Author
Neil Fiore
The psychologist who diagnosed procrastination as fear, not laziness, and prescribed thirty minutes and guilt-free play.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
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 most later books on the subject.
He has also written Awaken Your Strongest Self, on the inner critic, and The Road Back to Health, drawn from his own recovery from cancer in the 1970s, which he has described as the experience behind his interest in how people cope.
The signature
Fiore writes like a clinician who likes his patients: precise about the mechanism, gentle about the person, and practical to the point of giving you a timer. His signature is the reversal, rest scheduled first and work recorded after, and the insistence that self-criticism is a cause of procrastination rather than its cure.