 1 hour editing translates into 1 or more hours LESS Zero Draft writing, you can really put yourself up against it.

Again remember the point of the Zero Draft: Get the damn thing done! FADE IN to FADE OUT. The word “edit” is nowhere to be found in those edicts.

But again, every writer is different. And if NOT editing is “killing” you in such a way that it’s stifling your creativity, you may want to explore allowing yourself some time each day to edit.

Just be aware that can open a can of worms. Now you want to change something in the setup… which means you’re rewriting those pages… which means it will impact pages you’ve already written beyond this point… and suddenly you’ve lost a day or two to rewriting.

So on the whole, I would REALLY encourage you to stay the course. I quoted Anna Hamilton Phelan (Gorillas in the Mist) elsewhere today, I’ll quote it again:

“If I could say anything, it’s keep going. Don’t go back and fix that scene, that dialogue. Just write the next word.”

Just. Write. The. Next. Word.

For a Zero Draft, there is perhaps no better advice than that.

We’re all busy. And time is a finite resource. We don’t have to be mean to ourselves, however we can make adjustments to our behavior which in the long run not only allow us to be more productive, but in creating more time, be nice to ourselves.

For the rest of the article, go here.

How about you? Any of those items listed above on your personal roster of negative habits? Maybe you’ve found ways to break some habits. I invite you to share your observations and insights in comments.