
The Now Habit (2015) - Tomte
https://www.2uo.de/the-now-habit
======
hevi_jos
One of the most important books I ever read, changed my life.

Procastination is created by anxiety emotion, if you want to get deeper it is
easily explained in this animated movie:

[https://archive.org/details/understandingstressesandstrains](https://archive.org/details/understandingstressesandstrains)

Anxiety makes impossible for you to concentrate as it makes your attention to
focus on the thread, like an herbivorous animal will stop eating for focusing
on the lion.

It is an emotional block equivalent to pushing the brakes while the
accelerator pedal. A car that could go to 200, will only go to 10. If you push
harder, you break the car. If you know what procastination is,and know how not
to block, you can at 200, and enjoy it!!

Anxiety is extremely useful for humans, this baby has none of it. Without the
glass wall it will be a good idea that parents have it.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSlrDi9So9w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSlrDi9So9w)

Nowadays, the more relevant cause of anxiety is other humans, as we have
exterminated most of the other predators, in circumstances like war. E.g
Recently in Syria, you(or your family members) could die every single day,
beheaded after being raped.

It in interesting that in the modern world, in peace, when most problems are
not death threats, we increase the sensibility of anxiety making abstract
things like not entering University, losing a job or a partner or just being
humiliated while giving a speech or rejection, as "live threatening", causing
procastination.

~~~
johnchristopher
> we increase the sensibility of anxiety making abstract things like not
> entering University, losing a job or a partner or just being humiliated
> while giving a speech or rejection, as "live threatening", causing
> procastination.

Yes and no. We are social creatures. Being rejected or not recognized by our
peers used to be life threatening and we are still wired that way. In some
ways it is still life threatening.

------
akrakesh
There are many valid points in the summary but it seems to consider only
procrastination caused by perfectionism, while it's just one of the causes.
Procrastination is usually the result of difficulties in regulating emotions.
When we face a task we don't want to do we feel an assortment of negative
emotions—we may feel bored, resentful, frustrated, anxious or guilty. We put
off the task to avoid these negative emotions.

Techiniques such as Unschedule are at best just hacks that are effective only
in the short term. The only way to permanently beat procrastination is to
persist on work you don't want to do until it becomes a habit. Along with the
usual techniques of splitting a task into sub-tasks, removing distractions,
starting immediately, etc., making yourself accountable goes a long way in
crushing procrastination. Read more at
[https://procrushtinate.com/guide.html](https://procrushtinate.com/guide.html)

~~~
hevi_jos
Persisting on working on something you don't want to do is extremely
dangerous.

Thanks to Paulov conditioning you will be anchoring a bad experience to
something you want to do. Linking a bad memory to work and reinforcing it with
habit. Not good.

You can beat very weak procrastination with it. If the procrastination is
serious(anxiety is great), you will be creating a strong trauma linked to
work.

In fact you are probably referring to not crushing procrastination but
reinforcing it increasing anxiety and going from avoidance(flight) to fight.
This works(badly) and is the usual method of normal people for dealing with
it, using deadlines(like frequent exams) as the tools that make them increase
their anxiety.

A friend of mine had a very serious accident of his bike. He can't get on one
without shaking and avoids them because of the trauma.

You will be doing the same thing with work, like the rat anticipating the
electric shock, you will be anticipating the bad experience just by sitting
down on your desk.

The anxiety those memories create will add procrastination to the already high
level making impossible for you to work.

While you will be "in place", "at work", your thoughts will escape with
fantasies evading work because the high levels of anxiety. Your productivity
will be very bad.

Your linked page states that procrastination is voluntary, conscious, it is
not.

Not procrastinating is in fact extremely easy, once you know how.

~~~
Infernal
Could you continue with the knowledge of how to easily not procrastinate?

------
fprog
I read this book in 2016 as I was trying to overcome a number of bad personal
and professional habits and make other positive changes in my life. I highly
recommend it.

I think there’s an argument to be made that your personality is made of
habits. If you’re trying to change how you act or think in some domain of
life, but you sometimes feel locked in a stalemate with your own mind, do
consider taking a look at Fiore’s book.

If you’re familiar with Thinking: Fast and Slow, you could consider this book
a how-to guide for using System 2 to change System 1 processes.

~~~
marviel
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

~~~
branweb
Will Durant? I've always liked that quote.

------
myth2018
I finished the reading some months ago and highly recommend it as well. I had
always been a fairly productive person on my work and academic activities, but
always wanted to work on some more meaningful projects, and to build a company
around some product ideas. My excuse used to be that I didn't have enough
time. Suddenly I saw myself with plenty of free time and, to my surprise, I
got stuck after a couple of months. I wasted almost two years trying to
understand what was happening to me, because I had the time and didn't manage
to make any progress that seemed compatible with the plenty of available time.
I almost lost my Masters deadlines (finished it only 1 week before the
deadline expired) and all those delays are costing a lot of money to the
company I founded. But the book helped me to understand that I was feeling
overwhelmed about the gigantic ideas and the unrealistic deadlines I was
imposing to myself. I wasn't prepared to be my own boss, at all.

Although I haven't become a super productive person yet (lol), I started to
think of strategies that suits my own style and I'm putting them on practice
at small steps. It seems to be working.

Besides, the chapter regarding dealing with procrastinators is a must read for
team managers in general.

------
reidrac
That's an excellent summary of the book.

Someone bought me this a a gift, I can't remember who. I read it and, although
it has some interesting ideas, it felt like there was no enough content and it
repeated the same points over and over to fill space.

I didn't like how it was written. This is the only self-help book I have read,
so I don't know if it is following some conventions of the genre (is this a
genre?).

Overall I liked some of the core ideas, but not reading the book.

