Monday Motivation Hack: Breaking Bad Habits

At any given time, everyone is trying to break at least one bad habit.

Bad habits sap our confidence, time, and energy and keep us from living our healthiest, most productive, and happiest lives.

Whether you want to eat better, improve teamwork skills, quit smoking, listen more, or something else, we’ve compiled some best practices that will have you breaking bad habits for good.

Before You Start Breaking Your Bad Habits. . .

I’ll be straight with you—jumping into this whole-hog is a recipe for disaster. Human brains are primitively hard-wired to seek rewards, which makes changing habits time-consuming and difficult.

If you’re going to do this, do it right.

• Clarify your bad habit. What habit do you want to break? Think about it seriously. Regularly remind yourself about it. Then, ask yourself why you want to change it. What are you losing out on now? What do you stand to gain?
• Write it down. Journal or make notes about your bad habit. Pay special attention to the triggers and context that accompany it.

Here’s a tip: Critically observe a bad habit for at least one week before trying to make any changes.

How to Break Bad Habits

1Get Your Mind Right

Stop thinking of yourself as a practitioner of your particular bad habit. Marie Forleo recommends changing your inner dialogue from “I can’t” to “I don’t” as a powerful starting point.

2Give Yourself Time

On average, it takes sixty-six days to change a habit, and there is a lot of variance. It’s a commitment. Consequently, some experts recommend taking a month to reflect on a bad habit before making a change.

Itching to start? Do a test run. Drop the habit for a week, then review to iron out the kinks.

3Take Small Steps

Make every step as simple as possible. Jenny C. Evans, author of The Resiliency rEvolution advises making changes so minute that they remain undetectable by the primitive brain and do not trigger a stress response. So, if you want to quit smoking, cut back how much you smoke daily instead of going cold turkey.

4Build in Accountability

Make new habit-formation a team effort by involving friends—it’s easier and more motivating than going solo. Remain accountable to yourself by setting reminders. Trying to eat better? Set daily reminders to order a side salad instead of fries. If you need something more compelling, bet money on it with 21habit and have your investment keep you honest.

5Strengthen Your Willpower

Avoiding relapse is impossible without self-control. Willpower is a muscle you can strengthen with simple tips, like changing your environment (the out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach) or creating an If-Then Plan.

6Make Alternatives Concrete

Often you’re not only stopping a bad habit, but also trying to replace it with something better. The Simple List Method is ideal for this situation. Basically, list the behavior you want to see and a corresponding concrete action, e.g., Listen better → Don’t bring a phone to meetings.

7Associate Bad Habits with Something Negative

Break the magical hold of a bad habit by focusing on why it’s awful. Being mindful is surprisingly good at helping you with that. Imagine practicing mindful smoking or mindful procrastination. It’s naturally unappealing—exactly what you’re after!

8Track Progress and Analyze It

Whether you journal or keep a table of success like the Simple List Method, it’s important to track progress, reflect periodically, and find patterns. Analyzing your results helps you understand if you fall off the wagon on certain days or in certain contexts. This knowledge will inform your habit-breaking approach moving forward.

6 Quick Tips for Writing Emails That Actually Get Things Done

How many emails do you send per day? With over 200 billion emails going out every single day, there’s a good chance at least a couple of them are coming from you. But if you’re not structuring your emails properly, you may be making both your and your recipient’s lives more difficult than they need to be.

Whether you’re asking for customer support, planning a party, or sending a work email, the following tips will help you craft efficient and effective emails that actually get things done.

Write a Descriptive Yet Concise Subject Line

Email marketers have known this for a long time.

The subject line of an email is just as important as the text inside. Why’s that? Because if you can’t even get the recipient to open your email, none of the words in your email body matter.

To write a great subject line, keep it as brief and descriptive as possible. Think of a newspaper headline: it’s short, attention grabbing, and tells you exactly what to expect in the article. That’s everything your subject needs to be. Avoid the vague “Quick Question” and similar. If your question is that quick, just ask it in the subject line!

You can even steal a little more knowledge from email marketers here. Thousands of sent emails show that 65 characters is the sweet spot for subject lines that get your emails read.

Keep Your Message as Short as Possible

Guy Kawasaki is a marketing guru who deserves some of the credit for the success of a little-known product called the Apple Macintosh. He’s a famous author and a globally respected marketer. As you can imagine, he’s a man who gets a lot of emails. And all those emails have pushed Guy to publicize this one rule about emails:

Emails should be around five sentences long. In his own words, “Less than five sentences is often abrupt and rude, more than five sentences wastes time.”

While not every email can be written in five sentences, it is a good rule to help keep your emails as brief as possible. Most emails need to include only five basic details:

• Who you are
• What you want
• Why you’re asking the recipient
• Why they should do what you’re asking
• What the next step is

Break Up Your Text to Make It Scannable

If your recipient is staring at a backed-up inbox, the last thing they’ll want to see is a massive wall of text in your email. Even if you stick near the five-sentence rule, it’s still possible to create a text wall if you’re not careful.

