The Now Habit - Overcome Procrastination

"The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play" will help you to conquer the causes of procrastination and eliminate its negative effects. The author, Dr. Neil Fiore, Ph.D., explains that procrastination is "a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision".

This book will help anyone who is trying to conquer procrastination:

• Students who want to stop procrastinating on their studies, hand in their reports on time, and stop leaving everything to the last minute.
  
• Business people who want to get more done at work and improve their prospects for being promoted.
  
• Homemakers who want to be more efficient around the home so that they have more time to spend playing with their kids and helping them with their homework.

If you keep leaving things to the last minute, if you have lots of half-finished projects lying around, and if you keep putting off getting started on things that are important to you, then you're not living to your full potential. Procrastination can have a very negative effect on your ability to reach your goals and achieve what you want to get out of life. If you'd like to find out more about "The Now Habit", and learn how to stop procrastinating, continue reading below.

Brian Johnson of “Philosopher’s Notes” explains in the video above that Dr. Neil Fiore, Ph. D., the author of “The Now Habit”, indicates in his book that it’s important to know what the root causes of procrastination are. He adds that procrastination is not the problem; instead, it simply masks the underlying issues of perfectionism, being overwhelmed, being afraid of failure, and so on. Dr. Fiore explains that we can move through our procrastination by developing more compassion for ourselves, by setting more realistic goals, and by learning to take baby steps toward our goal.

Johnson refers to another book, “Pursuit of Perfect” by Dr. Tal Ben Shahar, in which Ben Shahar explains that there are three zones when it comes to goal setting:

• Our Comfort Zone
• Our Stretch Zone
• Our Panic Zone

We need to move out of our Comfort Zone, but without getting into our Panic Zone. Instead, we want to move into our Stretch Zone. In our Stretch Zone, the goal that we’ve set is a stretch for us, but it’s not so far out of our Comfort Zone that we feel panic. When we set goals that are very far away from our current reality, we feel afraid, and this fear leads us to procrastinate. Instead, we need to set goals that are within our abilities to reach. Then, once you’ve reached the goal, you can set a bigger goal, and a bigger one after that, and so on.

Going back to “The Now Habit”, Dr. Fiore recommends that you always ask yourself the following: “What’s the next small step that I can take right now in order to reach my goal?” Then ask yourself, “What’s the next step?”, and the next one after that, and so on. Just keep moving forward by taking small steps.

A popular productivity tool that is recommended by Dr. Fiore is keeping a time log. For a few days, keep a notebook with you at all times and write down everything that you do. This will help you to see how you’re using your time, in order to help you identify what you want to do more of, and what you want to do less of. You’ll notice that by bringing awareness to your behavior, your behavior changes.

When you’re procrastinating, you’re in victim mode. You feel overwhelmed, you use self-defeating language such as “I have to do this”, you feel like you can’t do what needs to be done, and so on. You have to move from being a victim, to being a creator. One way in which to do this is to stop telling yourself that you “have to” something. You don’t have to do anything; you always have a choice. Therefore, do what you choose to do with all your heart, and stop acting like a victim.

Replace the following:

• Replace “I have to” with “I choose to”.
• Replace “I have to finish this project” with “I’m going to get started with this project”.
• Replace “This project is so big and important” with “I can take one small step”.
• Replace “I don’t have time to play” with “I most take time to play”.

The book is about getting out of procrastinating mode, and into producer mode.

Dr. Fiore explains in "The Now Habit" that the following are some of the signs that indicate that you're a procrastinator:

• You view life as a long list of obligations.
• You're unrealistic about time: you're usually late for appointments; tasks take longer than you think they will; and things last longer than you expect them to.
• You haven't set goals for youself.
  
• You feel unfulfilled, frustrated, and depressed.
• You have trouble making decisions.
• You fear making mistakes. 
• You have low self-esteem (this is both a cause of procrastination and a sign that you're a procrastinator).