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

lose track of how you spend your time?

Observe where your time is going. What are you doing when you’re really productive? And note how that differs from those times when you are busy but producing nothing. Difficulties in gauging how much time it takes to complete a project, to travel across town, or to make it to a meeting on time are often part of procrastination. Realistic time mana

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.

you interpret any criticism, rejection, or judgment by others as a threat to your very tenuous grasp on perfection.

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

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

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.

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

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

“Maybe it’s also been a long time since you were that approving of yourself.