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Procrastination is a habit you develop to cope with anxiety about starting or completing a task. 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. When you learn to work efficiently—in the Flow State or Zone, using more of your brain-cell power—you have less reason to avoid important, top-priority tasks.

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The Now Habit frees you of shame and blame and moves you to a leadership perspective in your life. From this awakened sense of a larger, stronger self, you are free of the inner conflict between the inner voices of “you have to” versus “but I don’t want to.” You begin to live your life from choice—a leadership function of your higher, human brain and your new identity as a producer.

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The Now Habit exercises help you break the cycle of procrastination by removing the stigma of calling yourself “a procrastinator” who’s burdened by having to get so many things done. Instead, you become like martial artists and peak-performing athletes who can push aside distracting thoughts and focus their attention on what they can do now. You don’t have to wait until you feel confident, motivated, or until you know it all; you start now and see what comes to you. You rapidly shift from not knowing to knowing—which is the essence of creativity.

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If you suffer from extreme panic and blocks when confronted by pressure to perform, this book will show you how to overcome the initial terror so you can get started. It will teach you to use empowering inner dialogue that leads to responsible choices, while avoiding ambivalent messages such as “you should” and “you have to.” The typical procrastinator completes most assignments on time, but the pressure of doing work at the last minute causes unnecessary anxiety and diminishes the quality of the end result. Procrastination is a problem that we all have in some areas of our lives, be it balancing the budget, filing a complicated legal brief, or painting the spare bedroom—anything we have delayed in favor of more pressing or pleasurable pursuits. We all have tasks and goals we attempt to delay—or totally escape.

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The procrastination habit catches people in a vicious cycle: get overwhelmed, feel pressured, fear failure, try harder, work longer, feel resentful, lose motivation, and then procrastinate. The cycle starts with the pressure of being overwhelmed and ends with an attempt to escape through procrastination. As long as you’re caught in the cycle, there is no escape. You can’t even enjoy the recuperative and creative benefits of guilt-free leisure time. Suddenly, any time spent on play—and even time spent on more enjoyable work—feels like an uneasy shirking from what you should be doing. By negatively affecting the way you think and feel about work, leisure, yourself, and your chances for success, procrastination becomes a part of your identity.

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Dozens of books offer pop-psychology theories about why people procrastinate. They encourage self-criticism by giving you additional negative labels, and they imply that you’re lazy by making greater demands for discipline and organization. But there’s a big difference between just diagnosing what’s wrong and providing a system that enables you to correct it. People who have been procrastinating for years on major life goals are already pretty good at self-criticism. What they need are positive, practical techniques for getting beyond the stumbling blocks and on to achieving their goals. Some books offer prosaic advice such as “break it into small pieces” or “set priorities.” You already know this. You’ve heard the advice, you have the knowledge—you may even have paid dearly for it. But this kind of advice isn’t helpful because it misses the point: you would do these things if you could, if it were that simple. People don’t procrastinate just to be ornery or because they’re irrational. They procrastinate because it makes sense, given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism.

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You do not procrastinate twenty-four hours a day. When you turn your attention toward what you love to do—activities that foster your spontaneity, motivation, and curiosity—you know that you are more than a procrastinator, more than just lazy. With these experiences you can begin to shed your identity as a procrastinator and reconnect with your innate human drive to produce and make a contribution.

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If early training has caused you to associate work with pain and humiliation, then just approaching an intimidating or unpleasant task can bring on a reliving of criticism, not only from your current boss but from parents, previous bosses, and teachers. Every insecurity bubbles up to your consciousness as you think about working on some project you feel you’re no good at. Pain, resentment, hurt, and fear of failure have become associated with certain kinds of tasks. When life seems to hold too many of these tasks it’s as if you’re driving with the brakes on; you’ve lost your motivation and doubt your own inner drive to get things done. At this point your self-criticism seems justified. You’re likely to think of yourself as a chronic procrastinator—someone doomed to experience anxiety and self-reproach when faced with certain kinds of projects. Your first step toward breaking the procrastination habit and becoming a producer involves redefining procrastination and coming to a new understanding of how and why we use it. Procrastination is not 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.

