The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play

Both workaholics and chronic procrastinators are either working or feeling guilty about not working.

The reverse calendar starts with the ultimate deadline for your project and then moves back, step by step, to the present where you can focus your energy on starting.

Feeling ineffectual regardless of how hard you try is very depressing and damaging to your sense of worth. Without an established sense of worth that bounces back from criticism in the face of normal mistakes, it is extremely difficult to step into the work arena, where some failures can be anticipated and where the longed-for praise for hard work

One of the reasons we procrastinate is out of fear that once we start working there’ll be no time for play, that work will deprive us of play and the enjoyment of life. Guilt-free play offers you a way around this problem by insisting that you plan recreation in your weekly schedule.

The three major fears that block action and create procrastination are the terror of being overwhelmed, the fear of failure, and the fear of not finishing. These three blocks usually interact with each other and escalate any initial fears and stresses. Overcoming any one of the three quickens the destruction of the remaining blocks because you buil

three Now Habit tools: • three-dimensional thinking and the reverse calendar, to combat the terror of being overwhelmed • the work of worrying, to tackle the fear of failure and the fear of being imperfect • persistent starting, to tackle fear of not finishing

A more common solution for individuals raised on threats is to use their own threatening self-talk in an effort to win approval by mimicking their critical mentors. Rather than helping them to face their fears, such threats will only contribute to the procrastination cycle: threatening self-talk leads to anxiety, then to resistance, resulting in pr

The cycle follows a pattern that usually begins with guilt-free play, or at least the scheduling of it. That gives you a sense of freedom about your life that enables you to more easily settle into a short period of focused, quality work. Once you’ve completed some quality work on your project, your feeling of self-control increases, as does your c

Replace “I must be perfect” with “I can be perfectly human.”