What are the most significant career bad habits?

As a general proposition, when turning around a business, there is a high return at the very beginning to getting rid of a strategic few bad apples. The Pareto Law rules, 20% of employees absorb 80% of your leadership time. You don't want to go crazy with this idea. Its not about cutting your way to success. However, my experience has been that getting rid of the worst individuals, those that are bad in their performance, toxic to their colleagues, and high maintenance in their absorption of scarce leadership time can have almost miraculous consequences.

Their colleagues hate these bad apples and resent that time is going to them and not to the people who are actually doing a good job. The bad apples also drive internal drama and disruption which distracts from the enterprise goal. And obviously, they absorb the scarcest of limited resources - leadership time. And almost always to no measurable benefit to the enterprise.

In a very similar vein there is The bad habits you should give up if you want to be successful by Zdravko Cvijetic. I am not a fan of listicles but Cvijetic's is pretty good. Easily within the power of the individual, not requiring much in terms of invested time or money, and quick to show returns. The critical 13 identified by Cvijetic are:

1. Give up on the unhealthy lifestyle
2. Give up the short-term mindset
3. Give up playing small
4. Give up your excuses
5. Give up the fixed mindset
6. Give up believing in the “magic bullet”
7. Give up your perfectionism
8. Give up multi-tasking
9. Give up your need to control everything
10. Give up saying yes to things that don’t support your goals
11. Give up the toxic people
12. Give up your need to be liked
13. Give up your dependency on social media and television

I might give these a different ordering depending on the individual and certainly in terms of which are most prevalent on average. It occurred to me that Ngram Viewer might give an interesting alternative prioritization. I searched on most of the terms. Some I had to consolidate (don't support your goals and social media consolidated into distraction) or rephrase (need to control into micro-management and toxic people into bad people). Here is the relative ordering based on Ngram viewer (i.e. phrases in books).

Click to enlarge

Distraction is by far the most significant bad habit. I might quibble with this ordering somewhat but I don't have a compelling discomfort with it. I think playing small, multi-tasking and making excuses should be higher up the list perhaps but overall I suspect this is a pretty reasonable ordering.

Distraction
Perfectionism
Bad people
Making excuses
Magic bullet
Multi-tasking
Micro-management
Unhealthy lifestyle
Need to be liked
Playing small
Short term mindset
Fixed mindset

My version might be:

Distraction
Multi-tasking
Perfectionism
Playing small
Bad people
Need to be liked
Magic bullet
Making excuses
Micro-management
Unhealthy lifestyle
Short term mindset
Fixed mindset