By: Web Work Daily

Last year, I attended a professional workshop where the instructor asked us to write out our worst habit. Unfortunately, more than one answer flooded my brain, and I had to seriously consider which to choose. In the end, I decided that my most unabashed, shameless and ubiquitous bad habit is impatience.

My impatience invades every aspect of my personal and professional life. For instance, I constantly find myself wondering, “Why do these people take so long in line at the grocery store?” Counting out each precious penny, then pulling out a coupon, then deciding they don’t really want the milk after all. Instead of an express line for 12 items or less, I think grocery store lines should be divided up into only two lanes — a line for those of us who move fast, have somewhere important to go and something worthwhile to do and a line for those who don’t. See, I told you I was impatient.

In terms of how it’s affected my productivity at work, I’m embarrassed to say that my impatience has led to countless instances of emails sent in a hurry, which only needed to be retracted or clarified latter; decisions made on quick assumptions  — that turned out to be wrong — and occasional crankiness with those around me who are not moving fast enough.

Having pulled back the curtain on my own worst habit in the workshop, I decided to do something about it. I’ve spent a good deal of time over the last year working on my bad habit of impatience. And while I’ll never be “the soul of patience,” I have made progress. I’ve learned to quell my initial reaction to respond immediately, and, instead, take a deep breath and wait things out a bit. It’s helped my productivity by saving me time, money and stress.

“We all walk around on a daily basis with habits that are detrimental to our productivity,” says Larry Tobin, co-creator of Habitchanger.com.

Tobin, whose 42-day online habit-changing program deals with everything from quitting smoking to reducing stress, says that science has shown us that we can teach an old dog new tricks.

“A habit is an involuntary, unconscious action,” says Tobin. “Habits are learned, not instinctual. They are something we have taught ourselves to do, so it is possible to unlearn them,” he says.

In fact, a whole slew of recent scientific research in the field of neuroplasticity has proven that the brain has the ability to adapt to new information, if it’s consistently presented over a period of time. “It takes between 30 and 60 days of doing the same thing over and over again on a daily basis to create a new habit or break an old one,” says Tobin.

According to MedicineNet.com, Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.

Why not put the power of your flexible brain to work? Here’s a simple, two-step process I teach my consulting clients to help them break down their bad habits and build up their productivity.

Step 1: Call out the bad habit and identify its negative consequences.

“To break a habit, the first thing you need to do is step aside and become aware of what you are doing,” says Tobin. In my 25-plus years as a consultant, I’ve noticed a consistent group of productivity-killing habits including procrastination, disorganization, being ill-prepared and operating in crisis management. What are your bad business habits and what negative impact has the bad habit had in your business (and perhaps personal) life? Here are a few examples:

• You work full-time for a company and often find that you arrive at meetings unprepared. The negative impact might include: Feeling unable to make a decision in the meeting, or the progress of the group being hindered by your lack of preparation.
• You’re a freelancer and procrastinate to the point of lost productivity. The negative impact might include: Missing a deadline for submitting a proposal for a new piece of work or delivering late on a project to an important client — hurting your credibility and chances for future work.
• You telecommute and have a disorganized home office. The negative impact might include: Being late to meetings at the office due to looking for needed documents at home or becoming distracted by to-dos around the house, rather than confronting cleaning up a messy home office.

Step 2: Create alternative actions.

One way to change an old, bad habit is to replace it with a new, better one. By practicing the new action, a pathway is created in your brain that, over time, can become as strong as (if not stronger than) the previous behavior. The key is to start small, with little actions you can implement easily. So get creative and think of some alternate actions you could take to counter the bad habit you identified. For example:

• I will schedule my computer alarm to notify me 30 minutes before the start of the meeting so that I have time to look over the meeting agenda and my notes before I arrive.
• The next time I have a proposal to write for a potential client, I will set aside a specific block of time in my calendar, on a specific date, to get it written.
• The first thing I will do every morning when I go into my home office is spend 15 minutes clearing off my desk or cleaning out a file.

Just remember, good habits don’t suddenly appear overnight; instead, they develop slowly over time, as certain behaviors — repeated over and over — begin to overlay the way you work. The good news is that, given a mind as malleable as yours, breaking bad habits is just a few new neural pathways away.

What’s your worst bad habit?

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By: David Port

A new generation of entrepreneurs is congregating in ‘co-working’ spaces across the country.

David Brunelle was living the dream: He’d shucked his 9-to-5 office job, liberated himself from the cubicle farm and started his own business. He was working from home, being his own boss … and before long, wallowing in freedom.

“More often than not, I’d find myself on the couch, playing Xbox at 1 in the afternoon,” says Brunelle, a Seattle web developer. “It became pretty clear that to be productive, I needed structure, I needed to set boundaries between my work and my home life, and I needed to be around other people who are serious about their work.”

Fortunately, Brunelle, who launched his web design company last November, discovered Office Nomads, a 5,000-square-foot collection of work spaces designed for people just like him: sole proprietors, freelancers, artists, consultants and other independent workers who have emerged to work and connect under the same roof.

Their search for a workplace that combines the best of a home office, an internet cafe and a traditional office has given rise to a whole new movement, with an awkward but apt name: “co-working.” It’s a dramatic U-turn in the quest for the perfect work environment–a migration back to the cubicle from the often-idealized home office, but a cubicle reimagined for a time when the line between domestic and professional life has never been more blurred.

