Have you developed bad habits that deteriorate your performance and motivation? Find out how you can ditch bad habits and become motivated academic!

Did you know that the habits you develop at the early stage of your development as an academic can make or break your academic career?

Why?

It’s because it’s relatively easy to pick up bad habits, while it’s substantially more challenging to ditch them.

And I don’t need to tell you how bad habits may affect your life as a PhD student – bad habits can drain your energy, diminish your productivity, and prevent you from staying motivated to solve the challenges, especially when you hit an obstacle in your research degree.

But what is bad habits definition? Broadly speaking, bad habits can be defined as negative behaviour. A common bad habits synonym is a weakness or a shortcoming.

There are many types of bad habits. But here is one of many unhealthy habits examples that you need to be particularly aware of as a researcher.

At the early stage of my formation as a researcher, I became an email slave. It wasn’t just a tool. I become obsessed with checking my email and was responding to every email right after it arrived in my mailbox. And I was doing this 24/7…

The result?

I got distracted from my research and had to stay up late to complete all my tasks. A not really great example of the work-life balance, and something that led to unhealthy sleeping habits.

Sometimes you may pick up a bad habit because you don’t really know it’s bad or it may have bad consequences in the long term.

But the great thing is that you aren’t alone with this and you may have picked up a bad habit because you weren’t shown otherwise.

Wondering how to improve studying habits, how to overcome bad habits and what are the examples of bad habits among PhDs? Look no further. I reflected on my good and bad habits to prepare the list of bad habits that are the most common and unhealthy that you should avoid so that you could become motivated academic and succeed in your career.

I also share ways to change them and succeed in your academic career. I hope this will give you an idea on how to stop bad habits and excel in your academic career! 

Bad habit to break for academic success #1: Procrastination

Do you always stick to your plan or do you delay your activities? Procrastination can be a number one enemy of every researcher, as you may struggle to get yourself motivated enough to get the work done. Procrastination can be seen as the bad habits definition for researchers and PhD students!

As a result, you may feel anxious because of the lack of progress. This may further deteriorate your motivation so that you keep delaying your work.

How to overcome a bad habit like this? To stop procrastinating and stay motivated, you need to understand that there’s a fine line between procrastination, motivation and burnout. To replace this bad habit with good ones, here is what you need to do:

• Take care of your wellbeing
• Plan for breaks and allow yourself some free time
• Don’t push yourself too hard to avoid anxiety and burnout

From my experience, the best way to break bad habits like procrastination is efficient planning and having a clear definition for WHY in your research.

Bad habit to break for academic success #2: Distractions cause lack of focus

Distractions kill your productivity. It’s as simple as that.

You won’t be able to properly focus on doing your research or writing your work.

Such distractions can include innocent things like having your phone close to you, having your email switched on, working with the TV on, working in a cluttered and untidy environment or in a noisy environment. Lack of focus is one of the worst habits to have as a researcher. It kills our productivity, results in long work hours, bad sleep hygiene, bad time management, and promotes negative work habits.

How to overcome a bad habit like this? Well, it’s relatively simple. Focus on replacing bad habits with good ones! Here’s how you can do it:

• take care of your working environment, especially if you work from home
• switch your phone to silent or use focus mode
• plan your focus and relax time in your daily schedule

Bad habit to break for academic success #3: Being addicted to email 

If we’re talking about examples of unhealthy habits in academia, being addicted to email is number one! I am guilty of this one myself, as I mentioned in the introduction.

Having your email open and replying to messages 24/7 is one of the key researcher’s sins, leading to bad productivity, unhealthy sleeping habits and other types of bad habits. After all, if you reply to your email at 3am, you’re giving others a message that you’re constantly on, keep working, and have no other life.

Moreover, this is one of the worst habits to have. It not only distracts you and prevents you from completing your daily tasks on time. It also can have a destructive influence on your health and wellbeing, as you’ll be more and more anxious about responding. You’ll also keep checking your email at all times.

How you can break this bad habit? Here is a process that I’ve been using for past couple of weeks:

• set specific time each day (1-3 times for example) when you check and respond to your email;
• switch your Outlook to work in offline mode to take control on when new messages hit your mailbox
• check messages only when you want to respond to them
• delete Outlook app from your phone and respond to emails from your PC only

Bad habit to break for academic success #4: Lack of sleep

Because of the distractions and procrastination, you tend to take more time to complete your activities than you initially planned (or than you should have).