Instead of one long paragraph, break up your email into easily scannable chunks. Try to use bulleted lists instead of sentence lists whenever possible, and keep your paragraphs to only a few sentences or lines.

Scannability has become even more important now that the majority of email is read on phones or tablets.

Include a Clear Call to Action

If you want to get a response to your email, it helps to actually tell your recipients what to do. If you need them to respond, tell them exactly what information you need and how many separate questions need to be answered. If you need them to click a link and fill out a form, be similarly clear about that.

Again, marketers have long known about the importance of clear instructions. You can write the best email in the world, but if you don’t clearly tell the recipients what you need them to do, it’s far too easy for them to push your email to the side.

Proofread Your Email for Spelling and Grammatical Errors

Not only do spelling and grammatical mistakes make your emails harder to understand, they also lower your credibility in the eyes of your recipients, as demonstrated in a Clemson University study. The study found that authors of content with spelling errors were perceived as less trustworthy and accurate than authors with proper spelling and grammar.

Don’t get happy fingers when it comes to clicking the Send button. You can avoid dinging your credibility by thoroughly proofreading every email. And for especially important emails, you might even want to read the email out loud to make sure your eyes don’t skip over any errors.

Check for Incorrect Links or Missing Attachments

If you’re including essential links or attachments, you should always double-check them. When copying and pasting multiple links, it’s easy to accidently duplicate a hyperlink or to misclick a button. And missing attachments are such a common problem that Gmail even created an automated warning for them.

No matter who you’re emailing, incorporate these tips into your next email. Not only will your email be more effective, your recipients will thank you for saving them time!

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Colin Newcomer is a freelance writer with a background in SEO and affiliate marketing. He helps clients grow their web visibility by writing primarily about digital marketing, WordPress, and B2B topics.

The Right Way to Procrastinate, According to Productivity Experts

Just about everyone I know is a procrastinator on some level. Going by Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule”, basically every college student is an expert procrastinator. But procrastination doesn’t mean putting off work forever and never doing it. For most people (even college students!), work that gets put off must eventually get done. From this perspective, the real masters of putting off work are those who still manage to get everything done and done well. Luckily, there are some simple productivity techniques that can make your procrastination work for you.

Accept that Procrastination Can Be Good For You

In our culture, we tend to vilify procrastination as the antithesis of productivity. When done correctly, however, procrastination can help you focus in on your goals, gain clarity on what’s important, and boost your creativity. Getting all the benefits you can out of your break time means actually learning how to procrastinate.

Procrastinating for Productivity

Effective procrastination is built around “active procrastination” or “productive procrastination” techniques. Strategies can include restructuring your tasks so that in putting off some work you actually get other valuable tasks done. You might also try pitting your task against your own boredom. (“You don’t have to write that email, but you can’t do anything else.”) Or you could default to certain helpful tasks, like organizing. In fact, active procrastination is often so productive that many people wouldn’t even call it procrastination. Here are some go-to strategies from success experts.

1Get Your Head Right

So often we dive into a project with little direction. Give yourself time before and during a project to step back, organize your thoughts or actions, and get clarity on what parts of the task are important. This doesn’t have to be terribly formal, either. It can be as simple as clearing the clutter on your desk for focus or clearing the clutter in your planner to decide what’s a priority. It can mean having a coffee and actively thinking about your approach to a problem or job. Whatever it is for you, do that thing that allows you to get your head on straight.

Sometimes it can feel like you’re juggling a million and one things at a time. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, it is worth separating all your tasks, correctly prioritising each one and then resuming action. Doing this can clear things up in your mind and leave you feeling less overwhelmed. —Jörgen Sundberg, Link Humans and Undercover Recruiter

2Embrace the Time Crunch

One of the reasons procrastination is appealing to people is that it creates the needed additional stress to push us to complete tasks or projects. The added pressure of limited time can help us focus and prioritize better. So, let yourself wait until (almost) the last moment.

I have tried many things in the past to get work done: to-do lists, diarying the stuff that I need to do, Pomodoro. However, the best thing I have found so far is the ‘Just in Time’ method of working. You know there is a task to do by a certain date. Two days before the date you spend all your time getting it done, depends on how big the task is of course.

For instance, I had a program where I needed to make 15 videos. I would normally do this over a span of 3-4 weeks. However, I spent 2 days, before the program went live, and completed the videos. This way you’ve got pressure, you’ve got a commitment, and you’ve got the added bonus of not overthinking things, you get out of your own way and just get it done. —Stephen Aitchison, Change Your Thoughts—Change Your Life

3Procrastinate by Getting Your Foot in the Door

Having trouble getting to the gym or writing that blog post? Let yourself procrastinate or dwell on one small step of that process. If you need to head for a workout, allow yourself to spend some time prepping your gym bag (once it’s all ready you’re more likely to go). Need to get the blog post done? Spend some time getting your space right or simply crafting the thesis.

