Stop procrastinating — Your only problems are wrong questions and a bad system

A Book summary — The Now Habit by Niel Fiore

This article is the first installment of my Book Summary series. I have read many books that have left profound impressions on me. So I always wanted to write Book summaries but have always procrastinated. But after reading the book, The Now Habit by Neil Fiore, I finally managed to write the first one. And I hope to write many more.

In case you don’t have time to read through the full article, here is a gist of it:

• Procrastination acts like a phobia: you avoid tasks you see as threats to your worth. Equating your worth to your work makes you vulnerable to procrastination.
• To conquer procrastination, separate your worth from your work.
• Five stages of procrastination are a. Giving power to your tasks to determine your self-worth b. becoming the victim of perfectionism c. Frozen by anxiety d. Using procrastination to escape your dilemma, e. Using threat to release yourself from perfectionism and to act as a motivator
• Three major fears that block actions and create procrastination are fear of being overwhelmed, fear of failure, and fear of not finishing. There are tools to overcome these fears.
• Tool 1–The 3-dimensional thinking and The reverse calendar to combat the fear of being overwhelmed. Tool 2: The work of worrying about tackling the fear of failure and the fear of being imperfect. Tool 3: Persistent Starting to tackle the fear of not finishing

Understanding why I procrastinate and applying the tools that the author has suggested helped me to complete this article and this newsletter. That’s it, folks; to know more about the above points, you can continue reading further.

Procrastinating – as most of us know well – is putting off things we know we should do. Some surveys find that about one in five people are chronic procrastinators. But everyone delays tasks from time to time, especially when the tasks seem complicated, or the deadline doesn’t feel immediate. Creating some sort of more urgent deadline can nudge action.

Are you among those who have been postponing your long-cherished goals for a long enough time? Starting a work-out regime, writing a novel, renovating your interiors, pursuing a long-stalled certification, the purpose of losing weight, and there are plenty of more. We all are procrastinators, and we all suffer the anxiety associated with procrastination. But why do we procrastinate, and is there a way to stop procrastination?

Fiore delves into why we procrastinate in the first few chapters and then gives us tools and a framework of how to come out of the vicious loop of procrastination.

Why we procrastinate?

People use procrastination to cope with “low-self esteem, perfectionism, fear of failure and success, indecisiveness, lack of work-play balance, and ineffective goal-setting. They focus on what’s wrong with them instead of focusing on doing the task.

I always aspired to write book summaries to share what I have learned with people, but I have never been able to do so because I kept procrastinating. My issue was perfectionism (majorly), followed by fear of failure and pursuit of idealism. Many people suggested that I need to start, and then things will start falling in place with time. I started but failed. My fears are always overpowered by my ability to act. Today I am in much control of my anxiety because I now know I have allowed my worries to creep in and dominate my ability to perform.

Firoe divides this phenomenon into five stages:

• Giving a task or goal the power to determine your happiness and worth
• Using perfectionism to raise the task 100 feet above the ground
• Frozen with anxiety: when something matter much, your stress level rise
• Using procrastination to escape your dilemma
• Using threat to release from perfectionism and to act as a motivator

In this anxiety cycle, procrastination is a temporary solution to help you avoid something you see as a threat to your worth. A friend of mine has been planning to switch careers, but he has not yet been able to apply to any single company because his Resume’ is not ready. He wants to make a perfect resume’. But he has not been able even to start writing the first line of his resume’. It’s been three months now, and he is yet to begin writing the resume’.

Though it may sound quite familiar and straightforward to say — “You just need to start,” but rarely do we follow this advice. The fact that we give power to the task to determine our self-worth is prevalent in many aspects of our life, including our relationships. We must practice separating our jobs and our self-worth. Our tasks or projects don’t determine how good we are as individuals. We should stop identifying ourselves with them.

Our identity is like our anchor; the more anchors we have, the more difficult it will be to start sailing.

Blocks to action

Three major fears that block action and create procrastination are

1. Terror of being overwhelmed
2. The fear of failure
3. The fear of not finishing.

The question is, how did we get these fears in the first place. These fears come from harsh criticism of parents, friends, teachers, or maybe yourself. If you have suffered the humiliation of solving a problem that others found easy, you may have developed a tendency to avoid certain kinds of work. In such a situation, procrastination becomes our defense when we cannot find other tools and cope directly and positively with such phobias or fears.

There have been plenty of articles, including a 200 pages book, which I have written but never published. Many articles are not even completed. A primary reason was I have fallen into the trap of “not writing a good enough article”. One novel which I have not yet published is still incomplete because I am overwhelmed by the effort it will require to edit it.

We don’t realize these fears are a major reason for our weak self-worth. You may come across many people preaching about leaving the projects in between (because they themselves have done it and have given up on them) and moving on in life. But this is a very mediocre way of living. We are left with a feeling of incompleteness, self-deceit, and a person with shattered dreams.