Co-working spaces–which cost anywhere from $25 a day for occasional drop-ins to $500 or more a month–only began popping up a few years ago in places like New York and San Francisco. Now they are slowly becoming a national and international phenomenon. The potential is huge: More than 10 million Americans are self-employed, up from about 8 million in 1980. Freelance job sites are booming, too: Elance.com had postings jump 40 percent in the first half of this year, while Guru.com saw its total membership grow by 15% over the year before.

The appeal of co-working seems clear: It provides people like Brunelle a professional and social package that most alternatives can’t match. For starters, there’s the real-live-human camaraderie you can’t get from Facebook or text messaging, as well as the potential for networking and uncovering new business opportunities. A co-working office can also offer a sounding board for ideas in an informal setting. And it relieves, for the most part, the energy-sapping world of office politics–not to mention blood-draining commutes.

All that, plus a basic support system that typically includes dedicated spaces for working and for socializing, high-speed internet, a kitchenette and, naturally, some type of caffeine-dispensing appliance. Printers and fax machines could also be available. Some spaces sweeten the package with lockers, showers and yoga classes. Others offer audio-video equipment, organized social outings, consulting services–and one of the newest services: child care.

Capitalizing on the fact that co-workers may have small children in need of supervision, Cubes&Crayons in Northern California has added onsite child care at its locations in San Francisco and Mountain View. What the company calls “professional, developmentally appropriate” care for children between the ages of 3 months and 5 years is provided during regular business hours. There’s flexibility in choosing a plan–full-time, part-time or drop-in. Rates for members range from $17 an hour for occasional drop-ins to a flat fee of $600 per month for 60 hours of care. Cubes&Crayons may be the first, but it is unlikely to be the last, to start grooming the next generation of co-workers.

But for most people, what makes co-working alluring isn’t the child care or the yoga but the cooperative spirit and community vibe fostered by the people who populate those spaces.

Take Tony Bacigalupo. “I was working from home for a web consulting firm and realized I needed to be around other people and out of the house,” he explains. “The local café wasn’t great as a work environment either. Then I discovered there was already a burgeoning movement for people like me.”

Similar disenchantment with working from home prompted Andrew Luter, a private equity investor in Denver, and Susan Evans, an environmental consultant in Seattle, to turn to co-working at around the same time.

“Isolation,” Evans says, “is an inconvenient byproduct of the concept of home-office convenience.” For Luter, the problem with working from home “wasn’t just the distractions, it was the sense of physical and mental separation.”

Having met enough like-minded people to believe co-working was more than a passing fancy, Bacigalupo, Evans and Luter were soon investing in the business and helping propel the movement in their respective cities. In April 2007, Luter opened the Hive in Denver. Seven months later, Office Nomads, the brainchild of Evans and business partner Jacob Sayles, began welcoming members in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. And a year after that, Bacigalupo opened New Work City in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. Meanwhile, co-working spaces also were debuting across the country–and not just in the largest cities but in smaller urban areas and university towns with thriving populations of entrepreneurs and independent workers.

Now, less than a year after opening, New Work City hosts anywhere from 40 to 50 full- and part-time members on a given day. To be there, they can pay a $25 daily drop-in fee or $500 a month for a full-time membership, which affords them 24/7 access to the space. The Hive, meanwhile, has roughly 20 members who use its 4,000-square-foot space, paying $199 per month for 24/7 access. Brunelle is one of about 25 full-time members at Office Nomads; for $475 they get “resident” status, which comes with a dedicated desk and 24/7 access. There are also part-timers and drop-ins.

Graphic artists and business consultants, architects and publicists, authors and code-writers: As diverse and colorful as the co-working crowd is, there are unifying threads. “No one in here wants to work by themselves; everyone is here because they want to be here,” Evans says.

And, Bacigalupo adds, co-workers tend to be personable types. “The jerks rarely stick around, if they come here in the first place, and they rarely do. These are offices spaces without all the sucky parts of an office.”

He explains that people spent most of the 20th century figuring out how to go from blue-collar to white-collar jobs. “Now we’re looking for a new kind of personal workplace beyond the white-collar environment,” he says. “I think what we’re seeing now is a resurgence of interest in the possibilities of the virtual office–a healthier, more sustainable version of telecommuting.”

The variety of people working in complementary fields can make co-working spaces fertile ground for new business opportunities, too. “There’s certainly work being passed to and fro among members,” Evans says. “That is definitely a consistent theme across co-working spaces. It’s a huge benefit.”

In the end, it is camaraderie, community and connectedness that fuel this trend. “It is what members make it,” Evans says, “and they have made it pretty awesome.”

So awesome, in fact, that Brunelle says he has “no complaints and no regrets” after six months as an Office Nomads full-timer–even though it’s meant sacrificing those pajamas-and-Xbox afternoons.  

David port is a freelancer based in denver who writes on small business, and financial and energy issues.

And if business takes you on the road, there are dozens of work spaces in the U.S. and abroad that have open-door policies for co-workers from out of town. as part of a loosely structured “visa” program. This means you don’t have to hole up in a hotel room to conduct business or you can rub shoulders with co-workers in other cities, Co-working spaces in at least 17 states and 13 countries have signed on to participate in the program, which invites co-workers to drop in and work at little or no cost.

“If you’re a member of a co-working space, come on in, take a seat and work here as many days as you like,” says Susan Evans, co-founder of Office Nomads in Seattle. Terms, such as whether to call or e-mail ahead to confirm space availability, vary by organization. For an updated list of visa-friendly spaces and their requirements, check http://coworking.pbworks.com/CoworkingVisa.

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