Chasing your tail – How unproductive habits stall your progress

I thought I was immune and not someone who had unproductive habits but yesterday I finally faced the truth. I’ve been chasing my “email” tail for a long time and it’s time to put a stop to it. I’m in El Salvador on a little business and a lot of pleasure. The particular house where I’m staying has very limited internet access. As a matter of fact I can only get onto my Shaw email account from 5:00-7:00 in the morning. The rest of the day when I attempt to log on I get ceremoniously booted off. I get up at 5:00 am every morning just to check my email. I’ve been here for fifteen days and every day I follow the same routine. After 9:00 am I attempt to log on to my Shaw account and then again at 10:00am and so on and so on. Yesterday I spent an hour trying to log on and got know where. Are you thinking this is insane behavior? Well it is but how many of you do the same?

I know I’m obsessed about email.  I’m hooked on pressing send/receive and checking email every two minutes if I can. This is not an exaggeration but a confession. Being away from home and with limited access, I can’t hide my obsessive behavior any longer. I’m faced with the fact that checking email every few minutes is an unproductive habit and one that can easily stall any progress. Without the distraction email my productivity for writing has increased exponentially.  I’ve written ten articles in fifteen days. At home and with the distraction of email it would have taken two months to generate this kind of content.

I’ve been contemplating why and how the obsession first began.  I can only surmise that it probably started off very innocently and then the habit crept up over time. I work from home which can be very isolating as I’m sure many of you can relate. I guess I just needed to connect with the outside world and every time an email came through I felt like I was in touch with someone.

I pride myself on how responsive I am and I’ve often been complimented on how fast I get back to people. This positive reinforcement has been great and it’s helped me build a successful business. Let’s face it most businesses don’t even have the courtesy of returning phone calls in a timely manner let alone emails. This has been a point of differentiation for my business as I value responsiveness so I deliver it. The sticky situation here is that this responsiveness has also led to feeding the habit. I will have to find a way to be both responsive and productive. I’m pretty resourceful so I’m sure I will figure it out.

I know I’m not alone in my habits. I’m sure there are some of you that spend your time chasing your tail. You may have one or two or maybe even more habits that cause you to be unproductive like multi-tasking for example. Many people pride themselves on being able to do multiple tasks at once. This is probably one of the most unproductive ways to work. When you divide your focus like, talking on your cell phone, responding to emails on your blackberry while driving your car drinking your Starbucks you split your attention. I don’t want to be the driver on that highway when you are busy “getting things done” and attempting to “be productive”.

It would be fun to create a support group for those of us that have a habit of chasing our tail. We would have to come up with a cute name. I’m sure some of you probably have just hearing the name. I implore you to look at your own habits and be honest about how productive or unproductive they are.  If you need support just email me.