Entrepreneurs like to say there are three kinds of people: The kind who make things happen, the kind who wait for things to happen and the kind who wonder “what just happened?”

Of course, we’re the first kind. Movers and shakers. Go getters, one and all. We believe to our core that we’re in charge of our own destinies. That our lives, our businesses, our realities are products of the decisions we make.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

Research from Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, show that most people spend almost half of their waking hours with their minds wandering, detached from the real live exterior world, stumbling through life on autopilot.

The truth is our lives are not a product of the decisions we make. Our lives are products of the habits we create. We don’t decide how we’re going to tie our shoes, which route we’ll take on our commute to work, whether to spread the peanut butter or the jelly on our PBJ first. We do it the way we do it because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

We don’t have the time or the mental bandwidth to make each of the thousands upon thousands of decisions we have to make to get through every day, so our brain decides for us. It stores programming subroutines that tell us what to do in each familiar situation. Snippets of code that tell us what to do so we don’t have to waste energy thinking about it.

That’s all a habit is, a routine that develops over time, usually through repetition. The more often we do things the same way, the more likely we’ll continue to do them that way by course of habit.

Entrepreneurs are particularly susceptible to bad productivity habits, because we’re the ones in charge. Or so we thought. Here are 3 bad habits that entrepreneurs fall into that actually decrease performance, productivity and personal effectiveness.

Terry Lancaster Is The VP Of Making Sh!t Happen, A Lifelong Entrepreneur, Keynote Speaker And The #1 Best Selling Author of BETTER! Self Help For The Rest Of Us.

He Helps Students, Salespeople And Entrepreneurs Create BETTER! Lives, BETTER! Careers And BETTER! Businesses One Step At A Time, Starting Right Here, Starting Right Now.