Source: allthingsd.com
Producing an iPhone might be a difficult process, and the factory that produces it always uses the same process of production, thus it does not have to always reconsider this system of production. Yes, it is something that is set up after a lot of regulations made in the past, but after a period of time, it became a process that is regularly used. The same process is used and the same output is produced. It is as simple as that, but we fail to implement it into our own lives.
You might say that we are humans and that we might not be able to achieve that, but we are products of our own habits, whether we are aware about them or not. Indeed, according to a study published by Duke University in 2006, we spend more than 40 percent of our time engaged in habitual actions that we do not give a second thought about. We simply do them without having to think whether we should do them or not. It might be brushing our teeth, checking up our inbox the moment we wake up, watching TV shows after we get back from work and other similar ones.
They sound really simple and easy to follow through because we already have the triggers, the routines and the rewards for these types of behaviors. The trigger might be waking up, the routine might be checking your latest emails and the reward might be a feeling of being important and significance seeing that other people have remembered to say something to you.
If we can simply change the routine, or break the triggers of some destructive habits, we might actually be able to get better rewards than wasting a lot of our precious time checking inbox, or browsing social media. You might not be able to abandon these types of habits, but you should replace them with other productive habits instead. Instead of checking up your inbox the first moment you enter in your office, you might use that time to write a to-do list of the things that you might want to finish that day. Instead of watching TV shows immediately after you get back from work, you might want to switch to read books, or write down some good things that happened to you that day.
I know that it sounds easy, but according to research forming a new habit mostly requires 66 days and after that it might be easier for you to do that behavior, than to not do it. You might have a lot of struggles in the beginning, because you are not used to do that new behavior, but remember that after 66 days you will probably do it a lot easier and the results that you gain from it are far more rewarding. This lesson alone can have a tremendous impact in our productivity, once we start to implement it.
