Quotes To Live By

Bad habits slow you down

Nothing sabotages your productivity quite like bad habits. They are insidious, creeping up on you slowly until you don’t even notice the damage they’re causing.

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.

“By constant self-discipline and self-control you can develop greatness of character.” –Grenville Kleiser

Some bad habits cause more trouble than others, and the eight that follow are the worst offenders. Shedding these habits will increase your productivity and allow you to enjoy the positive mood that comes with increased self-control.

1. Using your phone, tablet or computer in bed. This is a big one that most people don't even realize harms their sleep and productivity. Short-wavelength blue light plays an important role in your mood, energy level, and sleep quality. In the morning, sunlight contains high concentrations of this blue light. When your eyes are exposed to it directly, the blue light halts production of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin and makes you feel more alert. In the afternoon, the sun's rays lose their blue light, which allows your body to produce melatonin and start making you sleepy.
By the evening, your brain doesn’t expect any blue light exposure and is very sensitive to it. Most of our favorite evening devices—laptops, tablets, televisions, and mobile phones—emit short-wavelength blue light, and in the case of your laptop, tablet, and phone, they do so brightly and right in your face. This exposure impairs melatonin production and interferes with your ability to fall asleep as well as with the quality of your sleep once you do nod off. As we’ve all experienced, a poor night’s sleep has disastrous effects upon productivity. The best thing you can do is to avoid these devices after dinner (television is OK for most people as long as they sit far enough away from the set).

2. Impulsively surfing the Internet. It takes you 15 consecutive minutes of focus before you can fully engage in a task. Once you do, you fall into a euphoric state of increased productivity called flow. Research shows that people in a flow state are five times more productive than they otherwise would be. When you click out of your work because you get an itch to check the news, Facebook, a sport’s score, or what have you, this pulls you out of flow. This means you have to go through another 15 minutes of continuous focus to reenter the flow state. Click in and out of your work enough times, and you can go through an entire day without experiencing flow.

3. 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.”

4. Meetings. Meetings gobble up your precious time like no other. Ultra-productive people avoid meetings as much as humanly possible. They know that a meeting will drag on forever if they let it, so when they must have a meeting they inform everyone at the onset that they’ll stick to the intended schedule. This sets a clear limit that motivates everyone to be more focused and efficient.

5. Responding to emails as they arrive. Productive people don’t allow their email to be a constant interruption. In addition to checking their e-mail on a schedule, they take advantage of features that prioritize messages by sender. They set alerts for their most important vendors and their best customers, and they save the rest until they reach a stopping point in their work. Some people even set up an autoresponder that lets senders know when they’ll be checking their e-mail again.

6. Hitting the snooze button. When you sleep, your brain moves through an elaborate series of cycles, the last of which prepares you to be alert at your wake up time. This is why you’ll sometimes wake up right before your alarm clock goes off—your brain knows it’s time to wake up and it’s ready to do so. When you hit the snooze button and fall back asleep, you lose this alertness and wake up later, tired and groggy. Worst of all, this grogginess can take hours to wear off. So no matter how tired you think you are when your alarm clock goes off, force yourself out of bed if you want to have a productive morning.

7. Multitasking. Multitasking is a real productivity killer. Research conducted at Stanford University confirms that multitasking is less productive than doing a single thing at a time. The researchers found that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information, or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time. When you try to do two things at once, your brain lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.
But what if some people have a special gift for multitasking? The Stanford researchers compared groups of people, based on their tendency to multitask and their belief that it helps their performance. They found that heavy multitaskers—those who multitasked a lot and felt that it boosted their performance—were actually worse at multitasking than those who liked to do a single thing at a time. The frequent multitaskers performed worse because they had more trouble organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information, and they were slower at switching from one task to another. Ouch!

8. Putting off tough tasks. We have a limited amount of mental energy, and as we exhaust this energy, our decision-making and productivity decline rapidly. This is called decision fatigue. When you put off tough tasks till late in the day because they’re intimidating, you save them for when you’re at your worst. To beat decision fatigue, you must tackle complex tasks in the morning when your mind is fresh.
Bringing It All Together
Some of these habits may seem minor, but they add up. Most amount to a personal choice between immediate pleasures and lasting ones. After all, the worst habit is losing track of what really matters to you.
Are there any productivity-killing habits that I missed? Please share them in the comments section below, because I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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10 Qualities All Successful People Share (That Have Nothing To Do With Talent)

The Muse 

When I was in ninth grade, my cross country coach told me I’d never run a mile in under seven minutes and 30 seconds.

“You’re too short and stocky,” he said neutrally. “Have you considered swim team?”

I remember jogging away with tears in my eyes, convinced I had no fate as a runner. My mile time hovered stubbornly between eight and nine minutes for the next three months—and when the cross-country season wrapped up, I shoved my sneakers into the back of the closet.

Several years later, after gaining some perspective and deciding my old coach was full of, um, baloney, I put them on again. Running two or three miles at a time turned into four or five. I spontaneously signed up for a half-marathon, then began diligently training.

