Use the Unschedule to Overcome Procrastination

“Keep starting. Finishing will take care of itself.”       - Neil Fiore

Procrastination is a problem for many of us. There is a lot of work on our plate, but something is keeping us from starting. Maybe it’s the fear of failure, of being judged by others, maybe it’s perfectionism and criticizing ourselves too much. The work we have to do seems so overwhelming we rather look for something else to do to forget about it. The feeling we “have to” do things doesn’t make it easier.

The Now Habit, a book by Neil Fiore, provides helpful tools to overcome procrastination, and enjoying leisure time without feeling guilty about not doing anything. One of those tools is the “unschedule”. What is the unschedule and how can we use it to overcome procrastination? Read more

Book Review: The War Of Art

Sometimes a book can give you just what you need at that specific moment. It’s great to read a book and discover how you seem to recognize a lot of the information. It’s like you already know it but you never really thought about it. For me, Steven Pressfield accomplishes this with his book The War of Art - Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.

Clear And Concise
It’s a small book containing a lot of short and easy-to-read chapters. This is good. The book is about winning your inner creative battles, and it’s good to see the writer doesn’t need 500 pages to explain this. It’s about starting, so the sooner we are done reading the book, the sooner we can start. Start what? Start creating!

There are negative forces inside each one of us that holds us back from doing what we know we should be doing. Pressfield calls those forces Resistance. Read more

Use Parkinson’s Law To Get Productive

I read about Parkinson’s Law in Tim Ferris‘ Four Hour Work Week, and I recently experienced again how this ‘law’ works. It all about deadlines, and avoiding procrastination. Do you know the moment you finish a job just before the deadline and you find out that it didn’t take as much effort as you thought it would beforehand?

The definition Wikipedia gives for Parkinson’s Law is: “[...] a humorous observation (and not a scientific law) that states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
This basically means that the same job gets bigger and bigger the more time is available to complete it. So because there is more time available it also seems like you need more time for it.

So how can you use Parkinson’s Law? Read more

Make Sure You Have A Deadline

Apart from the work you do for your studies or job, you might have plans for a project on the side. Maybe you want to learn how to surf, play guitar or organize an event. But there is a lot of work to be done and you don’t want to spend every night working too. So your new plans seem less important, you might even forget about them at times, and you keep on postponing the required actions to make it work.

An example could be John, a graduate student who wants to start a band. He plays the bass and sings, and he already knows what kind of music he wants to play, and that he wants to take it serious and perform live on stage a lot. John is dreaming about this for a long time, and he doesn’t want to wait any longer.

He already started to write some songs, but Read more