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A complete treatment of procrastination must address the underlying blocked needs that cause a person to resort to procrastination. The Now Habit starts with a new definition:   Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision.     From this definition it follows that those most vulnerable to procrastination are those who feel the most threatened by difficulty in starting a project, criticism, failure, and the loss of other opportunities that may result from committing to one project.

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Advice such as “just do it,” “try harder,” and “get organized” is based on the old definition: “Your problem is procrastination. If only you weren’t so lazy you could do it.” Well-meaning parents, teachers, writers, and friends will worsen the problem by adding: “This is a really tough job. You’re going to have to work really hard. No fooling around. No time for friends and vacations until this is completed.” The message they communicate is: “Life is dull and hard. There’s no time for fun. Work is dreadful, yet it must be

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1. Creating safety will show you how to put a psychological safety net under your high-wire act so that you can lessen your fear of failure and learn how to bounce back from mistakes with renewed purpose. 2. Reprogramming negative attitudes through positive self-talk will help you to identify your negative messages to yourself and discover how they adversely affect you, while replacing them with positive phrasing that directs your energy toward task-oriented thoughts and rapid solutions. 3. Using the symptom to trigger the cure will show you how to use old habits to evoke and strengthen the formation of new, positive habits. 4. Guilt-free play will teach you how to strategically schedule your leisure time in order to shift your focus from work to play, thereby creating a subconscious urge to return to work. 5. Three-dimensional thinking and the reverse calendar will show you how to control the terror of being overwhelmed by important tasks by creating a step-by-step calendar of your path to achievement, with adequate time to rest and to fully appreciate your accomplishments. 6. Making worry work for you will show you how developing plans for coping with distractions will help you achieve your goals and strengthen your ability to face the worst that could happen. 7. The Unschedule will let you see the freedom awaiting you through prescheduled guilt-free play, will create a realistic image of the amount of time available, and will give you a built-in time clock for recording quality time on projects to let you see how much you’ve accomplished. 8. Setting realistic goals will help you to clear your mind of guilt-producing goals that cannot be worked on in the present, and will direct your energies toward the few worthwhile goals that deserve your attention now. 9. Working in the flow state will bring you beyond stress and low motivation to a state of focused energy, interest, and concentration within two minutes or less—letting you know that regardless of how you feel about your project, within moments you will be working at your most productive and creative levels. 10. Controlled setbacks will prepare you for setbacks so that you quickly turn them into opportunities, anticipate the temptation to procrastinate, and build persistence into your overall plan for achievement.

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These six warning signs will help you quickly determine if you have significant difficulties with procrastination, goal achievement, or inefficient work habits. 1. Does life feel like a long series of obligations that cannot be met? Do you • keep an impossibly long “to do” list? • talk to yourself in “have to’s” and “should’s”? • feel powerless, with no sense of choice? • feel agitated, pressured, continually fearful of being caught procrastinating? • suffer from insomnia and have difficulty unwinding at night, on weekends, and on vacations (if in fact you take vacations)? 2. Are you unrealistic about time? Do you • talk about starting on projects in vague terms such as “sometime next week” or “in the fall”? • lose track of how you spend your time? • have an empty schedule without a clear sense of commitments, plans, subgoals, and deadlines? • chronically arrive late at meetings and dinners? • fail to take into account the actual time it takes to drive across town during rush hour? 3. Are you vague about your goals and values? Do you • find it difficult to stay committed to any one person or project? • have difficulty knowing what you really want for yourself, but are clear about what you should want? • get easily distracted from a goal by another plan that seems to be free of problems and obstacles? • lack the ability to distinguish between what’s the most important use of your time and what’s not? 4. Are you unfulfilled, frustrated, depressed? Do you • have life goals that you’ve never completed or even attempted? • fear always being a procrastinator? • find that you’re never satisfied with what you accomplish? • feel deprived—always working or feeling guilty about not working? • continually wonder “Why did I do that?” or “What’s wrong with me?” 5. Are you indecisive and afraid of being criticized for making a mistake? Do you • delay completing projects because you try to make them perfect? • fear taking responsibility for decisions because you’re afraid of being blamed if something goes wrong? • demand perfection even on low-priority work? • expect to be above mistakes and criticism? • worry endlessly about “what if something goes wrong”?

