Ah, those bad habits! While we may not realize what some of our not-so-savory habits are, we may very well have some self-awareness around our other bad habits. Sometimes bad habits aren’t much more than an annoyance, BUT, what should you do when your bad habits are actually hurting your home business?
The first step, of course, is a little self-evaluation regarding what exactly your bad habits might be–we’ve talked about procrastination here, but what about other habits like smoking, online gambling, poor time management, or gossiping? One could argue that these habits don’t seem to have a direct connection or correlation with running a successful home business, but I could see how spending time gambling or chatting for hours on the phone could definitely take a chunk out of productive business time.
Plus, there can be such a fine line between something that is a coping mechanism–like watching an hour of self-help, confessional television, and something that becomes a bad habit (watching an entire day’s worth of self-help, confessional television.) In reality, it sometimes comes down to balance. Something that can be a helpful way to de-stress, making running a home business more do-able, can become a bad and harmful habit if taken to extreme. It might be worth your while to do some of that self-evaluation mentioned earlier and look over your habits and coping techniques to see if any of them may actually be getting in the way of your being able to focus on your home business when you need to.
Other habits like smoking or being perpetually late may influence how others view you and how they view your home business (your reputation). Only you can weigh how big of an effect this is on your business efforts to decide if it is worth working on giving up the habit for the sake of your business.
See Also: Remember, Being in Business is a CHOICE and Keeping Things in Balance