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

lack the ability to distinguish between what’s the most important use of your time

• feel powerless, with no sense of choice?

• have difficulty knowing what you really want for yourself, but are clear about what you should want?

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

If you believe that a judgment of your work is a judgment of yourself, then perfectionism, self-criticism, and procrastination are necessary forms of protection. Observing your hesitation to start or complete a project, supervisors and family members—often with good intentions—add encouragement, pressure, and threats to get you moving.

We can become addicted to the rewards of procrastination, learning to use it in three main ways: 1. as an indirect way of resisting pressure from authorities; 2. as a way of lessening fear of failure by providing an excuse for a disappointing, less-than-perfect performance; 3. and as a defense against fear of success by keeping us from doing our be

Does life feel like a long series of obligations that cannot be met?

there is one main reason why we procrastinate: it rewards us with temporary relief from stress.

Ironically, on a psychological level you are often the one who raises the board off the ground by changing a straightforward task into a test of your worth, proof that you are acceptable, or a test of whether you will be successful and happy or a failure and miserable. In most cases you are the one who confuses just doing the job with testing your