The Now Habit summary

Both teachers and parents alike believe they know why their children procrastinate: obviously, it’s because of their innate laziness!

And a child needs discipline, reward and punishment to overcome this laziness. Children that aren’t working hard enough simply need to be pushed harder! Right?

Each and every human being wants to be valued and held in high regard by others. If we can avoid it, we usually don’t surround ourselves with people who constantly make fun of us or put us down.

In fact, we employ many strategies to combat any threats to this desire to protect our own self-esteem .

One of the key ingredients of procrastination is perfectionism: no matter what we do, we always tell ourselves that the results must be the absolute best they can be. Mistakes are to be avoided at all costs, and failure is both unacceptable and a threat to our self-worth.

In the face of this overwhelming pressure to perform well, we lock up, meaning we do nothing, instead of starting our work and facing this challenge; we procrastinate by browsing the internet, sorting our stamp collection or leaving to run some “urgent” errand.

The typical procrastinator experiences a specific inner monologue, which is dominated by an inner conflict. Usually, this self-talk uses phrases such as “I must,” “I have to” or “I should,” which all implicitly mean “I don’t want to.”

This permanent conflict is like two horses pulling in opposite directions: one horse pulls you towards the task that “should” or “has to” be done; the other away from it because you “don’t want to.”

Procrastination is a vicious cycle: once you start delaying your work, the guilty feeling of having to catch up on everything later accumulates into a larger and larger pile of guilt.

Thus procrastination leads to a life where you constantly feel like you have more work to do than you will ever manage to get done.

Usually the hardest part about work is getting started.

Chronic procrastinators understand this: once they get started, they might actually have to write part of that report, so instead they spend hours opening the document, closing it, checking their Facebook page or cleaning the kitchen just to open the document again half an hour later…and then they repeat the cycle.

One simple technique to make your work week both more pleasant and more productive is to employ the Unschedule technique for time management.

The primary objective of this technique is to get as many short (around 30-minute) periods of uninterrupted, focused work into your day, instead of spending ten hours “working,” half-focused and riddled with procrastination and distractions.

There seems to be an infinite number of ways of getting distracted on the job:

Maybe you have a sudden stroke of genius and feel the intense urge to research or share it with a colleague. Or maybe you remember an urgent task and you’re afraid you’ll forget if you don’t take care of it right away. Or maybe your favorite co-worker swings by to say “hello” or reminds you of a report you promised to send her by the end of the week.