Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 5,500+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
7 Steps to Stop Putting Life Off
The Procrastination Cure is a practical and motivational guide to overcoming procrastination. It offers strategies and personal insights to diagnose and address the root causes of this behavior, enabling readers to balance productivity and relaxation without guilt.
What’s the longest you’ve ever spent procrastinating something? A few days? Weeks? The author once coached a client who had put off filing her taxes… for fifteen years!
While this may be extreme, it’s not without precedent. Every year, people pay millions in excess taxes for procrastination-related reasons; getting penalized for filing late or making expensive mistakes while in a time crunch. Experts estimate that 40 percent of Americans have suffered needless financial setbacks due to procrastination.
But it’s about much more than your bank account.
Consider our 15-year tax-avoider. What was going on there? It all stemmed from fear. Her initial procrastination started with some anxiety or discomfort, which escalated into dread as the potential consequences loomed larger and larger. A vicious spiral of fear, winding slowly upwards until, by the time she sought the author’s help, she was so afraid she couldn’t sleep at night!
This is perhaps the greatest toll procrastination takes. The loss of happiness and well-being.
So, why do people do it? What is procrastination, anyway?
It’s not the same as delaying a task. After all, we sometimes delay a task for perfectly good reasons: you can’t do everything at once. Procrastination is a particular kind of delay – it’s putting something off even after you know it’s time to start.
Procrastination is related to indecisiveness, but it’s not exactly the same. Indecision is struggling to make up your mind, while procrastination is when you’ve made up your mind, but still somehow fail to take action.
Psychologists Albert Ellis and William Knaus have their own definition – procrastination is when you delay performing a task up to the point where you start to experience discomfort or bad feelings.
This rings true. And yet – paradoxically – we procrastinate out of a vain effort to avoid discomfort. Something feels stressful, painful, or uncomfortable; and so we come up with a reason to do something – anything – else until, eventually, we start to feel discomfort about the avoidance.
As we’ll see, curing procrastination is less about managing your time and more about managing your emotions. A big step is getting clear about which emotions are driving us.
We each have unique life histories and experiences that inform our behaviors. But – lucky for us – the author has coached thousands of people struggling with procrastination, and there are some patterns that come up again and again.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 5,500+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trialBlink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma