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’s easy to become bombarded with instant comms apps like Whats App, Slack or Teams, and it doesn’t take much for managers to find their day punctuated by interruptions and inefficiencies. Like water travelling down a hill, people tend to follow the path of least resistance and communicate through a medium that takes the least amount of energy required.

The result? You begin to lose control of your calendar, and your time becomes increasingly reactive, responding to demands and putting out spotfires. Meanwhile, the important, yet non-urgent areas within work (such as strategy, direction, or vision) become secondary items that are treated as leftovers.

This is where systems and habits matter. When leaders step back and identify what automatic behaviours are driving inefficiencies, and make methodical shifts to achieve efficient and sustainable habits, they gain an edge. This shift allows them to give optimal 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 spot-fire. To save energy, the brain often follows the path of least resistance, not pausing to ask ourselves, “Is this the best use of my time?” In other words, we can easily find ourselves having created the wrong habits in an effort to conserve energy. To better understand what’s driving this phenomenon, it’s important to understand the brain’s basal ganglia and its role in seeking to create efficiency. The basal ganglia is responsible for turning repeated processes into near-automatic habits (whether helpful or unhelpful), freeing up mental energy. With this in mind, the question for leaders becomes this:

Are your habits serving you well, or distracting you from focusing on the right things, at the right time?

For high-achieving leaders, this question is critical, especially if you habitually respond to interruptions and demands, without calculating the cost of this automatic diversion of attention.

Let’s take a simple example: when a team member interrupts, 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 appropriate medium for communication:

Leaders only dropped everything for a P0, and its assigned communication medium (phone call) was used sparingly. Outside of the rare P0, most requests had structured, predictable turnarounds. Within seconds, a leader could gauge the priority level of an incoming request, and when it should be addressed. Healthy communication became instinctual and universal across the team - a system promoting habits that protected productivity.

While this system is specific to the tech industry, and may not work for everyone, the idea remains the same - establish clear, simple systems that ensure responses are made at the right time, through the most appropriate line of communication.

In saying this, I was recently challenged by a good mate of mine, someone I really respect, challenging me on the importance of prioritising people, especially in tough times. How do we navigate this in light of communication systems? To the one extreme, do you make yourself available 24/7, or to the other enforce rigid processes? The reality is, people matter, and it challenged me to consider the need for a healthy blend - design structured systems that support healthy communication, while still leaving space to meet genuine needs and connect.

5 Practical Ways to Protect Time

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

#1. Attention matters more than motivation.

Motivation alone isn’t enough - it’s the quality of focus, and the length of time given, that wires new habits. The NeuroLeadership Institute calls this attention density, emphasising the richer the focus, the quicker healthy habits are formed. This can be represented in the simple formula:

Intensity of Attention x Time = Strength of Habit.

Challenge your automatic response to interruptions, and take the time to think and talk about desired processes, regularly. The old, well-worn pathways never truly disappear, but they can be overridden. New habits form only with regular, ongoing rich attention. This is the work of a good professional coach - to design conversations that help leaders embed the right habits in a way that sticks.

#2. Keep habits simple.

There’s a great quote from Albert Einstein: “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, not to mention open-ended when it comes to prioritising them. Of course, we needed to work with client emails, which we streamlined through a CRM. The benefit was that a system designating selected platforms for the required level of priority 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 has found that one of the most effective ways to establish habit is through the 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.

6. Time-box.

One of the most effective ways to protect focus is time-boxing. This involves scheduling a block of uninterrupted time for deep work. During this window, distractions are off, a focus playlist can help, and the task is clearly defined and time-bound. Ideally this is scheduled at the same time each day, allowing you to get into a rhythm and your team to have predictability. The key is to align it with your natural energy peaks, creating an environment designed for deep work, while cutting out multitasking and low-value distractions.

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 the root causes 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 initially feel counterproductive pressing the pause button to sit back and reflect, 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.