Tools to overcome Blocks to action

• Three-dimensional thinking and the reverse calendar to combat the fear of being overwhelmed
• The work of worrying to tackle the fear of failure and the fear of being imperfect
• Persistent starting to tackle the fear of not finishing

Three-dimensional thinking

Fiore suggests three-dimensional thinking to combat the fear of getting overwhelmed. You get overwhelmed by the projects’ size, length, and breadth. You also get overwhelmed by the stakes which a project may involve. You create a two-dimensional picture of your project — all work all at once, with no time to catch your breath. Being overwhelmed by a large or important task is a form of physical and psychological terror.

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 insist on knowing the one right place to start.
• You insist on becoming competent right at the beginning rather than learning, building confidence with each step, and asking for help.
• Being critical about only starting and comparing with an imagined ideal

Avoiding these three thoughts helps to gather the required focus. It takes away your vulnerability and helps you experiment with your approach. Failing no longer becomes a show-stopper; rather, it becomes a part of the learning curve.

When I approached this article, I didn’t follow a waterfall approach from start to finish. (My fear of finding the right place to start is gone). I might have corrected 200+ grammatical errors and might have re-written at least 50 sentences more than 3 times. (I stopped insisting on becoming competent right at the beginning). I want to convey my message to my readers and see if I have been successful. (There is no image of an ideal article or an ideal writer anymore now). I will learn in the process and become better with time.

The Reverse Calendar

Plan a project and break it down into small chunks of achievable milestones so that you are complacent that you are making progress to complete the project one day.

Our life is a complex web of projects, and each project is equally crucial. If we don’t form a system to keep a tab of as many of them as possible, they all will soon skip from our hands. That’s why we must understand project planning, execution, and reviewing is a continuous process, and it needs a reliable system.

My system includes the following:

1. Trello: I have three kinds of boards in this. Tracker — A list to keep track of my weekly, monthly, and yearly goals, Work-related — A list of all my work-related projects. Last, I have a dedicated list of each project example, writing, education, office deliverables, etc. Though there are too many boards to handle, Trelly has the necessary features to declutter the boards.
2. Calendar: Once I have the tasks broken and reverse calendaring is done for each of the tasks in the Trello, I put them or sync my Trello board with my calendar application.

Regular review is a part integral part of the system. If I am not reviewing, I will never make the necessary adjustments in execution.

But have you noticed that we procrastinate to plan the projects and review them once in a while? You know why we do that because we see that as a threat to our self-worth, which makes us postpone this activity sometimes forever.

The work of worrying

The work of worrying includes six critical questions to ask:

• What is the worst that could happen?
• What would I do if the worst happens?
• How will I lessen the pain and get on with as much happiness as possible if the worst did occur?
• What alternatives would I have?
• What can I do now to lessen this dreaded event’s probability?
• Is there anything I can do now to increase my chances of achieving my goal?

By using the work of worrying, creating safety, and using the producer’s language, you establish skills for maintaining genuine self-confidence.

Real confidence is knowing that whether you’re calm or anxious, whether you succeed or fail, you’ll do your best and, if necessary, be ready to pick yourself up to carry on and try again. Real confidence is the ability to say, “I am prepared for the worst, now I can focus on the work that will lead to the best.”

Persistent Starting

When we have started the project, we tend to get trapped in several negative statements and conversations with ourselves. We may think we are just calculative and intelligent while having these statements, but the truth is we rationalize, and we end up not finishing the project. I have been in this trap for so long. So what are those statements:

1. I need to do more preparation before I can start
2. At this rate, I will never finish
3. I should have started earlier
4. There is only more work after this
5. It’s not working
6. I only need a little more time

Fiore has given some wonderful challenges to these statements, and I suggest you read his book if you have found this article useful.

Our lives are made of time, measured in hours, days, months, years, etc, and energy, which facilitates how we think and approach life situations. After reading this book, I wonder how the questions we ask ourselves, how we answer them, and how we handle our fears brings a significant change in our life. Creating a reliable system to tell our mind what we want it to do may be challenging, but it’s rewarding too. Most of the data we process comes from the outside, and we have no control over them. The only way out is to develop a system to feed the mind with the data that we want.

In my last post, I talked about setting goals extensively. I am glad that I picked up the right book, which has given me the right tool and questions to keep myself focused on the goal.

Should you read The Now Habit

If you have gotten up to this far, I am sure you liked the book’s concepts. Neil A. Fiore, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and a management consultant to industrial, educational, and health care organizations. He publishes extensively and often speaks on radio and television. He has used his experience quite well and in an engaging way to tell us how important and easy it is to develop The Now Habit.

If your interset is to delve deeper into the concepts, I suggest you read this book.