Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Authors Copyright Page Thank you for buying this St. Martin’s Press ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on Petr Ludwig, click here. For email updates on Adela Schicker, click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something has meaning, regardless of how it turns out. —V. Havel Author’s Preface Approximately ten years ago, I was convinced my life was over. During playing sports, my brain had unexpectedly malfunctioned, resulting in a medical condition where the right side of my body was completely paralyzed. I was overcome by fear and a feeling of powerlessness, yet at the same time I felt an eerie sense of peace. As I lay in bed, my entire life flashed before my eyes. At one point, it seemed as if I was travelling down a tunnel towards a light: it was just like in the movies. I began summing up my life, thinking about my failures and accomplishments. I slowly came to grips with the fact that I was dying. But fortunately, as it turned out, I had been mistaken. A few days later, everything was slowly getting back to normal, luckily without any sign of long- term harm; I had survived a close encounter with death. It was the most powerful experience I have ever had in my life. Later, so that I would never forget that moment, I jotted down the following thought to myself: When I set off fulfilling this resolution, I discovered that I would have to defeat a very fierce enemy: procrastination. So, a few friends and I decided to get to the bottom of why we tended to put things off and why we were so indecisive and ineffective. We soon discovered that a large number of scientific studies had been conducted on these very same issues in recent years. Based on these studies, we put together a practical toolkit for fighting procrastination. Once we realized that these methods worked for us, we decided that it would be beneficial to share them with as many people as possible. We began offering training courses for the public as well as lectures for university students. Helping other people better utilize their time and potential brought meaning to our lives. I was inspired to create even better tools for fighting procrastination through my consulting practice. Over the course of years, I visited a large number of companies around the globe. I had the opportunity to consult with their executives about how to motivate workers and how to increase employee effectiveness and happiness at work. In the past decade, tens of thousand people have attended our training courses. Based on clients’ experiences and their feedback, we began to improve our tools into their present form. At some point my future publisher approached me and asked if I wanted to write a book. “What a great challenge,” was my first thought; it also seemed like an exceptional way to further test the methods I teach. But would I procrastinate or not procrastinate when it actually came to writing a book about procrastination? Since I am an extrovert who is used to working with people—I teach and provide counseling—writing this book became one of the greatest challenges of my life. In order not to put off writing, a typically introverted activity and therefore not something I was used to doing, I had to deploy all my anti- procrastination weapons at full strength. Since you are holding this book in your hands, it means I was successful. I hope you enjoy reading it, and I wish you all the best in your fight against procrastination. You will gradually succeed; I am sure of it. Petr Ludwig