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6. Are low self-esteem and lack of assertiveness holding you back from becoming productive? Do you • blame outside events for your failures because you’re afraid to admit to any deficiencies? • believe “I am what I do” or “I am my net worth”? • feel ineffective in controlling your life? • fear being judged and found wanting?

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Early in life they learn that all they can expect from finishing a project is criticism or so-called constructive feedback on how it might be improved. What’s clearly being communicated is: “There’s no rest for you. You’ll always need to keep trying. Life and work are hard; it won’t be easy for you; you have a lot more work to do before you can rest on your laurels; you’d better get used to things getting tough because adulthood is even worse than childhood; and while you’re out having fun, some catastrophe is lurking around the corner, waiting to surprise you.”

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I wanted to challenge at least two of the counterproductive assumptions Clare’s story revealed: the feeling that she had to force herself—that there needed to be an inner conflict; and that this constant conflict is normal, the way everybody lives—as if it’s part of human nature to be lazy.

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In my work with thousands of procrastinators I have discovered that there is one main reason why we procrastinate: it rewards us with temporary relief from stress. In the case of Clare, who had many underlying reasons for seeking procrastination as a refuge, she learned to use procrastination because it effectively lessened her fear of being judged.

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Maintaining your own record for a few days will give you a pretty good estimate of how you spend your time. As you review a typical week’s activities you can total the amount of time spent on the phone, reading the mail, eating, socializing, working, and so forth. This will reveal patterns that you may wish to change and others that you wish to encourage or start earlier in your day. You may be alarmed to find that much of what transpires in your life is not directly related to high-priority tasks. Don’t expect to find eight hours of quality work a day. Much of the legitimate activity in life is not directly related to productivity. For example, work in a large organization does involve socializing, meetings, and communication to maintain a team approach and commitment to a common vision. Simply look for areas of improvement and greater control over interruptions and lost time. With an answering machine or administrative assistant, most telephone calls can be returned at your convenience rather than handled as they come in, breaking your concentration and momentum.

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Or you may find that, like many people, you take more than an hour to “settle in” before really getting started. What would happen to your efficiency level if you started on a high-priority project first thing in the morning, rather than reading the mail or making phone calls? To make changes, you’ll need to break out of automatic pilot and start making conscious choices when you first enter your office in the morning. Use your record to identify the events that precede procrastination or low-priority work. Knowing which events trigger negative habits will help you switch to more productive activities.

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First, you give a task or a goal the power to determine your worth and happiness. You think, “Getting this job, passing this test, dating this person will change my life and make me happy.” When a perfect performance or the achievement of a specific goal becomes the sole measure of your self-worth, too much is at stake to just start working without some leverage, such as procrastination, to break the equation of self-worth = performance. Berkeley psychologist Rich Beery states that fear of failure stems from assuming that what you produce reflects your complete ability. You therefore use procrastination to protect your worth from being judged. Second, you use perfectionism to raise the task 100 feet above the ground, so that any mistakes would be tantamount to death, and any failure or rejection would be intolerable. You demand that you do it perfectly—without anxiety, with complete acceptance from your audience, with no criticism.

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Third, you find yourself frozen with anxiety as your natural stress response produces adrenaline to deal with threats to your survival. The more issues you pile upon this task the more serious the threat if an error occurs. So in a series of “what if’s” you create a catastrophic image of a row of falling dominoes—one mistake leading to the loss of a client, leading to the loss of a job, leading to failed attempts at ever finding another job, leading to the breakup of your marriage, and so on. With such images it doesn’t take much to feel tension and stress and then to seek temporary relief through procrastination.

