How to avoid procrastination: I Want to Start a Business but I Never Actually Start: Preparing Is Not Progress.

Preparing feels almost exactly like progress. It produces work, it produces decisions, and it produces a folder that gets bigger every month. It does all of that without ever exposing you to the one thing that could go wrong, which is a person outside your head looking at what you made and saying no. The feeling of the two is so close that you've never had to notice the difference. That is not a character flaw. It's a very good trap, and you've been inside it for years.

From the introduction

There is also a legitimate case, and it deserves saying plainly. Sometimes the activity has no outside party because it cannot have one. You are learning something. Nobody issues a certificate of readiness for that, no reply exists that would end it, and no stranger can be asked to judge whether you know enough yet. Keep the activity if you want it and if it's doing something for you. Just stop filing it under preparation for a business, because nothing about it can ever be finished, and what that costs is the whole of the next chapter.

From chapter 5: Preparation and its stop condition

That is how the book looks at “how to avoid procrastination”: one idea at a time, with a step you can take right away. Of course, this is only one idea from the book. So, if this passage speaks to you, the full chapter goes further, and it ends with an exercise you can do the same evening.

In short, the book has 11 chapters, and each one ends with a practical exercise. Therefore, you can read it in order, or you can go straight to the part about “how to avoid procrastination”.

1. The gap between wanting and doing
2. The three-month window
3. What counts as started
4. The number that keeps moving
5. Preparation and its stop condition
6. The course that never ends
7. The licence you do not need
8. Why later always wins
9. Nobody chooses the day they start
10. The unfinished task
11. Fourteen days

Finally, you can get I Want to Start a Business but I Never Actually Start: Preparing Is Not Progress in the stores below. Because every title of this book shares the same text, you can simply pick the one you like best. Also, the book is available in 19 languages.

In addition, each title below highlights a different idea from the same book.

• Preparing Is Not Progress: I Want to Start a Business but I Never Actually Start
• I Never Actually Start: Preparing Is Not Progress
• I Want to Start a Business but I Never Actually Start: Why Preparing Feels Like Progress and Isn't

See all 43 titles. Go to the book page.