As a result, you need to work in the evenings or even pull all-nighters, sacrificing the time you could’ve spent on wellbeing, your hobby or with your family and friends. Such unhealthy sleeping habits are at the top of the unhealthy habits list.

Importantly, the length and quality of sleep are essential for your cognitive functioning and sleep deprivation significantly influences your performance.  

What it means? Well, even if you think you can do more work during the night, this unhealthy habit will deteriorate your productivity. So in the long run, you are better of taking more sleep and being more productive!

How to overcome a bad habit like this? about replacing a bad habit like this with a good one? Here is how I did this after I graduated:

• prioritise your sleep
• make sure you regularly sleep at least 7-8 h per day
• limit your caffeine intake, especially in the afternoons
• don’t use your phone or laptop before bedtime
• develop relaxing rituals that will help you fall asleep

Bad habit to break for academic success #5: Lack of organisation and bad time management habits

As you may have noticed, many of the bad habits examples I discussed above have in common.

Yes, that’s right. Most of them are a result of a lack of organisation and bad time management.

What I mean by lack of organisation is mainly the environment you work in. This could cause distractions and a lack of focus! But there is an easy fix! To improve your productivity, make sure that:

• your workspace is tidy
• you’ve got everything you need within your reach (so that you don’t need to stand up and look for it)
• your work environment supports your focus

The last point gets me to the poor time management. Let me make it clear from the very beginning – we cannot control and, therefore, manage time. So it is not easy to break this bad habit without the mindset shift.

How to overcome this bad habit? You need to realise that when it comes to project management, what we’ve got control over is what we do with the time we’ve got available.

Therefore, to break free from most of your bad habits and get things done, you need to develop strong task management skills. Here is how you can do it:

• learn to efficiently prioritise your work and don’t multitask
• write down your daily, weekly and monthly goals
• keep your to-do list in a visible place so that you could easily refer to it
• reflect on your work

Bad habit to break for academic success #6: Spreading negativity and complaining

Uncertainty and complexity are inherent to academic careers. These may cause anxiety and frustrations. However, it’s important that you don’t spread such negative feelings around. These can be seen as unhealthy mind habits!

I understand that you need to release your frustrations and don’t get me wrong – it’s a good thing to get it out. But you need to do this in a constructive way that leads to actionable reflections.

To overcome a bad habit of complaining, try these:

• have a support group of colleagues and/or friends who’d be happy to listen and discuss your challenges and issues
• make sure you try to reflect and find a solution, rather than focusing solely on the issue
• become aware of your body language (i.e. rolling your eyes, avoiding eye contact, negative posture) – these also send negative messages to your colleagues. Try to be open and positive instead!

Bad habit to break for academic success #7: Unethical behaviour 

Unethical behaviour is a big NO-NO in any type of career. This means that you must not:

• plagiarise someone else’s work
• falsify your results
• steal ideas

I believe that none of you ever considered such unethical behaviours. But I wanted to raise them to emphasise that replacing bad habits with GOOD ones is key to delivery ethical research. That is why you should always:

• do acknowledge someone else’s work when you cite it in your work to give them credit for the time and effort they put in getting it done
• do check your results and correct even the smallest mistakes
• engage with others to collaborate and solve challenges together

Conclusions

It’s easy to develop bad habits at the early stage of your academic career. I know it is not easy to define bad habits. But for me, an accurate bad habits definition would equate them to negative behaviour or something that you can see as your weakness or shortcoming. Regardless of whether these are unhealthy mind habits, bad time management habits,

The difficult bit is breaking bad habits and replacing them with good ones. For example, I took control of my email inbox only a couple of months ago. Until that time, I was addicted to checking email and responding to messages immediately.  

Therefore, from the very beginning of your career:

• take care of your wellbeing and get enough sleep
• take care of your working environment and develop efficient task management skills
• develop efficient working patterns (i.e. switch off distractions)
• promote collaboration, integrity and acknowledge others

Still, wondering how to improve studying habits or how to stop doing bad habits in your research? Feel free to reach out for more support!

What bad habits do you have?