The now habit free pdf download archiv

A calendar is now a. This is a book on self development written by stephen r. Farmhouse style classroom posters featuring 7 essential habits for teens. Don t make an action plan now.

It is one of the most popular books by the author. As a serious and committed stephen covey enthusiast i have made an xcl and pdf of his weekly schedule management table as featured on page and of the 7 habits of highly effective people and uploaded it here.

Seven habits of highly effective people weekly schedule pdf seven. After you ve reviewed all of the feedback take a few minutes to answer the questions on the final page of the assessment.

Here at thebookszone you can grab ebooks for free. In the seven habits of highly effective people stephen covey serves up a seven course meal on how to take control of one s life and become the complete fulfilling person one envisions. If you would like a calendar that you ll have the ability to edit and insert your notes only have a look at word calendar templates. The habits weekly planner pdf game planner template printable 7 habits calendar template 15 free weekly calendar templates smartsheet 7 habits calendar template Fiore Submitted by: Jane Kivik.

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Hot Collecting the Pieces by L. Hot Waiting for the One by L. Includes bibliographical references. Work—Psychological aspects. Play—Psychological aspects. Time management. P76F It has been written for all those who, in their quest for help, brought with them a battered sense of self-worth, a desire to save some part of themselves, and a burning conviction that they had some good work to contribute.

But most especially, this book is for Elizabeth. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of these courageous individuals who repeatedly faced their fears and found within themselves the strength to try again. Their stories are told with the names, jobs, and situations changed to protect their privacy. I also wish to acknowledge the constant support and love of my family and friends, who offered me so many guilt-free meals and opportunities for guilt-free play.

I want to thank Jeremy P. Tarcher, who believed in the early, rough draft of the manuscript and had the vision to see this book. I will continue to be grateful for the advice and help of my agents. I am very grateful to friends who read rough drafts and offered constructive criticism, but I especially appreciate the assistance of Jayne Walker and Harriet Whitman Lee. And I wish to acknowledge the editing skill and wise counsel of Hank Stine and the inspiration of Janice Gallagher, both of whom contributed greatly to the organization of this book.

The Now Habit has stood the test of time. 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. The Now Habit frees you of shame and blame and moves you to a leadership perspective in your life. 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 rapidly shift from not knowing to knowing—which is the essence of creativity. Much has changed in the world since The Now Habit was first published in Surfing the Internet, instant messaging, e-mailing, and the use of cell phones have added to the number of distractions that can seduce us away from our mission of starting on a major project that could change our lives. Because these new devices give us an immediate response, they have an unfair competitive edge over activities that will not be rewarded until the end of the month or—as in the case of finishing school, writing a book, or learning to play the piano—until after one to four years of intensive work.

All the more reason to use the tools offered you by The Now Habit. This has given me additional insights into what you, the reader, need in order to make the Now Habit a powerful tool in shifting you from a Procrastinator or an overwhelmed workaholic into an efficient Producer who wants greater work-life balance.

We, very understandably, feel overwhelmed and burnt out. Advances in research conducted by NIH the National Institutes of Health and in the fields of neuropsychology and behavioral medicine over the last twenty years have proven that we can take control over our negative habits if we follow a series of steps.

It seems that The Now Habit was ahead of its time. If you are organized in your larger work projects, but find that the small, essential tasks of everyday living get ignored, the Now Habit will help you set priorities for, start, and complete these tasks as well. 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.

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. The cycle starts with the pressure of being overwhelmed and ends with an attempt to escape through procrastination. 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. Instead, you can cultivate the Now Habit: the ability to put aside the fear of failure, the terror of feeling overwhelmed, and low self-esteem, and focus your mind on what you can start now. The skills and strategies of the Now Habit program will let you think of yourself as a producer, feel like a producer, and act like a producer.

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. They procrastinate because it makes sense, given how vulnerable they feel to criticism, failure, and their own perfectionism.

