The Now Habit Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: The Now Habit is a strategic program to help you eliminate procrastination from your life, bring fun and motivation back to your work and enjoy your well-earned spare time without feeling guilty.

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When I just learned how long The Now Habit has been around I was shocked. It combines so many now-common productivity practices that at first I thought it might have been an aggregation of a lot of them. In fact, it just might be the original source.

This book dates back to 1988. A crucial difference in how it tries to remove procrastination from your life is that it focuses on the potential upsides instead of obsessing over avoiding your distracting habits.

If you don’t focus on what will make your life better, the best you can hope for is that your life won’t get worse. So bringing back to your work the fun and drive you had as a kid is essential for this to work.

Dr. Neil Fiore has even developed his own program to help people implement the strategies from the book.

Here are 3 lessons to show you where procrastination comes from and how to deal with it:

1. Procrastination is trained into us.
2. Try to unschedule your life.
3. Record your distractions to block them.

I hope you’ve stretched your leg, because we’re about to kick procrastination in the butt. Hi-yaaa!

Lesson 1: We’re not innately lazy. Procrastination is trained into us as kids.

“Hasn’t anyone ever taught this kid some discipline?” is probably in the top 10 sentences uttered by grandparents on a regular basis. Often shaped by wars and economic depression, older people often had no choice but to grow up fast and tighten their belts – habits they tend to keep.

Young parents are often worried about not teaching their kids as well as their parents did, so they’re likely to listen to grandma and grandpa and bring out the good old reward and punishment.

“Do your homework or you won’t get to watch any TV tonight!”

But that’s exactly the wrong move. Children aren’t innately lazy. No one is. Just because kids don’t consider the things we call “work” to be fun doesn’t mean they’re not motivated to do anything.

Everyone has things they do without procrastinating. Kids never procrastinate on playing and they don’t judge their “work.”

Isn’t it odd that around the time we enter school we first start to dislike things?

Procrastination isn’t an innate character trait. It’s trained into us. A learned behavior. And we learn it in two ways:

1. School teaches us that work isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s the opposite of playing. “You HAVE to solve these math problems now.”
2. School teaches us that only the best is good enough. If we’re not the best, we need to try harder.

If work isn’t fun and only being the best at work is worth something then that’s the perfect setup for procrastination. No one can ever possibly fulfill their own expectations and no one wants to get started in the first place.

Lesson 2: Try to unschedule your life and build your work around your fun, not the other way around.

And that’s exactly the typical scenario you’re left with if you have to give a presentation to your boss. Creating the slides doesn’t sound like fun (because people tell you it’s not supposed to be) and boy, you better ace it, or you might not have to come back tomorrow.

So what do you do? You check Facebook. You open an empty Powerpoint file. Check Facebook again. Try to type a headline. Delete the headline. Then go to Youtube and watch Jamie Oliver make some delicious pasta, jump to a TED talk and whoops, time to go home!

But what if your schedule didn’t show you all this work that’s left to do? What if instead, it showed you that your life isn’t just work? That there’s plenty of fun to be had with some work in-between?

That’s what unscheduling is about. Fiore suggests you throw out your old calendar and schedule the pleasant things you want to do throughout the week, like meeting a friend for lunch, going to the movies, riding your bike in the morning or taking a walk in the afternoon.

Then let work fill up the rest of your time. Break your work into little chunks and chip away at it in short, 30-minute Pomodoro blocks in the gaps between fun activities. You can then book these hours into a working hours account and feel good about yourself.

This technique has two major advantages: you show yourself that the focus is on the fun part of your life and the amount of time you have left to do work is limited, so you have to use it well.

Lesson 3: Note down your distractions to block them and evaluate their importance later.

If you’ve read Getting Things Done, then this will sound very familiar. Fiore says that we let little interruptions take over our attention and day because we deal with them instantly.

When you remember you have to buy paper towels, have a great idea you need to talk to a colleague about, or they remind you about a request, it seems to make sense to take care of it right away. In reality, this just distracts you from the important thing you’re currently working on.

To take care of these things before your focus shifts, keep a piece of paper or little notebook with you at all times and instantly note down potential distractors. This resembles the collection bucket from GTD, but Fiore adds an important twist.

Not only will doing this allow you to stay focused, it also gives you a chance to evaluate these tasks again later. At the end of your day, take a look at that day’s list and ask yourself for all items on it: is this really that important? Do I have to do this at all?

You’ll often see things aren’t nearly as urgent or important and save yourself a lot of time!

Twenty-one years ago, psychologist Neil Fiore released his book The Now Habit. Here's a look at his revolutionary book on overcoming procrastination at work and enjoying our free time guilt-free.

Note: All parenthetical citations in this article refer to the page numbers in the 2007 edition of The Now Habit.

If you've climbed out from under a soul-crushing project list, cleaned out and redefined your to-do list, and set firm boundaries between work and play, but you still feel like you aren't handling the weight of broken commitments and unaccomplished work, plain and simple procrastination may be the root of your stress.

The Root of Procrastination

Many people believe that overcoming procrastination is simple: just work harder. The implication is that procrastinators are simply people who aren't working hard enough or who don't have a system in place that helps them to work hard enough. The Now Habit was revolutionary for being the first mainstream procrastination self-help book that focused on helping procrastinators deal with the psychological reasons behind procrastination and skipped the lectures on discipline and motivation. Photo by James Lee.

