Productivity: How Small Habits Drive Big Change

Do you ever feel like you’re sprinting through the day, barely pausing to breathe? Phone ringing, inbox inundated, people stopping you in your tracks, ‘just for a minute.’ It doesn’t take much for managers to find their day punctuated by interruptions and inefficiencies, where they no longer run their calendar, but the people around them run it. The result? The majority of your time becomes reactive, responding to demands. Meanwhile, the important, yet non-urgent areas within work (such as strategy, direction, or vision) are left in your wake.

This is where habits matter. When leaders step back and identify what automatic behaviours are driving inefficiencies, and make methodical shifts to achieve habits that are efficient and sustainable, they gain an edge. This shift allows them to focus on the right things, at the right time. An edge where habits allow them to become proactive, conserve personal energy, and lead with efficiency, clarity, and impact.

Why Do Days Lead Us, Not Us Lead Our Days?

We like to believe success comes from willpower and sharp thinking, but the brain tells a different story. Our prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for focus and decision-making, burns out quickly. To save energy, we slip into autopilot. We respond to whatever lands in front of us out of habit, whether that’s people-pleasing, ticking a task off, or putting out a spotfire. To save energy, the brain almost always follows the path of least resistance, not pausing to ask: “Is this the best use of my time?” In other words, we can easily find ourselves creating the wrong habits in an effort to conserve energy.

For high-achieving leaders, this creates a unique tension. You thrive on vision, growth, and opportunity - yet you habitually respond to interruptions, without calculating the cost of this automatic diversion of attention.

This is where it is important to understand the basal ganglia’s role in seeking to create efficiency. It’s responsible for turning repeated processes into near-automatic habits (whether good or bad), freeing up mental energy. The question for leaders becomes this: are the habits you’ve formed serving you well, or distracting you from focussing on the right things?

Take a simple example: when someone makes a request, do you instantly drop what you’re doing to help? In many workplaces, pings from tech trigger a near-automatic ‘yes.’ In my previous role in a tech business, we disrupted this cycle with a simple Priority (P) system. Every request was tagged P0 - P4, each aligned with a clear response timeframe, along with an approriate medium for communication:

Leaders only dropped everything for a P0, and the communication medium (phone call) was used sparingly. Outside of the rare P0, most requests had structured, predictable turnarounds. Within seconds, a leader could guage the priority level of an incoming request, and when it should be addressed. It became instinctual and universal across the team - a system of habit that protected productivity, while still meeting genuine needs.

While this sort of system might not work for everyone, the learning remains the same - establish clear, simple systems that allow for a response at the right time, through the right form of communication.

5 Practical Ways to Protect Time

There are many tips and tricks for designing systems and habits to protect your time and increase productivity. Here are 5 that I have gleaned from research and frequently embed in coaching conversations:

#1. Attention matters more than motivation.
Repetition alone isn’t enough - it’s the quality of focus that wires new habits. The NeuroLeadership Institute calls this attention density: the richer the focus, the quicker healthy habits are formed. The pause effect is incredibly powerful here. Create space to give an interruption your attention. Ask yourself the question, what is the cost of this interruption? Has the interruption been delivered through an agreed system (like the P system). Challenge your automatic response to interruptions, and take the time to think and talk about the desired process, regularly.

#2. Keep habits simple.
There’s a great quote from Albert Anstein: “Any fool can make something complicated; it takes a genius to make it simple.” Complex habits collapse under pressure. Short, clear habits like “close off all interruptions and time block between 10-11 am” survive the demands of leadership. As habit guru, James Clear writes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” (James Clear, Atomic Habits).

#3. Build systems that create consistency.
Systems multiply the effect of habits, creating efficiency across an organisation. Project Management systems like Asana or Notion, streamline actions and help new habits spread faster in an intentional way. In the P System above, you’ll notice emails were not used for internal communication within our team. Why? When it came to prioritisation, our leadership team found emails too inefficient and open-ended. Of course, we needed to work with client emails, which we streamlined through a CRM. The benefit was that systems created accountability and consistency across teams without draining emotional willpower.

#4. Use social accountability.
According to Duke University research, people are far more likely to adopt new habits when they see peers and leaders doing the same. Shared practice of habits normalises the behaviour and reinforces it regularly. Whether it be a mantra, a common set of language or a regular time where you discuss the effectiveness of communication, hold each other to account, and discuss how you are tracking. For our team, our CEO used to have a saying, ‘Lack of organisation on your part, doesn’t warrant an emergency on mine’. We had a rule book, and we played by it.

#5. Anchor habits using a ‘Then I, When' I’ statement.
The NeuroLeadership Institute found that one of the most effective ways to establish habit was through the simple use of a ‘When I, Then I’ statement, allowing new habits to be linked to pre-existing prompts. For example: When I finish checking emails in the morning, then I do a hard close on my inbox until my next scheduled email block.' This protects time, prioritises your agenda and keeps you proactive. Over time, these small changes lead to big shifts in performance.

Where Coaching Makes A Difference

Coaching starts with leaders identifying the problems they face. Coaches ask a range of questions that allow them to observe automatic behaviours, examining them from a range of angles. This is a critical first step in discovering root cause of unhelpful habits, from a rare position we naturally put ourselves in.

However, a coach doesn’t just urge you to change - they help you identify areas that truly move the needle and build daily actions to impact what matters most. A coach then helps you transfer this into habit, in essence reprogramming the basal-ganglia to work for you, not against you. It’s about small, yet deeply meaningful shifts, for big impact.

Final Thought

Habit formation is about intentionally optimising your brain’s energy for what matters most, and it’s a coach’s job to help you discover where, and how, to do this. It may feel counterproductive pressing the pause button, but it’s an investment that will pay off. It will give you the edge that lets you stop firefighting and start leading - with clarity, consistency, and purpose.