The Now Habit is a helpful guide for overcoming procrastination and becoming more efficient in completing complex and challenging tasks.

If you are a professional whose busy schedule doesn’t allow for leisure time, The Now Habit strategic program will legitimise guilt-free play while improving the quality and efficiency of your work.

If you suffer from extreme panic when you’re under pressure, The Now Habit will show you how to overcome the initial terror so you can get started.

Procrastination is a problem that we all have in some areas of our lives—be it balancing the budget, filing a legal brief, or painting the spare bedroom. We all have tasks and goals we attempt to delay or totally escape.

How We Define Procrastination

The OLD Definition

Advice such as ‘Just do it’ or ‘Try harder’ or ‘Get organised’ is based on the old definition of procrastination. The old belief is that your problem stems from procrastination; if only you weren’t so lazy you could do whatever you wanted.

There are plenty of books and programs out there that offer explanations as to why people procrastinate. They encourage self-criticism by giving you even more negative labels to whack on yourself and your behaviour. While they diagnose the symptoms, they don’t look at the root cause, nor do they offer anything to treat the real problems.

People don’t procrastinate just to be irritable or because they’re irrational. They procrastinate because it makes sense—given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism.

The NEW definition

The Now Habit is based on the fact that somewhere in your life, there are leisure activities and forms of work that you choose to do without hesitation.

You are more than a procrastinator because you don’t procrastinate 24 hours a day. When you turn your attention toward what you love to do, you know that you are more than a procrastinator.

Our first step toward breaking the procrastination habit and becoming a producer involves redefining procrastination and coming up with a new understanding of how and why we use it. Procrastination isn’t the cause of our problems with accomplishing tasks. It is an attempt to resolve a variety of underlying issues—including low self-esteem, perfectionism, fear of failure and of success, indecisiveness, an imbalance between work and play, ineffective goal-setting, and negative concepts about work and yourself.

A complete treatment of procrastination must address the underlying blocked needs that cause a person to resort to procrastination.

A Positive View of the Human Spirit

We can find so-called procrastinators in every walk of life, accomplishing much in those areas where they have chosen to devote themselves, but are unable to get started in others. The Now Habit doesn’t believe that laziness, disorganisation, or any other character defect is the reason we procrastinate.

It doesn’t accept the assumption that people, in general, are innately lazy, and therefore need the pressure to motivate them. In fact, procrastination is better defined as a neurotic form of self-defensive behaviour aimed at protecting one’s self-worth. We procrastinate when we fear a threat to our self-worth and independence. We only act lazy when our natural drive for fruitful activity is threatened or suppressed. No one does it to feel bad, it’s only to temporarily escape our deep inner fears.

Procrastination is Rewarding

A seemingly counterproductive habit like procrastination is immediately followed by some reward. Procrastination reduces tension by taking us away from something we view as painful or threatening. The more painful work is for you, the more you will try to seek relief through avoidance or through involvement in pleasurable activities. The more you feel that endless work deprives you of the pleasure of leisure time, the more you will avoid work.

We become addicted to using procrastination as a way to temporarily reduce the anxiety associated with certain tasks. If the work we thought we had to do later proves to be unnecessary, we have a justification and a double reward for procrastination. Not only did we use procrastination to cope with fears, but we also discovered that it’s a way to conserve energy. We may have learned that in some situations it makes sense to procrastinate, and we’re even rewarded for it.

Unfortunately, that only makes matters worse, because we then blame ourselves for falling into the awful habit of procrastination.
We get trapped in a vicious cycle. Perfectionism -> fear of failure -> PROCRASTINATION -> self-criticism -> anxiety and depression -> lack of confidence -> greater fear of failure -> -> stronger need to PROCRASTINATE as a temporary escape. We don’t fail because we procrastinate; we procrastinate because we fear failure!

CONCLUSION

Until now, procrastination is recognised as a rewarding and necessary tool for escaping tasks that seem painful and depriving. Therefore, to gain control over procrastination, you need to develop alternative tools for coping with your fears and making work less painful and depriving. The Now Habit will give you the tool to overcome procrastination by making work more enjoyable and making the quality of pleasure of your leisure time greater than you could ever achieve by procrastinating.