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Fourth, you then use procrastination to escape your dilemma, which brings the deadline closer, creating time pressure, a higher level of anxiety, and a more immediate and frightening threat than even your fear of failure or of criticism for imperfect work. You might even feel more powerful at this point; after all, you balanced out your anxieties and made them work for you. You also escape the terrible equation of self-worth = performance by delaying enough so that you cannot be tested on your real ability—that is, what you could do if you had enough time.

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In order to maximize your performance in a stressful world, you must create a protected and indisputable sense of worth for yourself. Until you do, energy and concentration will be drained from work and put into preparing for imagined threats to your survival, and into procrastination as a means of coping. Regardless of how you do it, or what you say, provide a safe place where you make yourself free of judgment, a place and a time where you can stop trying to perform perfectly.

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If you are threatening yourself with self-hatred and a life of unhappiness unless you achieve your goal, it’s impossible to concentrate on the work in front of you now. You must have some sort of protection from these self-imposed threats. Your healthy survival response (commonly thought of as stress) will not stop until you are safe. You need a commitment to yourself and your innate worth that lets you know that, in spite of any failures, you believe in yourself enough to try again, to get back on this board—or some other board more suited to your unique talents.

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The ambivalent self-talk of procrastination—“I should do it, but I don’t want to. I have to because they’re making me do it”—communicates victimhood, resistance, stress, and confusion. Of all the characteristics that separate producers from procrastinators, none is more liberating than the producer’s focus on “choice” and “choosing.” Messages of “I choose,” “I decide,” or “I will” direct energy toward a single personal goal with clear responsibility for the outcome. We often get caught in the trap of talking to ourselves in a self-pitying “have to” way about going to see the dentist, sending cards to friends, paying taxes, working, or facing the boss. These statements confirm the belief that others are making us do something against our will. The effect is to create an image of ourselves as defeated by small tasks in life, overburdened, working hard, and without joy. Repeated over and over again, a “have to” statement communicates to your subconscious mind • I don’t want to do it. • They’re making me do it against my will. • I have to do it or else!—something awful and terrible will happen. I will hate myself. • This is a no-win situation: if I don’t do it I’ll be punished; if I do it I’ll be going against myself.

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I’m not saying that ideals and goals aren’t worth striving for. What I am saying is that “should’s” create negative comparisons without indicating how to get from where you are to where you’d like to be. “Have to’s” and “should’s” do not communicate to the mind and body a clear picture of: • what you choose to do • when you choose to do it • where you choose to start it • how you choose to do it

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• See themselves as always burdened by incomplete work. They see themselves as always working, yet undeserving of a rest. • Think of their lives as “being on hold,” with only the faintest hope that someday they will be organized enough or successful enough to enjoy life. • View human beings as lazy and requiring pressure in order to create motivation. Both use negative self-talk and threats, but workaholics respond to this pressure with constant “busyness,” while procrastinators respond by being overwhelmed and immobilized by the anxiety. • Maintain negative attitudes toward work. They see work as infinite and insatiable, requiring deprivation and sacrifice, which workaholics are willing to make, often to avoid getting too close to anyone. Procrastinators exaggerate the sacrifice, escaping to halfhearted play out of fear of never being able to play again.

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We are more likely to work productively when we can anticipate pleasure and success rather than isolation and anxiety. Demanding twenty—or even four—hours of tedious work involving confinement and struggle is hardly calculated to get us motivated, especially when there are so many more pleasurable alternatives available. Given the choice between completing your income taxes and seeing an old friend, the odds are strongly in favor of the old friend—unless you have a strategy.

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When attempting to motivate yourself to start working on a goal, do you push yourself toward the goal with threats, or do you use your attraction to the goal to pull you forward? Unfortunately, most people use a “push method” of motivation and are unaware that there are alternatives. In any of a variety of sectors, including the military, business, or institutes of learning, we are subjected to threats—the “push method” of motivation—designed to stimulate action through fear of punishment. The fact is that the random action produced by punishment or fear is not directed toward a goal, but rather, like procrastination, toward escape from the fear. These punishing tactics often create a paralyzing rather than a motivating effect. Too often this harsh method is used more to exercise authority and control than to achieve positive results. The use of threats by those in authority is an example of how the attempted solution, rather than generating positive motivation for the goal, is counterproductive and contributes to procrastination by creating resistance to authority, fear of failure, and fear of success.

