The starting system

Techniques for beating procrastination survive only if they have a shape that can be kept on a bad Tuesday, and the shape is a page with two halves. The daily half starts the night before: tomorrow's list written with the 'frog' marked (Brian Tracy's name for the most important task, the one you most want to put off) and the desk set up. In the morning come a short start ritual, a thirty-minute timer and the frog before email. During the day, anything that arrives goes into one inbox, and anything under two minutes is done at once, as David Allen advises. At night come a shutdown routine and rest taken without guilt. Work is recorded after the fact on Neil Fiore's Unschedule, a calendar on which rest is planned first and work is logged only once it has happened. The weekly half is one hour: empty the inbox, give every project a next action, check the deadlines and count the week's starts. What holds it together is Fiore's diagnosis that procrastination is fear, not laziness; every line makes the fear irrelevant to the first step. The last rule is also Fiore's: forgiveness. Self-criticism after a slip is the anxiety that causes the next one, so write 'missed' without an adjective and make the next day's first step a two-minute one.