The hardest part of anything is starting, and 9 times out of 10 if I start I can carry myself through and get a lot done. That other one time, where I still can’t do anything? That’s when I know I should just go do something fun and try again later. —Sean Ogle, Location 180

4Make Sure You’re the Best Person for the Job

Procrastination allows you to pause and look critically at a project. Taking time to critically analyze what parts of the project are holding you back might help you understand whether or not you are the best person for the task.

Procrastination is a gift. It allows you an opportunity to assess if you are the right person to work on that task or strategy. Overcoming procrastination only takes 15 minutes. If you are really avoiding something you need to ask yourself: Is this something I MUST do?

If the answer is no, determine can you delete it or delegate it. If you can delete it that’s fabulous. If you can delegate it, who is the best person to outsource it to? —Neen James, Neenjames.com

Productive procrastination isn’t necessarily the best fit for everyone. Depending on your situation, you may have better luck nipping procrastination in the bud. There are literally as many approaches to managing procrastination as there are people, and no one is always right. So, it’s important to think critically about your work, goals, and priorities when planning for your productivity.

How do you manage procrastination? Are there any tips you would add?

What Is a Subordinate Clause?

A subordinate clause is a clause that cannot stand alone as a complete sentence; it merely complements a sentence’s main clause, thereby adding to the whole unit of meaning. Because a subordinate clause is dependent upon a main clause to be meaningful, it is also referred to as a dependent clause.

Whether you use the term subordinate or dependent to describe the clause, this clause’s function is clear: it provides informational support to the main event of the sentence. This main clause will be independent: it can stand on its own as a complete sentence.

We can all go for ice cream.

This sentence is an independent clause. It has a subject and a verb, and on its own, it presents a complete unit of meaning: all of us are able to go out and have ice cream. (Hooray!)

But perhaps this isn’t all we need to convey.

We can all go for ice cream if I can find my wallet.

If I can find my wallet adds substantially to the meaning of the sentence. It is too soon to celebrate about our ice cream outing because there is a task at hand. We have to first find that wallet.

On its own, if I can find my wallet is a subordinate clause; it is not a full unit of meaning. If it was written separately as a sentence, the result would be a sentence fragment—your English teacher’s pet peeve.

If I can find my wallet.

What will happen if I can find my wallet? If a clause in your sentence leaves us hanging like this when set apart on its own, it is a subordinate clause.

Words That Begin Subordinate Clauses

Subordinate clauses will often begin with subordinating conjunctions, which are words that link dependent clauses to independent clauses, such as for, as, since, therefore, hence, consequently, though, due to, provided that, because, unless, once, while, when, whenever, where, wherever, before, and after.

They can also begin with relative pronouns such as that, which, who, whom, whichever, whoever, whomever, and whose. Spotting these words can tip you off that you are dealing with a subordinate clause rather than a main clause.

Why Do I Need to Know Which Clauses Are Subordinate?

Now that you can identify a subordinate or dependent clause, you may wonder how this information can be helpful to you. The answer to that is simple. It will help you to avoid hearing the words (from a teacher, editor, or coworker), “You should put a comma there.” Or the equally delightful, “You shouldn’t have put a comma there.”

Knowing which clauses are main (independent) and which are subordinate (dependent) will help you organize your ideas and place your commas correctly. The best part is, it is actually quite simple. When a subordinate clause begins a sentence, it has a comma after it. When the main clause begins the sentence, there is no comma to separate it from the dependent clause.

If I can find my wallet we can all go for ice cream.

We can all go for ice cream, if I can find my wallet.

If I can find my wallet, we can all go for ice cream.

We can all go for ice cream if I can find my wallet.

Comma Placement Level 2: Restrictive vs. Nonrestrictive Clauses

Punctuating subordinate clauses only gets tricky when they begin with relative pronouns such as that, which, who, when, where, and whose. Conveniently, this type of subordinate clause can be referred to as a relative clause. There are two types of relative clauses: restrictivenonrestrictive.

Restrictive clauses are sometimes referred to as essential clauses. This is because they are essential to the meaning of the sentences they are a part of. Elements of a sentence that are essential should not be set apart with commas.

I enjoy watching movies that employ lots of special effects.

There should be no comma separating the restrictive clause that employ lots of special effects from the main clause I enjoy watching movies because it is essential to the meaning of the sentence.

The opposite is true with nonrestrictive clauses: they can be excised from a sentence without altering its core meaning. Since they are nonessential, they should always be set apart with commas in a sentence. Often, nonrestrictive clauses will “interrupt” a main clause, as in the example below, and when that happens, you should insert a comma both before and after the clause.

Watching Star Wars, which has lots of special effects, is my favorite thing to do.

Without the nonrestrictive clause which has lots of special effects, the core idea of the sentence, Watching Star Wars is my favorite thing to do, is still intact.