Pros and Cons of Habitual Working

By Ram Bansal, 28th Nov 2011 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/22e6h3ef/
Posted in Wikinut>Business>Employment

Habitual working provides benefit of high productivity but causes boredom, imbalance in body development and loss of intellect in the worker. There are two strategies for eliminating negative aspects of habitual working.

What is a Habit
Positive Aspects of being Habitual
Negative Aspects of Habitual Working
Handling Negative Aspects of Habitual Working

What is a Habit

habit

Normally, a person works on a new endeavor using his/her brain for planning and executing the plan. When the same cycle of operations is repeated again and again, planning is no more required, thus stopping the use of brain's thinking faculty in the repeated act. Instead, the job is marked as routine and handed over to subconscious level of mind which keep on directing the body for reiterations. For understanding this mechanism of changeover, differentiation between brain and mind and their functioning need be understood.

Jobs done by subconscious mind without intervention of the brain's logic faculty are called habits of the person. These are performed by the mind autonomously like the international working of body's bio-systems such as digestion, breathing, blood circulation, etc.

Positive Aspects of being Habitual

While working through a habit, the person works faster because of bypassing of the brain's thinking faculty. Therefore, habitual working is more productive, and all mass-scale production processes are carried out through developing habits in production personnel and making use of these habits. These persons work just like automatic machines taking up the next operation after finishing the previous operation in sequential cycles. Thus, shorter a sequential cycle on a job, faster it is learned as a habit, and higher its productivity.

Second advantage of habitual working is that the person is not required to be highly educated or intelligent for getting trained for a habitual job, thus, saving cost of production. On the contrary, an intelligent and thoughtful person is less productive on a habitual job and does not stay long with this type of working, because of the boredom such a repetitive working causes in the person.

Negative Aspects of Habitual Working

habitual working

Habitual working has three main drawbacks for the person involved in such a working -

1. Boredom,
2. Unbalanced body development,
3. Blockage of intellect.

Keep on doing the same thing again and again brings boredom to the person reducing his/her interest in the job. This nullifies benefits of habitual working in terms of high productivity.

Since, repetitive working may use only a few body parts of the worker, leaving other body parts idle for long duration, this may cause imbalance in the person's body making the used parts higher developed than the idle parts, thus deforming the person's natural body shape.

The habitual working, as aforesaid, does not make any use of intellect of the person but only his/her physical actions. In the long run, the person's intellect may get blocked and may not work even in case it is required to be working in fields of life other than the productivity of the person. This is, in a way, dehumanizing of the person for the intellect being the most precious asset of a human-being making him/her superior to other forms of life on earth.

Handling Negative Aspects of Habitual Working

Since boredom distracts the person from the job, imbalance in body may affect health of a person adversely, and loss of intellect is a mental disorder, production managers are required to take steps to eliminate these negative aspects of habitual working in the production personnel. There are two strategies, discussed below, for this.

1. Long Sequence in a Cycle of Operations

A long sequence of operations in a repetitive job cycle is designed for the persons required to be trained for habitual working. Such long sequences have a higher variety of operations in each cycle than those in a short sequence cycle. This helps in reducing boredom and involvement of more body parts of the person in the cyclic job. However, this may not help in increased use of the person's intellect on the job.

2. Multiple Jobs Training

Another way of avoiding negative influences of habitual working on a person is to train him/her on multiple repetitive jobs and keep on changing him from one repetitive job to another every two/three days. This strategy overcomes all the three negative aspects of habitual working, without much loss of productivity of the person. With this strategy, the worker gets more job satisfaction as it opens more avenues for his/her career progression.

Meet the author

Ram Bansal
An Engineer in the wonderland of Authorship. My writings here will principally focus on psychology, Indian politics, philosophy, health and happiness in routine ways.