To overcome procrastination you need a positive attitude about the human spirit. The Now Habit is based on the fact that somewhere in your life there are leisure activities and forms of work that you choose to do without hesitation.

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. 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.

Pain, resentment, hurt, and fear of failure have become associated with certain kinds of tasks. At this point your self-criticism seems justified. 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.

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. No fooling around. No time for friends and vacations until this is completed.

Work is dreadful, yet it must be done. The Now Habit program emphasizes healing the underlying self-alienation—the working against yourself—that results from early training and cultural conditioning.

Instead, the Now Habit reestablishes a working relationship within yourself that lessens inner conflict and allows you to engage your whole self in your task.

By giving you the tools to create inner safety and positive inner dialogue, it helps you to lessen the fear of being imperfect and enables you to take risks and start sooner. Because practical application of this positive philosophy to work situations is so rare, you will find few direct references listed in this book. The program shows you how to shift gears into a higher level of functioning so you can go faster more efficiently. It shows you how scheduling more guilt-free play in your life can attack the underlying causes of procrastination by lowering resentment toward work, making it easier to start working, improving the quality of work, and stirring motivation.

With this strategy you will be able to work virtually free of stress and enjoy your leisure time free of guilt. The Now Habit program will provide you with ten powerful tools for overcoming procrastination.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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. Armed with techniques for focusing on results and for recognizing and avoiding old pitfalls, you will discover yourself feeling positive and confident in situations that previously caused stress and procrastination. You will even discover that you are less critical and more supportive of yourself, capable of replacing old criticisms with positive, task-oriented directives and rechanneling the frustration of procrastination into successful production.

Since completing my doctoral program thirty years ago, I have worked with thousands of clients and hundreds of organizations in creating a strategy that has helped participants to dramatically improve performance, get freedom from destructive behavior, and enhance self-esteem and confidence. This same system has been used successfully by clients who considered themselves to be recalcitrant procrastinators. The Now Habit program for quality work and guilt-free play has worked for me and my clients and seminar participants.

And it can work for you! Does life feel like a long series of obligations that cannot be met? Are you unrealistic about time?

Are you vague about your goals and values? Are you unfulfilled, frustrated, depressed? Are you indecisive and afraid of being criticized for making a mistake? If you can relate to most of these categories the chances are you already know that you have real problems with procrastination, time management, or workaholism. If you see only some of these warning signs in yourself you may be procrastinating in some areas of your life while remaining in control in most areas.

But even if you avoid these extremes and can responsibly meet obligations and deadlines, you may still suffer from problems with procrastination. The fact is that most of us who consider ourselves procrastinators meet deadlines and avoid serious penalties. But we feel so rushed, so pressured, and so unhappy with the results that we have to admit we have inordinate difficulties with any frightening or unpleasant task.

So-called procrastinators can be found in every walk of life, accomplishing much in those arenas where they have chosen to devote themselves, but totally unable to get started in others.

The Now Habit perspective does not accept that laziness, disorganization, or any other character defect is the reason you procrastinate. Nor does it accept the assumption that people in general are innately lazy, and therefore need pressure to motivate them. Martin Seligman—on what Dr. He says that humor and positive emotions and thoughts have healing potential. The Now Habit applies a similar positive attitude about the human spirit to the problem of procrastination.

If human nature has this ability to be so positive and active, then why do we procrastinate? That is, we procrastinate when we fear a threat to our sense of worth and independence. We only act lazy when our natural drive for fruitful activity is threatened or suppressed. Theodore Rubin in his book Compassion and Self-Hate suggests that it is the fear of failure, the fear of being imperfect perfectionism , and the fear of impossible expectations being overwhelmed that prevent us from acting on and attaining humanly possible goals and relationships.

