The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play

Why it's worth it

Neil Fiore treats chronic procrastination as a symptom — of perfectionism, fear of failure, and a punishing relationship with work. His Unschedule puts play on the calendar first and fits the work around it, which is stranger and more effective than it sounds.

Fiore writes like someone who has procrastinated badly himself, and that changes everything about how the advice lands. There's no scolding. He describes the loop — you dread the task, you avoid it, you feel guilty, the dread grows — and once you see it written out, it stops feeling like a personal defect and starts looking like a mechanism you can interrupt.

The Unschedule is the reason to buy this one. You block out sleep, meals, exercise and genuinely guilt-free fun first, then record work only after you've done a solid uninterrupted stretch of it. It inverts every planner you've ever used. It also removes the thing that keeps chronic procrastinators stuck: the sense that the whole day is theoretically work, so no moment is ever really free.

From our review of 8 books on procrastination and focus, by David Sinclair, Managing Editor

What we like

• +Fiore writes like someone who has procrastinated badly himself, and that changes everything about how the advice lands
• +The Unschedule is the reason to buy this one
• +Readers who've tried and abandoned the system books tend to report this as the one that finally moved something

What to know

• –It's cluttered. Fiore pads the practical chapters with client profiles and case stories, and owners regularly say they wished…
• –The book is also older than the rest of the lineup and reads that way, with a self-help register that some people find dated