~~~
jskulski
Sounds similar to the ones I've read. Good points, little else, repeated with
anecdotes to substantiate the points. I like summaries of these.

------
CharlesW
I can also recommend "The War of Art" to people who encounter internal
resistance when trying to get things done.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007A4SDCG/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007A4SDCG/)

------
el_don_almighty
These are really practical. There was a recent post about how J.K. Rowling
pushed through the same forces and wrote her books. If only I would start on
10% of the great ideas that bumble around my head like flotsam.

~~~
hevi_jos
You should never push against it. You will be fighting against yourself, if
you push strong, so do your opponent.

Like with cancer, young people with cancer worsens much faster that old
people, because cancer is stronger, your cells are stronger, because cancer if
fighting against your own cells and body.

You should understand what creates anxiety, so you do not feel anxiety, so you
do not procastinate.

My advice will be for you to take a notebook and start writing down what you
feel and the thoughts that created those feelings.

More than understanding, it is a routine, we are used to think some way in a
particular situation that makes us feeling some way, that loops again making
us thinking, and feeling...

You have to change your routines, slowly, but without stopping and you will be
able do materialize the great ideas you have in your mind.

------
dkarl
_The fear that the demands of you will rise after successfully finishing the
current job is irrational. You will still have some autonomy to make an
informed decision later. Don 't fret about it now._

I've been in that position with bad management where finishing a project
quickly would get you a look like, "Is that all you're going to do? I thought
I figured out how to make you productive, but I guess I have to try again."
With the wrong kind of management, finishing a project puts a cap on the
credit you get from it, and finishing a project quickly can create an
impression that you're getting nothing done. A three-week project is worth 50%
more than a two-week project, a system that requires constant patching in
production gives you a constant flow of achievement, etc. Good management with
strong technical chops will remember the systems you built that are humming
along problem-free. Good management with strong technical chops will not base
their estimations of difficulty entirely on how long you take to build
something and how much trouble it is afterwards. Good management will
appreciate you _not_ adding functionality of uncertain value to the codebase.
Bad management can make engineers reluctant to wrap up work too quickly lest
their work be perceived as lower quality than it should be, and engineers can
always find ways to gild the lily if that's what management demands.
Especially coming up towards review time, if you have no chance to add an
extra line to your accomplishments after completing your current project, it
is tempting to find a way to add an extra week to inflate your achievement —-
if that's how your management thinks about it.

The opposite problem (with the same kind of bad management) happens when they
ask you to incrementally add more and more functionality to a system, but
because they keeping using the same label for each additional increment of
work, they end up feeling that you took forever to complete a single simple
project. The worst form of this is when they don't let you deploy the system.
A few years back I spent the bulk of two quarters adding new capabilities to a
system that was never used. (It was deployed in production, but for business
reasons related to the customer it was built for, it was idle. Another
maddening factor was that I was building on a codebase that had been half-
completed by two developers who were writing Scala for the first time, but
that's a different story.) Good management would apologize for wasting my
time. Bad management blamed me despite their ongoing direction to continue the
work. (When you hear someone say they want developers who are
"entrepreneurial," that means you're supposed to go outside the process to
talk to product teams, because management is going to get the business
priorities wrong, and it's your ass on the line when they do.)

Bottom line, when you find a great manager, do your sanity a favor and stick
with them as long as you can! There's enough wrong with you already without
your manager compounding the problem.

~~~
gronne
Unfortunately most people will never encounter such a manager.

~~~
eitland
If anyone is in Norway and is good with Java or C# I might be able to get you
an interview somewhere that has good managers. Email should be in my profile.

~~~
gronne
pay > 100k €?

~~~
eitland
Probably not. I didn't think an engineer here can expect cross 100k€ without
either 1.) running his own consulting business well or 2.) having huge
performance bonus and perform well or 3.) cross into management or sales.

Do you know many engineers in Norway who earn > 100k €? I was not able to
figure out from your profile if you know Norway or not.

~~~
gronne
I know Norway - was just curious. Your explanation matched my expectations. As
most places: Once you hit the ceiling the only way forward is sales.

------
andyidsinga
this really resonated:

>Imagine the concrete goal and the rewards. Let it pull you towards it. Don't
think about the long way till the goal, think about the way you've already
behind yourself.

------
aus10yates
I am going to read this later

