Want to Break Bad Habits and Supercharge Your Business? Use This Technique. Forget about breaking your bad habits. Automate your busy work and focus on growing your business instead.
By Aytekin Tank Edited by Jessica Thomas
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Homer understood the power of habits. In his epic poem, The Odyssey, the Sirens are half-woman, half-bird creatures whose hypnotic voices lure sailors into deadly coastlines. Ignore the misogyny in this ancient Greek tale, and the Sirens represent temptation; the magnetic pull of things we should probably resist. I'm not a classical scholar, but habits feel like the siren song of modern life.
As a CEO, I've also noticed that entrepreneurs often underestimate how habits influence our businesses. Unless we're talking clichéd green juice and cold plunge routines, we think our changeable workdays give us a free pass in the world of habits. Yet, research shows about 40% of our daily activities are habitual. That includes founders, too.
I spent the past year writing a book about automation, not habits. But as I considered how my team and I use software to minimize repetitive, manual tasks, I began to see that both habits and automation are built on loops. There's a trigger, an action and an outcome that occur whether we're conscious of them or not. As author Gretchen Rubin says, "Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life." I believe automation is the silent fuel of successful businesses.
When you can automate your habits, both good and not-so-good, you have more time to think strategically and grow your startup. But first, let's explore how habit loops work.
Related: 18 Destructive Habits Holding You Back From Success
How do habits form?
"Habits are actions that are triggered by cues, such as a time of day, an activity, or a location," writes Healthline contributor Stacey McLachlan. "They culminate in a feel-good reward that, through repetition, fuses the connection between cue and reward firmly in the brain."
As McLachlan describes, the habit loop starts with a cue. It could be a space, an emotion or anything else your brain associates with a specific behavior. That cue then triggers the craving, which drives you to a response, like eating a cookie or going for a walk. The routine satisfies your craving and delivers a reward to your brain — reinforcing the loop and strengthening the cue.
Cues are often unconscious, so before you even realize what's happening, you're biting your nails, scrolling social media or doing something you swore you wouldn't. If you want to change the loop, you need to break it down and understand how it works. The same goes for automation.
Automate your manual workflows
Automations run on workflows, which are a series of interconnected steps that produce a result. To operate your dishwasher, for example, you open the machine, load it with dirty dishes, add soap, close it and start the cycle. You don't add soap after the cycle finishes or load dishes while it's running.
We often fail to realize that many daily tasks are also workflows. Consider writing an email: It might appear as a single item on your to-do list, but it's often a multi-step workflow that requires additional information, input from others or even time to consider your tone and approach.
If you're struggling to find time for business strategy and innovation, workflows might be to blame — and they're often tied to your habits. For example, maybe you habitually spend hours each morning tackling DMs, emails, voicemail and text messages, even though you planned to brainstorm a marketing campaign. To change this routine, you need to determine which cues drive you to open your email browser or smartphone, instead of digging into that campaign.
When the "craving" to check your email hits, you could replace the response with a different behavior — or you could automate the process instead. With simple automation tools, you can group and sort incoming messages, delete unwanted emails, auto-save email attachments, convert emails to spreadsheets, set emails to "read later" and so much more. Understanding your cues and breaking down the habit loop is the first step to automating your busy work.
Related: 9 Ways to Actually Adopt the Better Habits You Know Will Help You Succeed
Find habits and tasks that are ripe for automation
Once you've identified a habit you want to automate, it's time to build the workflow loop. Every workflow has four components: trigger, steps, results and outcome.
Imagine a workflow that automatically deletes unwanted emails. The trigger might be a spam email landing in your inbox. Next, the steps are the tasks that happen during the workflow. For example, your email client recognizes and deletes unwanted messages based on your specified conditions. The outcome is a spam-free inbox. The best part? You didn't have to lift a finger or break focus while your device did the work.
Email filtering is a simple process, but workflow automations — like habit loops — follow the same pattern, regardless of how many steps, contingencies or people are involved. In the same vein, mapping your daily workflows can also highlight process issues and reveal opportunities to enhance efficiency.
As you're sizing up the daily habits and routines you'd like to automate, look for repetitive, systematic workflows. These are recurring activities like uploading expense receipts to bookkeeping software. You can also watch for tasks that follow a pattern and don't require your input, such as running the same marketing collateral in different regions. You've already created and approved the campaign, so let the machines do the heavy lifting.
Finally, automation-friendly workflows often have several interconnected steps. When you hire a new team member, for example, you could build an automation that adds them to the accounting and HR systems, supplies their necessary IT access codes and more. If it can be delegated or delayed, there's a good chance it can also be automated.
Creating simple and effective automations does take some time, especially if you're just getting started. However, the benefits far outweigh the initial effort. Be patient with yourself. You didn't build a business overnight; automating time-draining tasks is also a gradual process.
The more tedious tasks you can automate, the more you can resist the Homeric pull of unconstructive habits. In turn, you'll free up invaluable time to do the work that makes you feel energized, fulfilled and creative — the same work that led you to start your business in the first place.
Related: The First Step to Creating Healthy Habits Is Smaller Than You Think