Instead of treating procrastination like a lazy man's disease that can be cured by a stiff shot of Puritan Work Ethic, Fiore redefined procrastination and the subsequent treatment:

Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. (5)

The first section of Fiore's book focuses on defining procrastination, its causes, and our motivation for procrastinating. Few people could read through it and not see some of themselves in the examples Dr. Fiore provides from his practice and his years of treating patients. I can't replace a thoughtful and reflective reading of the first portion of the book in this overview, but I can suggest you reflect on the three main ways people procrastinate:

1. ...as an indirect method of resisting pressure from authorities;
2. ...as a method of lessening fear of failure by providing an excuse for a disappointing, less-than-perfect performance;
3. ...and as a defense mechanism against fear of success by keeping us from doing our best. (25)

Overcoming Procrastination: Observation, Reframing, and Unscheduling

Changing your procrastination behaviors begins with an honest reflection on what motivates your habit. Knowing why you do something, however, is only part of the process. Adopting new habits requires solid scaffolding and tools to help you approach work and play in a new way. Here's how Fiore breaks it down:

Get a handle on how you spend your time. Similar to budgeting and dieting, the only way to really understand how you're spending your time is by tracking it. Keep a time schedule. It doesn't matter if you buy a paper-based day planner and fill it in with pencil or log it on your computer using a tool like RescueTime (or any of the other popular time-tracking applications). You can't honestly assess how you spend your time unless you measure it first. Photo by dbking.

Stop talking like a procrastinator and start talking like a producer. Language is powerful, and Fiore believes that procrastinators tend to wield its power negatively. The worst time in my life was when, faced with the increase in responsibility and time constraints that come with being a full-time worker, husband, and father, I started saying "I don't have time to relax". Do you know what happens when you tell yourself that you don't have time to relax? You allow work to fill every available minute of your day. If you don't have time to enjoy life you might as well be working, right? The minute I stopped saying "I don't have time to relax" and started saying "I must make time to relax.", everything changed for the better. The work never went away, mind you, I just had a renewed focus on containing it and keeping it from eating away at my personal time.

Be realistic and productive in your worrying. Non-procrastinators think of procrastinators as lazy and careless. The reality for most procrastinators is that they care way too much. They worry that the work they do isn't good enough (so they put off doing it so they have an excuse for not meeting their own unreasonable expectations). They worry that the worst possible thing will happen if they don't get their act together (they'll lose their job, people will find out they aren't as competent as believed, or they'll fail at accomplishing what really matters to them). Photo by Keo 101

Fiore asks: What's the worst that could happen? What would you do if it did? How would you overcome that worst case scenario? Worrying paralyzes the procrastinator; break through it by assessing your worry as though you were helping a friend. You wouldn't saddle your friend with unreasonable worry or ridiculous theories about what could go wrong—you'd help him see how he could succeed even when it was tough. (As performance artist and speaker Ze Frank puts it: avoid hoarding ideas like they're brain crack.)

Start "Unscheduling" your calendar. On the surface, procrastinators might seem to have lots of fun. They seem to goof off a lot, right? Who hasn't procrastinated away a few hours here or there playing games, surfing time-sink web sites, or otherwise not really digging into their important work? That kind of behavior is a sinister fusion of fake work and fake play at the same time. You're unhappy because work is looming over your head, you're unhappy because you're not getting that work done, and you're unhappy because the "play" you're engaging in isn't relaxing because you know you're just avoiding getting work done. You're cheating yourself on all levels.

Fiore encourages procrastinators to get away from preemptively scheduling work and focus on unscheduling. Unscheduling is a massive shift in thinking from how most of us use calendars and schedules. Rather than start by filling the calendar with the work you want to do, you start by scheduling fixed commitments and play. You reverse your calendar and begin with the premise that you need (and deserve) at least one hour of play and relaxation a day and at least one day of work off a week. You schedule those first, as well as previously committed time—like when you sleep, eat, exercise, commute to work, and other blocks of time you must expend each day.

Why do this? Fiore highlights how procrastinators are almost always very poor at gauging the amount of time available for tasks. You don't have 24 hours in a day to devote to work. You have to tend to all your other commitments—like spending time with your family, walking your dog, and living. You need to see those things on the schedule both to help you understand where your time goes and set realistic goals for work and what you can accomplish at any given time. Photo by Erik Fitzpatrick.

Where does the actual work go on this schedule, you ask? It goes on the schedule after you spend 30 minutes of quality time working on it, and not a moment sooner. You don't block out 9AM-11AM for next Monday with the promise to yourself that you'll "Work on the Johnson Proposal". That sort of scheduling is what creates the stress that you're not doing what you should be doing. Instead, you come into work on Monday, and after you invest focused effort on the Johnson proposal, you put that on your unschedule. Think of your calendar as a time clock you're using to "bill" productive work. You can only punch the clock for the work you actually do. Your calendar becomes a living record of your achievements instead of a prediction of the unrealistic expectations you're bound to be unable to meet. As the weeks go by, you'll start to get a picture of how much work you can realistically do in a day.

Fiore also urges readers to focus on small blocks of time with a focus on realistic output. In addition to limiting the total amount of time you spend working (and recognizing the limitations of how much work you can do in the process), focus on limiting the size of your individual blocks of work. If you sit down in front of a task with an open-ended schedule like "I need to finish this entire project by the end of the day", you're setting yourself up for a bout of procrastination. In the mind of a procrastinator, the end of the business day is practically in the next century. Instead say "I have 30 minutes to work before I must take a small break to relax. What can I realistically accomplish in 30 minutes?".

I've read The Now Habit multiple times, I've given copies away to college freshman I'm teaching (every year I watch them struggle with procrastination and time management), and I've praised the book to anyone who confided in their struggles with procrastination and a sense of despair in the overwhelming nature of their work. If you've read books about procrastination and put them down in frustration after they turned out to be a rehash of the old "just focus and work harder!" shtick, Neil Fiore's The Now Habit is a refreshing look at the habits and thinking that drive procrastination and what you can do to change the way you work and play.