Conquering Procrastination: The Now Habit

“The Now Habit”, written by psychologist Neil Fiore Ph.D., is a classic in overcoming procrastination. The book’s essential message is the following:

“Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. It is your attempted solution to cope with tasks that are boring or overwhelming. When you use the Now Habit strategies to lower your anxiety, fears, and self-doubts, you can stop using procrastination as an escape and can double your productivity and, often, double your income.”

Dr. Fiore explains that people procrastinate because it makes sense to do so, given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism. Procrastination is an attempt to resolve a variety of underlying issues, including:

• Low self-esteem
• Perfectionism
• Fear of failure
• Fear of criticism
• Fear of success
• Indecisiveness (loss of other opportunities that may result from committing to a project)
• Imbalance between work and play
• Ineffective goal setting
• Fear of impossible expectations (being overwhelmed)

He emphasizes that procrastination is not a character defect; it’s an attempt at coping with fear. Procrastination rewards us with temporary relief from stress. The more painful a certain task is for you—you’re afraid you won’t do it right, you’re scared of being judged, it’s a huge project and you feel overwhelmed, and so on—the more you will try to seek relief through avoidance or through involvement in more pleasurable activities.

“The Now Habit” gives you the tools to create inner safety and a positive inner dialogue to lessen the fear of being imperfect and to enable you to take risks. In addition, the advice offered in this book will help to make your work more enjoyable and make the quality of your leisure time greater than you could ever achieve by procrastinating. Here are some of the tips offered by Dr. Fiore to help you overcome procrastination:

Know How You Spend Your Time

The first step of the “Now Habit” program is to simply procrastinate at your normal level for another week. Keep inventory for that week on how you’re spending your time. Then, as you review a typical week’s activities you can total the amount of time spent on the phone, organizing your desk, doing high priority work, socializing, surfing the net, eating, watching television, and so on. This will reveal some patterns you may want to change and others you want to encourage. You can also use your inventory to notice the events that precede procrastination or low-priority work; these are your procrastination triggers.

The next step is to keep a “Procrastination Log”, which links the avoided activity—such as getting started on your tax returns—to a specific thought, justification, attempted solution, and resultant thought. You’re going to identify the attitudes and self-talk that are keeping you from getting started and then replace them with a focus on one small step. Here’s what to include in your procrastination log:

• Day and time that you procrastinated
• The activity you postponed and its priority
• Your thoughts and feelings about the task
• Your reason for procrastinating
• The type of procrastination you used
• Your attempts at reducing anxiety
• Your resultant thoughts and feelings

Your log will help you to identify which thoughts and feelings lead toward achievement and which ones lead toward further delay and self-rebuke. That is, it will alert you to your inner dialogue and how it’s helping or hindering your efforts to achieve your goals.  This will allow you to adopt a strategy to get started on your high-priority projects. Here’s an example:

In the first example this person worked on one file for his tax returns and then went for a walk, with the result that he felt good he got started and enjoyed his walk. In the second example he felt resentment about having to fix the screen door on his day off, which made him feel overburdened; he dealt with this feeling by watching TV. The result was that he felt guilty and anxious that his wife would be angry because he didn’t fix the screen door.

Stop Equating Your Self-Worth with Your Performance

To illustrate the danger of equating your self-worth to your performance, Dr. Fiore uses the example of having to complete the following task: there’s a solid board placed on the floor and you have to walk across it; simple. Now imagine that the task is the same, except that the board is suspended 100 feet above the pavement between two buildings. That is, if you fall, you’re dead. Of course, in the second scenario instead of calmly walking across the board you stand paralyzed on one end, not daring to take a single step forward.

Many times we take a simple task and we do the equivalent of raising a board that’s on the ground 100 feet up in the air by telling ourselves that the task is a test of our self-worth, or proof that we’re acceptable. We confuse just doing the job—which would be relatively easy—with testing our self worth, which leads to fear and therefore to procrastination. You need to break the equation of “self-worth = performance” by replacing your threatening inner dialogue with nurturing and effective self-talk.

Two more changes you can make to your self-talk are the following:

• Change from “this project is big and important” to “I can take one small step at a time.”
• Change from “I have to be perfect” to “I can be perfectly human.”

Other Ways to Change the Way You Talk To Yourself

The way that you talk to yourself can lead to procrastination. For example, if you’re constantly saying that “you have to” or “you should do” something, you’re giving yourself the message that it’s something that you don’t want to do, but you’re being forced to do it. This leads to ambivalence, resentment, and resistance to those tasks. You’re directing part of your energy toward accomplishing the task, while another part of your energy is directed toward resisting threats to the integrity of the self.

Change a “have to” into a choice. You need to communicate to the mind and body the following:

• What you choose to do,
• When you choose to do it,
• Where you choose to do it,
• Where you choose to start, and
• How you choose to do it.

Also, instead of telling yourself that you need to “finish a task”—which is something in the vague distance—replace it with “when can I start?”. This replaces worries about finishing with a clear focus on what can be tackled now. Create a clear picture of when, where and how you will be starting.

Go Out and Play

Dr. Fiore explains that one of the reasons we procrastinate is out of fear that once we start working there’ll be no time for play. Although it may seem paradoxical, in order to lessen the urge to procrastinate we need guilt-free play to provide us with physical and mental renewal. When you know that work will not deprive you of enjoying the good things in life you can more easily tackle a large task without fear that it will leave no room for doing anything else. Engaging in recreation will keep you motivated and interested in returning to your work projects.

There are two basic things you can do to leverage the power of play to help you conquer procrastination:

• Plan recreation into your weekly schedule.
• Make your work periods shorter, with more frequent rewards.

Conclusion

There are many more tips for overcoming procrastination—which are rooted in psychology–in “The Now Habit”, including “the Unschedule”, creating a safety net, and learning how to say no. This book has withstood the test of time and if you’re looking for ways to overcome procrastination, I highly recommend it.

photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

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