Having a fear of failure means you believe that even the smallest error could be evidence that you are a worthless and awful person. Having a fear of being imperfect means that it is difficult for you to accept yourself as you are —imperfect and, therefore, perfectly human—and so you interpret any criticism, rejection, or judgment by others as a threat to your very tenuous grasp on perfection. These fears, Dr. Rubin says, keep us from reaching a level of life where we feel compassion and respect ourselves now—for who and where we are now.

This compassion for ourselves is essential in overcoming the underlying causes of procrastination. It means understanding that procrastination is not a character defect; rather, it is an attempt—albeit an unsatisfactory one—at coping with the often incapacitating fear of having our worth held up for judgment. The fear of judgment is the key fear that stems from over-identifying who you are, your worth as a person, with your work. From this fear follows the counterproductive drive toward perfectionism, severe self-criticism, and the fear that you must deprive yourself of leisure time in order to satisfy some unseen judge.

She clutched her handbag tightly and sat scrunched forward on the edge of her seat as if in pain. When I called her name, Clare brightened and tried to smile, but it came across as anxious and awkward. As she stood I could see that Clare was a tall, well-dressed woman in her late twenties who could rapidly drop her childlike appearance and look her true age and size.

Once we reached my office, Clare resumed her childlike look. I feel awful. For more than thirty minutes she poured out her problems with procrastination: a story of embarrassment, humiliation, and self-contempt, about constant anxiety, continual feelings of being out of control, missed deadlines, and rushed projects that left no time to check for obvious errors. I felt so stupid, so incompetent. I was so afraid of making a mistake.

My way of doing things is so different from his. There was a huge backlog from Janet, the person who had my job before me. After a while I stopped asking for help and stopped showing my work to anyone. I knew that my difficulties with procrastination would always catch up with me. I have an ulcer that started in high school. Even then I would worry about turning in a project for fear that it would be mediocre—just average. I decided this would be a good time to interrupt.

She had spent quite a bit of time describing herself as the victim and the scared, helpless child, but at this moment she had become the judge and the critic. Not very positive roles, but ones with more energy and potential for movement than the part of her that felt so devastated by a poor performance evaluation. Sounds as if you can be pretty tough on yourself. Where did you learn to talk to yourself that way? Ever since I can remember, they all made fun of me if I asked for help with my homework.

I was always expected to do well and have no problems. I suppose they thought they were showing me how bright I was. There was never any praise for my accomplishments, even when I worked very hard. I always felt as if someone was looking over my shoulder, worried about how well I was doing or how smart I was. I felt I had to force myself to do these things for them even though I wanted to be outside playing with the other kids.

It seemed so important to my parents that I be good at something special. I wanted them to be happy, so I really tried for them. Never someone they could be proud of. But it always turns out average.

I hate being average. There seems to be no way of pleasing their parents or teachers. 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. For Clare, being in constant conflict with herself was the only way she knew how to be. Every sound you uttered was greeted with applause and a look of encouragement—a reassuring smile that you would do just fine.

I feel so stupid. Now stop that and apologize. Where did you learn to talk to yourself in such a tough, critical way? Feeling like a victim had become so much a part of her identity that she simply assumed that the voice of the critic was coming from outside herself. I was asking her to notice that she was the authoritarian judge.

I explained to Clare that she probably learned that demanding voice as an attempt to ensure acceptance from her parents. Thus Clare learned to talk to herself, not as a loving parent, but as a threatening and parental judge. Clare had learned her attitudes about work and her abilities when she was too young to think for herself. Now that she was an adult, I wanted her to decide consciously which attitudes and assumptions made sense to her.

I also felt it was important for her to know the theories on which I based my approach to her problems. I told her that my work was based on a positive attitude about the human spirit, a belief that work and improvement are natural for the human body and mind, and that problems such as procrastination usually come about from suppression of that drive. I asked Clare to keep track of when and why she procrastinated for a few days to make her aware of when the old views were most likely to lead her into negative patterns.

From the entries in her log, Clare made a list of her most frequent negative self-statements. From these we developed positive challenges to replace them and to redirect her focus toward the task at hand, rather than to questions of her ability or worth. With the use of the Now Habit system, Clare got beyond her image of herself as a procrastinator.

