Willpower

midafternoon cigarette break or chocolate binge, the after-work drink, the late-night bowl of ice cream while watching the same TV show in the same easy chair. Changing your routine makes it easier to break these habits. Take a different route to work. Go for a midafternoon stroll. Schedule a session at the gym after work. Eat ice cream only at the kitchen table, and switch to doing sit-ups during that TV show. Do your Web surfing on a different computer from the one where you work. To break a really entrenched bad habit like smoking, do it on vacation, when you’re far away from the people and places and events you associate with cigarettes.

The Power of Positive Procrastination
    Procrastination is usually a vice, but occasionally—very occasionally—there is such a thing as positive procrastination. In the previous chapter we discussed experiments showing that people tempted by chocolate managed to avoid it by telling themselves they’d eat it some other time—a postponement strategy that worked better than trying to deny themselves altogether. This “I’ll have it later” trick can work for other temptations, too. If a TV show is keeping you from getting back to work, record it and tell yourself you’ll finish watching it later. You might discover, once you’ve finished work and don’t need an excuse to procrastinate, that you don’t really want to watch the show after all. Vice delayed may turn out to be vice denied.
    A more dubious form of positive procrastination was identified by Robert Benchley, one of the deadline-challenged members of the Algonquin Round Table. (His colleague Dorothy Parker gave her editor at The New Yorker the all-time best excuse for an overdue piece: “Somebody was using the pencil.”) In a wry essay, Benchley explained how he could summon the discipline to read a scientific article about tropical fish, build a bookshelf, arrange books on said shelf, and write an answer to a friend’s letter that had been sitting in a pile on his desk for twenty years. All he had to do was draw up a to-do list for the week and put these tasks below his top priority—his job of writing an article.
    “The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” Benchley wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”
    Benchley recognized a phenomenon that Baumeister and Tice also documented in their term-paper study: Procrastinators typically avoid one task by doing something else, and rarely do they sit there doing nothing at all. But there’s a better way to exploit that tendency, as Raymond Chandler recognized.

The Nothing Alternative (and Other Tricks of Offense)
    Anthony Trollope’s writing regimen is one path to self-discipline, as we mentioned in chapter 5. But what if, unlike Trollope with his watch at his side, you’re incapable of producing 250 words every fifteen minutes? Fortunately, there’s another strategy for ordinary mortals, courtesy of Raymond Chandler, who was bewildered by writers who could churn out prose every day.
    Chandler had his own system for turning out The Big Sleep and other classic detective stories. “Me, I wait for inspiration,” he said, but he did it methodically every morning. He believed that a professional writer needed to set aside at least four hours a day for his job: “He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks.”
    This Nothing Alternative is a marvelously simple tool against procrastination for just about any kind of task. Although your work may not be as solitary and clearly defined as Chandler’s, you can still benefit by setting aside time to do one and only one thing. You might, for instance, resolve to start your day with ninety minutes devoted to your most important goal, with no interruptions from e-mail or phone calls, no side excursions anywhere on the Web. Just follow Chandler’s regimen:
    “Write or nothing. It’s the same principle as keeping order in a school. If you make the pupils behave, they will learn something just to keep from being bored. I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don’t have to write. b. you can’t do anything else. The rest comes of