Success in 2017 is more about what you need to stop doing

Inc.com has an article online that hits close to home, “17 Bad Habits You Need to Kill in 2017 to Be More Successful.”

Number three is interesting – Kill your habit of multitasking. With the ability to stay connected to the workplace, to schools, to friends and family, wherever you are and whatever you are doing, just about everyone today considers themselves a multitasker.

Apparently, we’re all terrible at it. Inc.com got in touch with the director of the applied cognition lab at the University of Utah where they study multitasking and distracted driving. Utah’s studies have found that 98 percent of people who try to multitask end up not doing either task well.

There’s a lot of fascinating science in there. Click here to read more. The main point for this post is that to truly efficiently do the task at hand well you need to halt the stream of distractions. Don’t look at LinkedIn, left Facebook go, don’t worry about what President-elect @realDonaldTrump just tweeted. Shut it all down.

Several other tips are about attitude such as stop thinking it’s all about you, comparing yourself with everyone, complaining, wasting time with negative people and creating excuses.

Another relevant one that you’ll likely hear more and more about in the coming years is No. 10 – kill the habit of sitting.

One of Thinker’s clients is Ege Worksmart Solutions. Founder Scott Ege makes his living convincing companies that having their workers sitting stationary, grinding through to-do lists is bad for their corporate health. Ege with dozens of companies across the company – including behemoths like General Mills and Jewell/Osco – on the importance of stretching in the workplace.

“If you want to have more energy, the blood has to flow. The oxygen in our blood is golden. When it’s stagnant, we don’t work well, we aren’t as efficient. Movement is good. It’s healthy. It’s productive.”

Ege said there are dozens of studies that show you should – at minimum – get up from your computer screen every 30 minutes and take a walk. His favorite though was published in 2014 that essentially said “sitting still can kill you.” In that study, the managed care giant Kaiser Permanente studied 82,000 men aged 45 and older for more than 10 years. The ones who reported high levels of sedentary time and low levels of phyical activity had 2.2 times the risk of developing heart failure as compared with those who were more active.

The message in those statistics is simple – get up or else.