Three months later, on a sunny spring morning, I completed the half-marathon. Average mile time? Seven minutes and thirteen seconds.

“Take that, Coach!” I yelled as I sprinted the last few steps.

Talent definitely contributes to success. But as this experience proved to me,telling yourself you don’t have the requisite skills to be successful will only hold you back. I’m not suggesting you should be unrealistic—after all, I know I’m never going to be an Olympic runner. However, there’s nothing stopping you from achieving a goal within the realm of possibility: not your body, your brains or your natural aptitude for a task.

While hard work and persistence got me across the finish line of my race, those aren’t the only things people can tap into to realize their goals.

Fouad ElNaggar, CEO of mobile development platform Sapho, has eight more:

1. Being On Time

2. Work Ethic

3. Effort

4. Body Language

5. Energy

6. Attitude

7. Passion

8. Being Coachable

9. Doing Extra

10. Being Prepared

10 things that require no talent or luck, via Fouad ElNaggar. Actually, I'd consider one showing these AS talented!pic.twitter.com/FIA9pqGSj6

As you can see, none of these things require an ounce of talent. So next time you want to make your dreams come to life, remind yourself you have what it takes.

Have you had any experiences like my cross-country one? Would you add anything to EINaggar’s list? Let me know on Twitter!

"10 Qualities All Successful People Share (That Have Nothing To Do With Talent)" was originally published on The Daily Muse.

Aja Frost is a freelance writer specializing in business, tech, career advice, and productivity.

The true meaning of true grit

Chewing dirt
On the true meaning of true grit

WOMEN@WORK

Camille Khodadad
By Camille Khodadad
Camille Khodadad is a partner at Hall Prangle & Schoonveld. The head of the employment law group and member of the commercial litigation group, she is a frequent speaker on current trends in employment law and issues pertaining to women in the workplace.

CKhodadad@HPSLaw.com

July 2017
What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word grit? I asked some of my colleagues (female and male) and here is what they said:

“John Wayne and chewing dirt”
“Clint Eastwood and harsh”
“Clenched teeth and grime”
“Eating raw meat”
While all of the above statements in some way capture what traditionally has been viewed as grit (my favorite is “chewing dirt”), the term has now taken on a different meaning. It has come to signify a new measure of effort that has many applications, including determining which women tend to succeed in the law.

So what is grit? In her book “Grit,” Angela Duckworth defines it as having the passion and perseverance to achieve long-term goals. It involves having a sustained drive that serves as a compass and the determination to stay the course. A gritty person is someone who continues to challenge herself, move forward despite adversity and picks herself up when she has fallen down.

Grit does not exist in isolation. It goes hand in hand with having a “growth mindset.” People with a growth mindset meet adversity with perseverance and see it as an opportunity to make them stronger. They view their abilities as something that can be changed and developed through hard work. In contrast, people with a “fixed mindset” avoid adversity at any cost, resulting in a conscious choice to stay away from challenges or give up too easily. They view their abilities as predetermined and unchangeable.

An important thing to remember is that grit has everything to do with drive and determination and little to do with stubbornness and arrogance. In fact, gritty people are often gracious and collegial.

Grit has become the new buzzword because of its influence on success. While confidence, talent and skills are important qualities, Duckworth considers grit to be one of the greatest predictors of who will succeed. For example, Duckworth studied cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Despite the qualifications and extreme vetting of those who are admitted to West Point, one in five will drop out before graduation. Her study showed that grit — not talent — was the more accurate predictor of who would stay in the program.

In the context of the legal profession, grit has been shown to be an accurate predictor of success for women in the largest law firms. Milana Hogan conducted a study of female lawyers in the top 200 Am Law firms. Rather than focus on what prevents them from succeeding, Hogan focused on uncovering characteristics common among women who succeed in that environment. Her study found a significant correlation between grit and a growth mindset and success.

Recognizing the significant role that grit plays in the success of women in the legal field, the American Bar Association on Women in the Profession created the Grit Project.

The goal of the project is to educate female law students and lawyers about the importance of having grit and a growth mindset with the view toward enhancing the promotion of women in the legal profession. The project has created a toolbox to assist bar associations, law firms and corporate legal departments with developing these qualities in female lawyers.

Let’s face it, attorneys by definition are gritty. If you are a woman or a minority, you are likely especially gritty. Why? Historically the process for women and minorities to enter and remain in the law has been more challenging than for others. Nonetheless, most of us can benefit from becoming grittier.

Need some grit goals? First, focus on changing your mentality. Find your passion and compass and then create a clearly defined vision of your long-term goals. Knowing that you can overcome adversity, challenge yourself every day. And when you fall down — which you will — pick yourself up and continue to move forward.

Second, surround yourself with a gritty environment — one that encourages and rewards hard work, passion and perseverance. That environment may include the people you work with or your family and friends. Grittiness is contagious. Just remember, if you are interested in becoming a grittier person, there are ways to do it … without chewing dirt.