Book Summary: The Now Habit
The Now Habit looks at the mindset and tools needed in everyday life to help fight procrastination. Everyone experiences it but how do we overcome it?
Related Book Summaries:
The Pomodoro Technique – Francesco Cirillo
Getting Things Done – David Allen – Book Summary
Quotes:
Replace “the project is so big and important” with “I can take one small step”
Book Summary Notes: The Now Habit
- Procrastination is sometimes used as a strategy for avoiding fear of failure. Our main tasks susceptible to procrastination all have 3 things in common; you want to do a good job to meet expectations, usually it is dull work and usually has a fuzzy end goal of being ‘good’. Your then caught between working hard on something boring that you end up not doing a good enough job on anyway or you can avoid the boredom, uncertainty and fear of failure by procrastinating.
- Even when we are young we only ever hear about ‘work’ as a negative or linked to a punishment.
- We live in a world where our self esteem is often tied to the work we produce. If that work is deemed not ‘good’ enough then it can be a major blow to our sense of happiness or ego. No one wants to experience that, so it’s better that we just procrastinate instead right?
- Procrastination also offers another layer of protection, we aren’t failing because we’re bad, we just never really tried to begin with. It helps us to deal with what we see as unrealistic expectations and uncertainty.
- One method of overcoming procrastination is to realise that we only truly learn when we fail. Embrace your mistakes and learn from them. We also usually fail to realise that the stakes themselves are often not as high as we perceive, it’s never a life and death type of moment even if that’s how it feels.
- Make changes to the self talk you use. Change “I must” or “I should” to “when can I start?”
- Manage your stress and help to alleviate some of the triggers for procrastination by building in time for relaxation and play into your everyday.
- Goal setting and prioritisation can help with your procrastination as well. Break down your tasks into smaller more manageable pieces. “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
- Try using pomodoro sessions to help or maybe learn about GTD.
- Keeping a notebook or piece of paper handy for those times when you need to get something out of your brain can be a great option as well.