She was able to focus on her accomplishments, her strengths, her innate drive for quality work, her intellectual curiosity, and her desire to improve whatever situation she was in.

Having become her own source of approval, Clare grew less dependent on external judgments of her worth and was able to face work without procrastinating. She had unlearned her need to procrastinate and could now start thinking, feeling, and acting like a producer. 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. The main reason we learn any habit, as Drs.

Frederick Kanfer and Jeanne Phillips tell us in Learning Foundations of Behavior Therapy, is that even a seemingly counterproductive habit like procrastination is immediately followed by some reward. Procrastination reduces tension by taking us away from something we view as painful or threatening.

The more painful work is for you, the more you will try to seek relief through avoidance or through involvement in more pleasurable activities.

The more you feel that endless work deprives you of the pleasure of leisure time, the more you will avoid work. In a sense we become addicted to using procrastination as a way to temporarily reduce the anxiety associated with certain tasks. If the work we thought we had to do later proves to be unnecessary, we have a justification and a double reward for procrastinating.

Generally we are taught that procrastination is the problem, rather than a symptom of other problems. This diagnosis, instead of directing your efforts toward ending the cycle of pressure, fear, and procrastination, unfortunately makes matters worse by blaming you for choosing such an awful habit.

Just do it. If you believe that a judgment of your work is a judgment of yourself, then perfectionism, self-criticism, and procrastination are necessary forms of protection. Observing your hesitation to start or complete a project, supervisors and family members—often with good intentions—add encouragement, pressure, and threats to get you moving. As conflict builds between your internal fears of failure or imperfection and the external demands of others, you seek relief through procrastination.

Procrastination does not start the pattern. From the perspective of the Now Habit, procrastination follows perfectionistic or overwhelming demands and a fear that even minor mistakes will lead to devastating criticism and failure. We can become addicted to the rewards of procrastination, learning to use it in three main ways: 1. As we consider in more depth these major reasons for procrastinating, notice which ones reveal the underlying causes of your own procrastination patterns.

Procrastination Can Express Resentment You can use procrastination to get even with powerful authorities who place you in situations where your alternatives all seem negative. Pay the bills or go to jail, give up your vacation or lose your job. Procrastination in such situations reflects your resentment at the authority who placed you in this no- win dilemma. You feel like a victim whose life is controlled by others who make the rules. I have to have the presentation ready by Friday.

If I were God there would be no parking tickets. But by procrastinating, you temporarily, secretly dethrone this authority.

You can resist by dragging your feet and giving a halfhearted effort. If you are in a one- down position—a student, a subordinate, a private in the army—procrastination may be the safest way to exercise some power and control over your life. Bedridden patients, who appear totally helpless in comparison with the authority of the hospital staff, are seldom given opportunities to exercise control in their lives. Larry, a fifty-five-year-old production supervisor in a company that produces CDs, used procrastination to balance the inequities he saw between himself and his manager.

He had been passed over for promotion several times. Over the years Larry had grown bitter about the younger people who were being promoted while he seemed destined to stay at the same level.

Without being totally aware of what he was doing, Larry began to ignore requests from Bill for reports and accounts. Procrastination and laziness seemed to be the causes of his problems. But they were only surface attempts at coping with deep resentment and hurt. Larry felt powerless and stuck—too old to look for another job, he had to stick it out without ever saying anything about how he felt about the unfairness.

Self-empowerment and stopping the victim role would be the hardest parts of applying the Now Habit tools for Larry. This was still his job, and he believed in his ability to do it well— in fact, better than any other employee. In an attempt to change the direction of his counterproductive struggle, Larry began to apply effective goal-setting, acknowledging where he was in the company rather than holding on to the fantasy of where he should be.