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The “push method” of management assumes that humans are basically lazy and that scaring the hell out of them will create motivation. For example, those in authority might say: • Private Jones, if you don’t finish peeling that truckload of potatoes by 1700 hours, you’ll lose your weekend pass for the next six months. • This firm needs to generate $200,000 worth of sales this month or we’ll all be looking for jobs. • Unless you increase the number of clients you see each day to at least fifteen, we will have to close this center. • This freshman class had better learn now that you’re in for a lot of hard work. By the end of the semester you’ll have read this entire shelf of books; and by the time you graduate, this entire wall of books.

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The three major fears that block action and create procrastination are the terror of being overwhelmed, the fear of failure, and the fear of not finishing. These three blocks usually interact with each other and escalate any initial fears and stresses. Overcoming any one of the three quickens the destruction of the remaining blocks because you build confidence as you face and live through any fear. Studies have confirmed that as little as thirty seconds of staying with a feared situation—a barking dog, a crowded party, giving a speech—while using positive self-talk is enough to start the process of replacing a phobic response with positive alternatives. Learning to stay with any fear will be much easier when you have weapons and tools that give your brain alternatives to running away.

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Being overwhelmed by a large or important task is a form of psychological and physical terror. As an eager and productive new lawyer, Joel found great satisfaction in working on depositions and briefs that he could complete quickly. However, he shied away from more complicated cases. His fear and procrastination began to get in the way of his advancement in the firm. Whenever he was faced with an important or risky case, his physical and emotional reactions were so strong that he felt stuck, unable to do anything. His worrying resulted in insomnia, indecisiveness about small issues, and increased use of coffee and alcohol. He worried about making a mistake, about his ability to handle the case, about how much work he’d have to do to just adequately complete the case, and about his devastation if he failed. As Joel put it:

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I become so intense about the possibility of losing the case that I stop myself from ever starting the necessary preparation. This makes me so anxious I can’t decide how I’m going to handle it—how I’ll approach the opposite, or where’s the best place to start. Then I become so frightened that I’ll make a mistake on my choice of what to do that I waste additional valuable time. Eventually, my nervousness and procrastination leave me less time to take depositions and meet court dates.     For Joel, and many others like him, the anxiety of being overwhelmed is increased by the expectation that he should be able to start without anxiety, and by the severe self-criticism he directs toward his initial efforts (“How will I ever finish if this is all I can do at the start?”).

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Conquering the feeling of being overwhelmed starts with anticipating that it is natural to experience a certain amount of anxiety as you picture all the work involved in completing a large project. It is important not to misinterpret this as a sign that you can’t do it. This normal level of anxiety will not become overwhelming unless you: 1. Insist on knowing the one right place to start. The indecision and delay in looking for the one right place keeps you from getting on to the rest of the project. The possibility that there are several adequate starting points escapes you, and you feel anxious that the one you’ve chosen leads to a devastatingly wrong conclusion. You’ve gotten yourself stuck by thinking in a right-wrong dichotomy—either you do it right the first time or you’re wrong. From this perspective each starting point seems as if it’s set in cement, dictating the succeeding steps, domino fashion, cascading you in the wrong direction. 2. Have not permitted yourself time along the course of your project for learning, building confidence with each step, and asking for help. Your two-dimensional view pressures you to be competent now at the beginning. Instead of allowing yourself to learn along the way, you expect that you should feel confident at the start. 3. Are critical of the fact that you’re only starting, and you tell yourself, “I should be finished.” Each achievement is diminished by being compared with the imagined ideal. The starting point and the path of trial and error have little legitimacy in comparison to your goal. You have little…

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All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable. . . . [they were] not solved logically in [their] own terms but fade when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. —CARL JUNG

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For years you’ve been telling yourself to work harder on difficult projects, and to try to put in more time. The Unschedule and the guilt-free play system help you to put more time into your leisure and more quality into your work. It tells you to make sure you’ve scheduled enough time for high-quality, guilt-free play. It says: • Do not work more than twenty hours a week on this project. • Do not work more than five hours a day on this project. • You must exercise, play, or dance at least one hour a day. • You must take at least one day a week off from any work. • Aim for starting on thirty minutes of quality work. • Work for an imperfect, perfectly human first effort. • Start small.

