Most of us do things we wish we didn’t do (“bad habits”), and many of us leave undone things we think we should do (failure to develop “good habits”). Those many things crowd my mind every year when January 1st rolls around. This year, however, I received a bit of relief from my impending New Year’s self-flagellations while listening to an interesting radio interview.
The interviewee (unfortunately I didn’t catch his name) pointed out that the common term for changing a bad habit is to “break” it. We think that by sheer force of will, we can become different people in a month or two. This doesn’t work for me, and I suspect it doesn’t work for most people.
His suggestion was that rather than trying to “break” a bad habit, we can “untangle” the habit as if it were a knotted ball of string. By decomposing a habit one piece at a time, we can examine at close range the small things that keep us from getting to our goal. His example was his failure to incorporate meditation into his daily life. He knew that by doing it he could reduce stress, but he never seemed to be able to find the time. After many months of analyzing his day, he figured out that if he meditated after deleting the spam from his email box, but before he started to answer emails, he was able to meditate for three minutes every day. This was the first of many small, incremental changes he made in his life to integrate meditation into his day.
One activity project managers do on every project is a Work Breakdown Structure, or WBS. Similar to untangling a bad habit, the project manager can decompose a project one task at a time until a path to finishing the project is identified. Many teams want to attack the project, to just “start working”, without looking at the project as a series of component parts. These teams most likely will not gain lasting results from this superficial approach. Just as untangling a ball of knotted string takes time and patience, untangling a bad habit through deliberate, one-step-at-a-time effort can result in success and satisfaction.
Think what a WBS could do for your next project!