It was difficult for Larry to admit that Bill was in charge and could affect his job; but denying this fact had kept him too long in a fatiguing and unpleasant struggle. The manager now considers Larry one of his most trusted employees, and Larry feels powerful in effecting a change in his work environment and his own feelings. His procrastination is no longer a problem because the underlying resentment and powerlessness have been removed. Certainly others are frequently in positions of power to affect you and your job, and they might even try to judge your work or your skills.

But they can never make you into a victim or a procrastinator. Only you can do that. Procrastination Is Often Used Against Fear of Failure If you maintain extremely high standards for your performance and are critical of your mistakes, you will need to defend yourself from risky projects where the chances of failure are high.

Perfectionism and self-criticism are, in fact, the chief causes of fear of failure. All of us at some time in our lives fail to achieve some of our goals, and that can be very disappointing and quite painful. But a failure to a perfectionist is like a small cut to a hemophiliac.

The need to procrastinate as a protection against criticism and failure is particularly strong for those who feel they have to succeed at one specific goal, seeing no acceptable alternatives. Those who gain their sense of identity from many areas are more resilient when failing in any one area.

For example, a professional tennis player is more likely to be upset by losing a match than is an amateur player for whom tennis is only one of many activities in the week. This has been borne out in studies by Yale psychologist Patricia W. You need some form of escape to relieve the anxiety and to disengage your self-esteem from how well you do at this game of tennis, this exam, or this job. In such a predicament, procrastination can serve as a delaying action and as a way of getting you past your perfectionism.

If you delay starting your work, you cannot do your best and so any criticism or failure will not be a judgment of the real you or your best effort.

If you delay making a decision, the decision will be made for you and you will not have to take responsibility if something goes wrong. Whether it was a piano recital, an exam, a job interview, or a presentation at a meeting, Elaine died a thousand deaths. The mere thought of even a minor error caused her hours, often days, of panic and anxiety.

Elaine was raised in a family of intense, high-energy, high achievers. Everywhere she looked on her family tree she saw alphabet soup: M. She had internalized their well-intended pressure to mean she had to be perfect, to never make a mistake. And this perfectionism was actually causing her to freeze at crucial moments and to ultimately avoid, through procrastination, any situation in which her performance might be evaluated.

When I first asked Elaine about her sense of innate worth, she was dumbfounded. To avoid procrastination, she would need to create a contract with herself that whenever she made a mistake, she would remind herself of her worth, quickly forgive herself for not being perfect, and rapidly start over. In other words, Elaine learned to accept herself as being perfectly human. When success in our career causes conflict in our relationships, procrastination can serve as an attempt to maintain contact with two worlds that seem diametrically opposed.

Being unwilling to fully choose one over the other, we attempt to walk a middle ground by spending time with friends— sometimes resentfully—while procrastinating on work and suppressing the drive for success. In one of its more insidious forms, fear of success can express itself through unconscious self-defeating behavior.

The drive for success involves setting a goal, making it a high priority, and then investing time and energy toward its achievement. As the demands on your time and attention become greater, friends and family may come to resent your ambitions and your success. They may see your high-priority projects as indications that you care less for them and that their relationship with you is threatened.

Working through tests quickly and easily in grammar school did not endear Dorothy to her schoolmates. Ambivalence and procrastination in doing her homework were the first signs that Dorothy was beginning to hold back for the sake of being popular. While Dorothy could never openly sabotage her performance, she did procrastinate in an attempt to avoid the hurt of being ostracized for her success.

By the time she reached adulthood, Dorothy had learned that success had its disadvantages. From her earliest experiences she had learned to fear competition, not because she could lose, but because she could win so easily.

Being bright and athletic, oddly enough, made it very difficult for Dorothy to maintain friendships in grammar school and high school. College was different for her, however. Here she was more readily accepted. There were students who could compete at her level and some who even challenged her to test her limits.

