REVIEW: "Procrastinator's New Year" by S. Jay Scott

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

At the beginning of 2016, the publishing house "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber" published the book "New Year of the Procrastinator. 23 habits that will help you overcome laziness and achieve results. " We figured out what the lazy people would find interesting in it.

Of course, every procrastinator has read at least a dozen articles with tips for dealing with yourself. I suspect that many of them did not go for the future. For example, I almost began to consider my laziness as a character trait, but this book made me reconsider my views.

Who is this book for

For those who again failed to change their lives from Monday. If you feel that you are not doing anything, although you are spinning like a squirrel in a wheel, if every day you rush about, choosing the most important from the very important, if failures unsettle you, if a to-do list makes you hug your knees and cry - this book is for you. …

About what

In his book, S. J. Scott suggests looking at procrastination from a new angle: as a bad habit.

Let's face it - our life is largely made up of routine habits. Some people prefer to follow habits that lead to self-improvement: setting goals, reading inspiring books, working on important projects, and ignoring distractions.

Others choose habits that lead to self-destruction: they work carelessly, spend their free time on TV, social media and idle chatter, eat junk food and blame others for their own failures.

SJ Scott "Procrastinator's New Year"

The author is convinced: you resort to procrastination every time you need to overcome a conflict with your daily routine, disrupt the usual course of things. Time after time, you look for excuses that boil down to seven "procrastinator excuses" (you'll recognize yourself in this part, I guarantee!)

Most of these publications simply offer you a list of helpful tips. Here you will find out why this or that specific strategy of combating procrastination works, what limiting belief it helps to eliminate, how you can immediately apply it in your own life.

After reading the book, you will have very detailed instructions on how to introduce new good habits into life. The Procrastinator's New Year is not a new life from Monday, but the slow but sure growth of a successful person, step by step, day after day. The author does not give you universal recipes, but suggests identifying his typical excuse and deciding which of the 23 ways he proposed would be convenient for you to get rid of it. You write the recipe yourself!

After reading the book, you will be able to:

1. Take on any assignment immediately, even if you're not in the mood.
2. Start your day with priority tasks.
3. Break down very complex projects into small tasks.
4. Finding motivation when you don't feel like working on difficult tasks.
5. Saying "no" to meaningless projects and requests, without offending your bosses, colleagues and friends.
6. Determine what is really important to you and ignore everything else.

When will the result be seen

Today. You can start changing yourself as soon as you open a book. Even if you only worked for 20 minutes that day, you will learn to understand that this short period of time is a building block of a new habit, and not a random episode in viewing social networks in the workplace.

When I started reading the book, I was a little scared. The main idea is clear right away: here you have one big bad habit, let's replace it with a set of small and useful ones. But knowing that it takes about 30 days to form a habit, it is easy to calculate that it will take two years to master all the proposed methods of combating procrastination.

But I calmed down very quickly: two years is not that much for the skills that will build you for the rest of your life. The author himself is convinced that there is no rush to change your life:

What's the hardest part? There is no way to use all the methods at the same time. If you try to squeeze in the work on them in one day, then you are in for a huge overload, followed by frustration and complete failure.

Building good habits is a marathon, not a sprint.

SJ Scott "Procrastinator's New Year"

Except for the 43-folder method, which my humanitarian brain introduced into a coma, the book is read very easily and quickly: no water and stories about supermen, only specific and understandable advice for living people who have finally decided to change something in their lives. Because the most important thing in changing oneself is the awareness of problems and the desire to solve them.

"New Year of the Procrastinator" is an excellent read and a wonderful gift for yourself to the lazy. You can start practicing from the first chapter.

“Procrastinator's New Year. 23 habits that will help you overcome laziness and achieve results , S. Jay Scott