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By requiring you to schedule and stick to recreational time, and to limit your work activity at first to predetermined periods of thirty minutes, the Unschedule builds up a subconscious desire to work more and play less.

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1. Schedule only: • previously committed time such as meals, sleep, meetings • free time, recreation, leisure reading • socializing, lunches and dinners with friends • health activities such as swimming, running, tennis, working out at the gym • routine structured events such as commuting time, classes, medical appointments It is basic to the principles of unscheduling that first you fill in your Unschedule with as many nonwork activities as possible. This will help you overcome the fantasy that you have twenty-four hours a day and forty-eight hours on the weekends to work on your projects. It will sharpen your perception of the actual time available and make you a better manager of your time.

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Do not schedule work on projects. Remember, first and foremost, that the Unschedule guarantees your guilt-free play and the legitimacy of your personal time. This first step will help you avoid scaring yourself with overly ambitious, overly dictatorial plans for work that lead only to failure, disappointment, self-criticism, and procrastination.

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2. Fill in your Unschedule with work on projects only after you have completed at least one-half hour. Think of the Unschedule as a time clock that you punch in as you start work and punch out when you take credit for your progress. You want to maintain an excitement about how much you’ve accomplished in a short period of time rather than anxiety about how much more there is to do. You can also use your thirty-minute commitment as your own deadline to motivate you to work more efficiently.

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Students entering Harvard, for example, are brought to a special section of the library where the rough drafts of famous authors are kept. This exercise has quite an impact on young writers who previously thought that the work of geniuses arrived complete and leather-bound in a single stroke of inspiration. Here, the freshmen can examine how a successful writer often starts with an apparently random series of ideas centered around a theme; many of these ideas later proved superfluous to the final design, but were essential to the process of developing a new concept. That is, the early drafts are not discarded like mistakes, but are viewed as the initial steps in unfolding the idea. The

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FOCUSING EXERCISE Start by sitting upright in your chair with your feet flat on the floor, with your hands on your thighs. Focus your attention on your breathing. If you’ve been stressed you may discover that your breathing is constricted. Breathe deeply, holding your breath for a moment, and then exhale slowly and completely. Do this three times, counting each time you exhale. With each exhalation imagine that you are letting go of any remaining tension and that you are deciding to drift to a different level of mind. Now focus your attention on the feeling of the chair against your back, buttocks, and legs. Float down into the chair. Let it support you, as you release any unnecessary muscle tension. You can now let go of those muscles. Shift your attention to the feeling of your feet resting against the floor. Now let go of those muscles. As you let go, continue to exhale away any remaining tension. Just let go and allow your body to give you the gift of relaxation and support. During the next few moments, there is nothing much for your conscious mind to do except to be curious and allow your subconscious mind to provide your body with deeper and deeper relaxation with each phrase.

