Neil Fiore

Neil Fiore is a psychologist who worked for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, counselling students and staff, and later in private practice, where the people who could not start became the centre of his work.

The Now Habit, first published in 1988 and revised in 2007, set out what he had found: that procrastinators worked hard at anything that did not frighten them, and that the cure was to make the fear irrelevant to starting. Its Unschedule, thirty-minute start and reverse calendar have been borrowed by many later writers on the subject.

He has also written Awaken Your Strongest Self, on the inner critic, and a book on the emotional side of serious illness, first published as The Road Back to Health and later as Coping with the Emotional Impact of Cancer, drawn from his own cancer diagnosis at 32.