“The Now Habit” Mini-Review
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This week we’re taking a look at The Now Habit, a book by Neil Fiore on how to stop procrastination. I’ll admit that I used to have a problem with that. I used to put off so many things, and I the only reason I did that was to finish all the OTHER stuff I put off. I mean, my father threw a tantrum ten years ago and it took me that long to get all the soy sauce out of my hair.
Anyway, the book starts off by telling us why we procrastinate, and it says that procrastination helps us find relief from difficult work. Trust me, that’s true. The longer I put something off, the more afraid I get to finish it for good. Eventually I get so freaked out that I have to rebuild my confidence before I can get back into action. By the way, quick way to feel better about yourself – watch someone fail a driving exam. Your self-esteem will skyrocket.
The book also talks about how free time is a better way to motivate yourself to work instead of forcing yourself to do it, and that you should actually take time off more often to be more productive in the long run. Now, that might be true if you’ve got a BORING job, but if that’s the case, you should be more like me. I get paid to write humor for a living, and it’s the BEST job in the world. I have fun all the time. And I’ve learned a lot, too. For example, when you can’t sell any of your work and all you’ve got is ten bucks for food at the dollar store, just remember…you’re not buying food past its expiration date. You’re just buying food and eating it fashionably late.
Now, to help you take more time off, this book has a really good tool called an Unschedule. How that works is that the only thing you schedule is stuff like free time, chores, things like that. You leave everything else blank, but you color parts of it in whenever you do work. And that adds up. I tried it for a while and it felt really good to see all the work I did that week by looking at the spaces I colored in on my schedule. The only problem is that you have to draw up a new schedule every week. I don’t got time for that, I’ve got fart jokes to make, okay?
The book also covers how you talk to yourself. See, when we talk to ourselves using words like “I have to do this” or “I should do this”, it causes resentment, which makes us slack off. The book shows you about words you can use instead to make it easier. I needed this more than I thought, because I’ll agree with whatever my voice says. I love my voice. If it was real, I’d give it a half-naked nelson in a pigpen if I could.
But like I said, some of the self-talk exercises are helpful. I had a speech I was working on and I kept telling myself, “I have to work on my speech, I have to work on my speech.” But then I started using better self-talk, and I started telling myself things like, “I have to work on my speech…but I can’t play Mass Effect 2 until I beat the first.” And now I just finished Virmire, so it’s been really effective.
All in all, though, this is a good book. If you’ve read up on procrastination, you’ve seen some of these ideas before, but the book packs it all together in a usable way. If you’re just getting started at trying to improve your productivity, this book is a good place to begin. On the back, it says that it’s “simple, effective, and immediately useful”, and that quote is definitely true. In fact, I liked it so much that I wrote it down for future reference, under a little section I call “Quotes That Accurately Describe Me”.
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