However, Dorothy found herself in the same class as her new boyfriend. This made her very anxious. She was leery of endangering her new friendship with Paul. Luckily, Dorothy had a professor and a boyfriend who were willing to support her success. She had to learn to trust in the true friendship of those interested in her advancement, even if others would turn away out of jealousy. Dorothy had to learn to make the difficult choice between whole-hearted effort, with its probability of success, or the popularity offered by those who required her to be less successful.

She learned that procrastination had become a convenient way of remaining ambivalent about this decision. Once Dorothy began facing the possible and the imagined consequences of success, she was able to make rapid decisions about her work and no longer needed procrastination.

Perhaps a more common fear of success results when we know that completing a particular project will be a mixed blessing, leading to both gains and losses. In business and in school, stagnation can develop when one completes a phase of career or education. There is a reluctance to leave what is familiar for the unknown, a reluctance to leave one level that has been mastered for a promotion into a new area where one must begin again the awkward and risky steps of the novice. It had been difficult for John to leave the comfort of the college campus for the so-called cold, cruel world.

Upon graduating he quickly found a new home in a firm that treated him like one of the family. Within two years, however, John had learned everything he could in this small accounting firm. The job had become routine for him, and executive headhunters were making him tempting offers from large, competitive companies with challenging jobs.

John was terrified of leaving another comfortable home for a job where he might feel like a small fish in a big pond. He coped with his fear of success by obsessive list-making of pros and cons that kept him procrastinating on a decision for two more years. John needed to start with a real choice and with full responsibility for his decision. He also needed to know that if he failed, or even just had some difficulty with his new job, he would not criticize himself harshly for making a mistake.

His demand on himself for perfection left little room for taking reasonable risks and bouncing back from unexpected difficulties. Delayed Fear of Failure. If you have been doing well, it is very likely that higher and higher expectations will be set for you. It takes the fun out of winning.

The chain of reasoning goes like this: you work hard and long for a very difficult goal, such as pole-vaulting sixteen feet. You barely make the jump, but somehow you succeed. With each successful jump it becomes more and more difficult to face the bar knowing the rewards are fleeting, the expectations for better performances are ever mounting, and the chances of failure are increasing. The higher you go the more competitive it becomes—the greater the likelihood that you could fail.

Success raises the anxiety that still more is going to be expected in the future. This pattern is often seen in movie and sports celebrities who burn out or who turn to drugs in an attempt to sustain superstar productivity. Resistance to the demands of success is often mixed with delayed fear of failure. Having achieved success, you would like to rest, but the crowd, the family, and the cost of your elevated lifestyle continually demand that you keep working hard. Your motivation had dried up.

At this point, you need more efficient ways of working, and you need the cooperation of every part of you. Procrastination has been learned, and it can be unlearned. Therefore, to gain control over procrastination, you need to develop alternative tools for coping with your fears, to make work less painful and less depriving. The Now Habit will give you the tools to overcome procrastination by making work more enjoyable and making the quality and pleasure of your leisure time greater than you could ever achieve by procrastinating.

You can use your awareness of negative patterns to redirect your energy toward forming positive habits. Identifying how you go about doing anything is essential to improving your performance. Once you identify specific negative behaviors you can actually use their onset to redirect your energy toward your goals. I will teach you to become aware of how and when you procrastinate. Just observe yourself objectively, like an anthropologist who records the behavior and rituals of a foreign culture without making judgments.

For now, just concentrate on becoming aware of your current behavior patterns. Observe where your time is going. And note how that differs from those times when you are busy but producing nothing. Difficulties in gauging how much time it takes to complete a project, to travel across town, or to make it to a meeting on time are often part of procrastination. Realistic time management and a structure for focusing on commitments are necessary tools for making the transformation from procrastination to productivity.

If you find yourself chronically late, overwhelmed with details, surprised by deadlines, procrastinating on dozens of projects, and with insufficient time for recreation and relationships, you have a time- management problem. There are many theories about why humans have difficulty managing their time. But the difficulties remain a fact for most of us, regardless of the theory.