5 Work Habits to Support Your Personal Life

Our habits contribute significantly to our success in life and in our career. To be successful we need to develop the right habits that support who we want to be and the accomplishments we want to achieve.

Last week we discussed personal habits that can support you in your career. Today we look at those work habits you've developed and how they can be beneficial to your personal life.

Organization. The ability to remain organized amid complexity, chaos, and competing demands is a skill that is needed in the work place and, obviously, allows one to maintain order in your personal life when surprises inevitably come. Develop a system to remain organized at work and it can serve you well at home.

Effective listening. Demonstrating the ability to listen to others well is necessary for successful communication and builds healthy and successful relationships, both in your work situation and in your personal life. We all need to become good at listening and truly hearing others and the work place provides a great opportunity to develop this skill.

Avoiding procrastination. Developing the skill of addressing what is important without delay is critical to becoming a trusted part of your work team. It requires you to identify what is most important and addressing this task to meet the demands of your work schedule. There are always things we'd like to put off at home and learning to avoid procrastination at work can help us be more successful with these tasks in our personal life.

Never Say "It's not my job". You are a team player and are willing to take on any tasks necessary to get the job done, even if they don't fit your job description. The same is true in our personal lives: sometimes we need to take care of the garbage, paint the basement, fix the door, or do something else that we're not trained in or might tale us out of our comfort zone.

Avoid distraction. Staying focused on the task at hand, without getting distracted by coworkers or social media, is a key to success at work. This also helps our personal lives and prevents us from spending our weekend playing video games or staring at our phone when our friend or child is trying to talk to us.