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Now, notice how heavy your eyelids are beginning to feel. And as you experience them getting heavier and heavier, let them float softly closed over your eyes. Or you can try to keep them open, and find that it takes so much effort to try that it’s much more comfortable to let them float down of their own accord. As your eyes close, allow relaxation to flow down over your entire body.     Letting go of the past. With your next three slow, deep breaths, tell yourself to let go of all thoughts and images about work from the past. Let go of what you’ve just been doing—driving in heavy traffic, making a telephone call, cleaning the house. Let go of thoughts about what you’ve been telling yourself you should or shouldn’t have done. You may even want to let go of your old self-image—your former sense of identity and its limitations on your potential. Inhale, hold your breath, and exhale completely, freeing your mind and body of the past.     Letting go of the future. And with your next three slow, deep breaths, let go of what you anticipate happening in the “future”—a constructed concept of a time that really doesn’t exist. Let go of all thoughts and images of future work and deadlines—freeing more energy for focusing in the present. Inhale, hold your breath, and exhale completely, freeing your mind and body of the future.     Centering in the present. With your next three slow, deep breaths, notice—just notice—that it really doesn’t take much energy to just be in the present. Let go of trying to be in any particular time, and let go of striving to be any particular way. Just allow yourself to notice the sensations of being where you are now. Choose to be in this situation, allowing the wisdom of your body and inner mind to give you just the right level of energy and relaxation to be here, doing whatever you choose to do in this moment. Inhale, hold your breath, and exhale completely, floating down into the present moment. You can now find yourself at a deeper level of relaxation where you can give yourself any positive suggestion you wish. With your next three slow, deep breaths, you can begin to link the power of the right and left hemispheres of your brain, reaching the flow state under your conscious control. After taking about a minute to complete the first part in twelve breaths, use any one of the following three conclusions to complete your focusing on a specific issue. To overcome procrastination and stimulate interest in starting work, count up from 1 to 3, and say to yourself:   With each breath I become more alert, curious, and interested. I’ll be going beyond discomfort and worry to starting with purpose and commitment in just a few seconds of clock time—1. Becoming more and more alert and ready to begin as I tap into the inner wisdom of my mind and many alternative solutions—2. Coming all the way up to full alertness, operating at a genius level with the support of my entire brain and my creative faculty, ready and eager to begin—3.  …

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about how much I will accomplish in such a short period of clock time. Counting up from 1 to 3, I am becoming more quietly alert and am now ready to work in a focused, concentrated way, rapidly going from not knowing to knowing how to start—1. More alert, relaxed, and energized, ready to use the superior wisdom of my subconscious mind—2. Ready to come all the way up to full alertness with my eyes open, eager to work in conjunction with the creative faculties of my mind—3.   If you’ve been procrastinating out of fear of confronting a boss, employee, or loved one, the next version of the exercise will be valuable in getting unstuck from negative patterns of social interaction. Use it to establish your own safety and protection, so that nothing is taken too personally. Then give yourself time to consider the results you wish to achieve and the alternative responses that will get you there. And finally, visualize a positive outcome—that rather than confronting each other as enemies, you and this other person can become valuable allies to each other.   I create the feeling of a warm, golden glow around me, an atmosphere that protects me from any distracting words and attitudes of others, and even from any negative thoughts of my own. I have all the time in the world to consider thoughts and remarks or to push them aside and to return my focus toward positive attitudes and my chosen goals. My thoughts and actions convey to others that I am their ally—not their enemy or problem. Others can only help me. I am becoming more and more…

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• Choose a project on which you are likely to procrastinate (paying bills, returning letters, home repairs, starting on your income tax return). • Notice the warning signs of procrastination associated with this project (for example, being overwhelmed by all the steps involved in paying bills or income tax; feeling that life has become a long list of “have to’s”; feeling deprived and isolated from fun and friends because you have to work). • Consciously choose to procrastinate for a few hours to observe the self-statements that lead to guilt and self-criticism: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why can’t I finish anything? Am I going to procrastinate my life away? If I can’t even pay the bills or answer letters I really must be a mess.” • Notice how this process of self-criticism leads to guilt, depression, and resentment while keeping you from paying just one bill, putting one stamp on an envelope, finding one file for your income tax.

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If you have a number of goals that remain unfulfilled and that continue to plague you with guilty “shoulds”—“I should get in shape”; “I’ve got to get organized”; “I should fix the back door”; “I have to get around to dealing with customer complaints”—chances are that, though you want the goal, you have been unwilling to make a commitment to the work required to accomplish it or, even though you really want to do it, you can’t find the time in your busy schedule. One of the best-kept secrets of successful producers is their ability to let go of goals that cannot be achieved or started in the near future. To set realistic goals you must be willing to fully commit to working on the path to that goal and be capable of investing the time and energy required to start now. If you cannot find the time or motivation to start working on that goal, let go of it, or it will keep haunting you, making you feel like a procrastinator—as if you’d failed to accomplish something important that you promised yourself you would achieve.