7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People on the Job

No matter how hard you work, how early you arrive and how late you stay at the office each day, no one gets more than twenty-four hours in their day. Everyone wants to be more organized, more efficient, more effective, and better at using their time. There are many ways of learning and honing those skills and everyone has their own challenges and priorities. Instead of telling you what to do to be “highly effective” professionally, whatever that means to you, here is a list of 7 habits that are guaranteed to keep dragging you down. 1. Ineffective People Don’t Show Up It was Woody Allen who said that “80 per cent of success is just showing up.” Ineffective people who don’t show up either don’t care about the appointments they make, or they care a great deal and overcommit themselves and then are forced to back out at the last minute, with or without notice. Effective people realize that in order to be seen as a serious professional in control of their workload, it’s necessary to commit strategically. Not showing up says a whole host of things about the ineffective person to those around them, none of which are good. 2. Ineffective People Don’t Plan The second characteristic of an ineffective person is their inability to plan their daily lives. The truth may be that the ineffective person has no idea what they would like to ultimately achieve or where they want to go in life. They make decisions and take impulsive actions with no goal in mind. An effective person, on the other hand, will have planned which tasks need to be done and this will pave the road ahead and make their goals easier to achieve. 3. Ineffective People Don’t Eat the Frog Mark Twain is credited with saying, “If you eat a frog first thing in the morning, that will probably be the worst thing you do all day”. Productivity experts agree that getting the “worst” task out of the way first is one of the best ways to be effective. Ineffective people procrastinate with smaller, less important tasks rather than focusing on their priorities. Effective people will eat the frog by doing the intimidating task first, and then the rest of their day is downhill from there. 4 Ineffective People Don’t Put Things Away The work spaces of different, but highly ineffective people often look alike. Ineffective people just don’t put things back in the same place and they waste valuable time looking for things and wondering why they’ve missed important deadlines when they remember making a note of the date. Effective people do not only put things away, but they designate areas where certain things should go and they save time and reduce their stress by keeping it that way. 5. Ineffective People Ignore the Chaos In most workplaces, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed with the amount of information coming in – e-mails, phone calls, deadlines, meetings, projects, networking – it never ends! An ineffective person will ignore the chaos and allow it to grow without putting in the extra effort to reign it in. Eventually the chaos will get so out of control that even trying to tackle a portion of it will be too daunting to attempt. The effective person plans for this. They detect chaos as it builds, rather than ignoring it, and they set aside time to catch up before their inbox becomes an irredeemable mess. This is a positive habit to master, but it can be learned. 6. Ineffective People Don’t Focus Ineffective people place too much importance on multitasking, and most aren’t very good at it. In fact, most humans aren’t very good at multitasking. You might sit down to write an important proposal but before long you’re checking your email, the company’s twitter account, and doing idle research on an unrelated project. If you’re not careful, you end up on Facebook! Effective people know that working on ten tasks for three days is criminally inefficient. They know that it’s a better use of time and energy to complete one whole task before starting the next. They train themselves to filter out distractions. 7. Ineffective People Suffer from Analysis Paralysis Ineffective people can get so hung up on doing things perfectly the first time that they can suffer what’s called “analysis paralysis”. They become so consumed with making sure something is faultless that they can neither complete it, nor can they move forward. Effective people don’t have to examine everything from every angle before they try it. They also don’t wait for the perfect time to do something, because that time never comes. They understand that productivity doesn’t leave much room for perfection. Creativity, innovation and many valuable professional skills involve risk of miscalculation and mistakes, which is better than stagnation. If you’ve found yourself in the descriptions of ineffective people, you’re in good company. Effective people make all the same mistakes from time to time. The difference is that they are aware of their bad habits and correct for them, and now you can too. Know thyself, go forth and be effective! Related to 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People:

• Writing an Effective Cover Letter
• Career planning goals – make some resolutions
• Work productivity killers – a cure for work productivity killers