The Now Habit
by Neil Fiore, Ph.D.
Self-improvement time on the beach this week. After all, too much brain candy may be hazardous to your attention to other tasks in your life– I mean, who wants to clean out closets when there’s a new beach-worthy paperback just waiting to while your day away? (Yeah, if you can find it in that nasty closet you’ve been meaning to clean out . . . )
The subtitle of The Now Habit (“A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play”), spoke to me. Moms aren’t allowed guilt-free play, are they? Isn’t that like a rule? Well, not if mom can be content with the closet being cleaned out to just a bit below Martha Stewart standards (like maybe your out-of-season stuff is stored in Hefty bags instead of hand-hewn cedar storage containers, but heck, it’s stored, right?). Really, though, this is more a “why-to” than a “how-to”: why you should recognize counterproductive messages (“I’ll never finish, so why start?”); why you should replace “I have to” with “I choose to”; why you should just keep on starting and face the worst first. Getting your most onerous task of the day out of the way will allow you to feel good about enjoying deserved down-time– the better to get back to the beach!
– Sandy Page
