The Now Habit | Hacker News Reader

The Now Habit

2uo.de

107 pointsTomte16 comments

Open articleView on HN

One of my favorite books.

Particularly the example with a person who should walk on a beam between two skyskrapers.

IIRC it goes like this:

- A beam lies ok the ground. Everyone can dare to walk on it.

- Now the beam gets lifted up between two skyscrapers.

- Now almost no sane person would walk across it.

- If it starts burning in the building, at some point one will cross, if necessary by sitting and sliding yourself across: embarrassing but better than the alternative.

- If however there was a reliable safety net right underneath the beam a good number of us would enjoy crossing between even if there was no fire.

I think this example speaks volumes about how to get oneself and others to get past certain fears by making sure there are known, reliable safety nets.

FWIW: I found out a while ago that the example with the beam (or rather a plank) probably comes from Coué. (There's a reference here: https://medium.com/s/radical-spirits/the-man-who-helped-the-...)

There's a huge difference between walking on a beam with a tangible, solid safety net like the ground and closing your eyes and repeating Coué's mantra while walking on a beam between two skyscrapers.

One of them has a safety net, the other hasn't [0].

[0] plus the whole thing about high winds and the rebound when walking on a beam not being supported by the ground but floating in the air.

I realize the article is mostly about the mantra, but I included it not because of that but because of the small reference to the example with the plank hidden in the middle :-)

The Now Habit really helped me let go of procrastination being my fault, and just seeing it as a systemic side effect of my approach. Brilliant book, on the order of GTD or the Effective Executive in terms of how true everything has held up over the years. Recommend reading it for anyone, any single tip from the book is likely to be worth your time.

However, the best for addressing procrastination for me was a coach. They really worked through things with me to give names to the bad habits I'd developed, and the tools to recognize emotions as they occurred. It reminds me a lot of the "noting" practice in meditation.

For example:

"foldering" - once, I decided that I needed to make folders and put all the documents I needed to create & review in various states (e.g. incubation, pre-review writing, published for review, reviewed, complete, etc). This is not effective, as what I needed to know was "what should I work on today" or "how aligned are my projects with the business". Instead I was making sure all my documents and folders were right. Now whenever I do this over-organization-as-avoidance, the word "foldering" occurs to me before I even notice I'm doing it.

One of the hardest things is that the best coaches come through recommendations from others. If you don't have a social or professional network where people have worked with coaches, it can become very hard to find a good one. Many friends according to their instagrams are "coaches" now who have never been near a stadium.

Effective Executive. I gifted this book to the executives at work. Recommended.

Loved reading this book ~20 years ago, still remember/apply the core principals.

> 3. You fear that you cannot meet the expectations you have imposed on yourself. You cannot act.

This is a means by which we may double bind ourselves into non-action.

Good book, but why ignore a plethora of problems like ADHD that might have something to do with the chronic procrastination in a person's life? I just can't go past the first few pages of the book without seeing the fact that most of the symptoms that the author is describing of chronic procrastinators are in fact the exact symptoms that are used to diagnose ADHD in adults. What am I missing?

I assume medicine and therapy combined with good systems is more effective than just medicine and therapy.

“Don’t get overwhelmed.” Well sure. Might as well say “just stop procrastinating.”

I take your point, but it's not quite that bad.

Getting overwhelmed, it turns out, is a big part of why we procrastinate. Looking at why you get overwhelmed is somewhat more likely to result in actionable information that is not simply shame based. You can't white knuckle your way out of a lifetime habit like that. You might have when you were 9, but the 'damage' piles up.

When I encounter that overwhelm, I try to break every single step down.

“You’ll stand up off the couch, you’ll grab a trash bag, you’ll toss in trash, you’ll move dishes to sink, etc”

That has helped me a little with the frequent procrastination paralysis I get when some necessary task feels impossible.

The Now Habit is an entire book about how to identify problems, form strategies to deal with them, and implement them in your life.

Think of "Don't get overwhelmed" as the name of a chapter in a book, not a solution contained within a single sentence.

Well, stop.

Discussion from last time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18769188

These points seem more applicable to me than the median productivity content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com