New Year’s resolutions are all about constructing new habits, but what about breaking old ones? That’s just as important if not more.
And as an entrepreneur, you should quickly identify and cut out the bad habits for personal and professional growth and development.
It’s easy to develop bad habits, especially the longer you’ve been doing them. Whether you’re a veteran entrepreneur or new to the scene, here are seven common habits to ditch.
- Multitasking
You’re in the midst of your financial statements when you get an email that you just HAVE to reply to super quickly. It will take 30 seconds to reply, then you can go back to the data. Easy enough, right?
Well, not exactly. For many, multitasking is a bad habit that could take up to 40% of your productive time. Having to switch your brain from one task to the other could make you more prone to mistakes.
- Not prioritizing your health
Do you work crazy 20-hour days? Eat snacks instead of meals? Sleep is no longer a priority? As they say, health is your wealth.
Putting your health on the back burner could cost you not just medical bills but also productivity. You might think you have no other option but to sacrifice your health for your business, but really, you’ll end up sacrificing both.
- Procrastinating
You have tasks you know you have to get done. But hey, that’s what tomorrow’s for, right? That’s until you realize that all 57 tasks you’ve procrastinated on need to be done in a small time frame.
Procrastinating can be one of the most difficult habits to break. But as an entrepreneur, putting things off can lead to more issues for you down the road. To ditch a habit of procrastinating, try to improve your time management skills.
- Mismanaging your time
Time management is an important part of being an entrepreneur. You’re juggling a million tasks while trying to grow your business at the same time.
Sure, menial tasks may be necessary. But if you’re spending too much time doing things you could be doing faster, you might be mismanaging your time.
Here are three ways to help you better manage your time as an entrepreneur:
- Delegate tasks to employees
- Take advantage of softwares and technology
- Use tools to streamline tasks
- Stretching yourself too thin
Do you make a habit of pushing yourself to your limits to get everything done? How about a habit of saying “yes” to everything? As an entrepreneur, you’re probably stretching yourself too thin.
Wearing a million hats naturally comes with the territory of starting a business. When you’re passionate about something, you want to work hard to see results. But if you work too hard, you could lose that passion over time and become stagnant.
So, start taking a step back and determine what you actually need for the long haul.
- Micromanaging
Do you have a bad habit of micromanaging?
In the workplace, nobody wants a micromanager. But, micromanaging is very common with entrepreneurs. Your business is your baby, so it’s natural that you feel compelled to control every aspect of it.
But if you want to keep your employees engaged, consider cutting out these tendencies. Even for you, micromanaging could become unhealthy if you become obsessed with keeping things a certain way.
- Getting set in your ways
In life, it’s easy to become set in your ways. The more you start doing things a certain way, the less you take risks. But in entrepreneurship, risk-taking is one of the top things to do for company growth.
Alone, these habits may not seem like much, but when repeated, in conjunction with one another, their destructive capacity can prevent you and your business from growing. The more proactive you are in noticing these habits, and the more determined you are in getting rid of them, the better chance you’ll have at leading your business to long-term growth.