Habits are automated routines created in our brains that transform us into productive, thoughtless humans.
Your memories are kept in the hippocampus of the brain, where you’ll find quotes from old movies, sport statistics, and Algebra II (if you’re lucky).
Daily routines, like where you walk in the neighborhood, how you shower, or drive to work (even if it’s down the hallway now), are kept in a completely different place – the basal ganglia.
Habits – good and bad – trigger on their own. Your brain senses a cue and responds with the associated routine all by itself.
No thought needed.
Your lazy brain actually makes you more productive because while the automatic routine is simmering on the back-burner, you can use the rest of the stove. New situations require the entire kitchen.
Habits give you capacity to think.
They’re why some jobs start to feel stale after awhile – work has started to become a series of small habits instead of new and exciting problems to solve. When work doesn’t change or challenge you enough, your brain isn’t engaged.
You get bored.
You think, “I wonder who would win an office chair drag race?”
Or more productively, your capacity to take on new projects expands because you conquered the day-to-day minutiae of your work’s routines. Autopilot.
Your brain thirsts for new and interesting thoughts, problems, and opportunities. Don’t waste the extra room your habits created for you.
Team’s also build habits.
Have you ever been to the same, weekly, boring meeting? They’re stale, unsurprising, and filled with no interesting drama. Shake it up with an agenda that leaves the basal ganglia outside the room.
Or cancel it until something new comes up.
Not all organizational habits are as monotonous though.
In The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg talks about how the military is a giant habit experiment. Drills and skills are designed at scale to help entire units react or plan automatically.
There’s a lot to be said about a company’s operational systems – the “pipelines” that make the rest of the company work. For example, how quickly can your realtor move contracts through their team? It depends on how standard, routine, and habitual their processes are.
Teams with positive habits work quicker, with more predictable results, and with way more room to think critically about how to win the moment.