Five Bad Workplace Habits to drop in 2016

Happy New Year! It's 2016. Another year beckons, and it's time to get down to an old tradition - making resolutions and failing to keep them. In that same spirit, here are five bad workplace practices that should go the way of the dodo, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Productive, aren't we?

1. Staying back after work

Make no mistake - there will be times when you're required to stay back after work. Maybe there's too much work and too little time. Maybe it's a client requirement (these pesky time zones!). Or maybe you think it makes you look good in front of management.

If there's too much work (or bugs you can't solve), the trick here is to only stay back when necessary. And, if possible, not to make it necessary. Productivity tends to go down the longer you're at it. At 9pm, you're not going to be plugging away at the code with the same verve you exhibited at 9am. Spending more time in the office is not going to help you. Walk away. Recharge those batteries. Reboot that brain.

If it's a client requirement - sorry honey. That doesn't count as staying back after office hours. As far as the company is concerned, those are your working hours.

If it's just to show your boss that you're worth keeping, for the love of God, stop working for half-wits who think that the number of hours you show your pretty face in the office equals value for money. That may be true if you're a novice. Noobs need to pay their dues. But after you have a few years of experience under your belt, it doesn't look good anymore. In fact, it looks bad. Really bad. If a supposedly experienced developer needs to stay back after office hours to do work he should know like the back of his hand by now, something's very wrong.

Rise and shine, buttercup.

2. Sleeping late

There are 24 hours in a day, and about 6 to 8 hours of it are supposed to be spent in blissful slumber. In bed. Not in the office.

It's gotta be tempting to make the most of your day. Watch that last YouTube video. Complete that last stage on that mobile game. Read that last chapter in that crime thriller. Solve that last bug in your pet project. The list goes on.

But bear in mind your body needs sleep. And sleep deprivation is something that builds up over time. I won't even bother listing down all the negative effects on your physical and mental health, because this is about how it affects your performance at work. That's what makes sleeping late a bad workplace habit.

Even assuming you manage to make it to the office on time, you're operating at sub-optimal levels. A sleep-deprived brain makes mistakes that an experienced web developer has no business making. A sleep-deprived brain tends to produce sloppy code.

Obey your human limitations. They're there for a reason.

That ain't gonna fly.

3. Keeping long fingernails

You must be thinking, you gotta be kidding, right? What has long fingernails got to do with anything? Your fingernails are your prerogative, right?

Correct - to a point. Hygiene and image aren't the reasons behind this, though on that score, it certainly wouldn't hurt. No, the entire point is about work performance.

Let's conduct an experiment. Let your fingernails grow to about a quarter of an inch. Then flip to a random page of your favorite novel and try typing out the entire page. Any difficulty there? Now trim your fingernails and type another page. Are you feeling the difference yet?

The standard paragraph in English would cause you a certain amount of difficulty. Now think how much more difficult typing program code and HTML will be. All those curly brackets, parentheses and special characters. Sound appealing to you? I didn't think so.

Born in the Year of the Octopus.

4. Trying to do too much at once

Productivity is a catchphrase in the industry today. A much overused catchphrase. The more an employee accomplishes within x hours, the more productive he is. Hence the temptation to stick one's fingers into as many pies as possible, at the same time. While Task A is compiling, work on Task B and C. While Task B is being processed, check on Task A and resume Task C. On paper, it's certainly productive. In practice, the human brain functions best when focusing on one thing at a time.

Think about it - when you switch tracks, are you more likely to screw up? Does it take a certain amount of delay before you can fully clear your brain of the last task and concentrate on the task at hand? Therein lies the risk. Sure, there's the possibility that you could pull it all off flawlessly. But the likelihood of missing something is unacceptably high.

Remember this - doing two things right trumps doing five things half-fucked. Because five items half-fucked equals zero items accomplished to satisfaction. Do I need to pull out the tired old cliche "quality over quantity"? I shouldn't have to - because it's true.

Again, obey your human limitations.

Talk to the hand.

5. Being a yes-man

Say no more often. Especially when it's warranted. Sure, everyone likes an easygoing and obliging colleague. They're so easy to exploit.

I want to emphasize here that there's absolutely no harm being helpful - until it starts interfering with your job. Your job - you know, the one the company pays you to do? The completion of which is in your annual KPIs? Yep - that job.

Your colleagues may not realize what an interruption does to your work. You may be on a roll, coding and debugging like a boss, when someone asks you to help unjam the office copier. Or look at their Outlook. Don't blame them - if they were that savvy, you wouldn't be needed now, would you? No, the onus is on you to refuse - and refuse in a manner that discourages further negotiation.

One colleague recently complained that when she interrupted my programming process to ask for help screwing in a lightbulb (I kid you not), I answered with a sneer. My manager explained to her quite nicely that if she so wished, he would get me to stand by to help her screw in all the lightbulbs she wanted - as long as she was willing to take responsibility for all my project delays. I never got any such request ever again.

Phew, what a list!

Those are the bad practices I'd like to discontinue in 2016. They impede effectiveness. But this requires a mindset change too. That probably means leaving the office on the dot so I can go home and trim my fingernails and be in bed by midnight.

No sweat. Er, right?

So make like a bunch of stripper nuns, and drop those habits!
T___T