The Now Habit

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.

“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:

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.” 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.

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…