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I've written a new book. It's called After You Don't Show Up, and it's out now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
It's quarter to four in the morning. I'm lying in bed fully dressed, and my thesis is exactly where it was when I woke up eighteen hours earlier.
I'd promised myself I'd start that morning. Then after lunch. Then right after a shower. Then once I'd eaten. By late evening the promises had stopped being plans and become something closer to a nervous tic, a thing I said to myself every hour or so to make the last hour bearable. And then, at 3:45 in the morning, with total sincerity, I heard myself think: right, I'll definitely start at four.
Fifteen minutes away. That was the plan.
I want to be clear that I wasn't being flippant. I meant it. That's the part I find hard to explain to people who don't have this problem; the promises aren't lies you tell yourself cynically. You believe every one of them, right up until it passes.
AFTER YOU DON'T SHOW UP
BOOK
At the time I drew the obvious conclusion, which was that I was lazy. It seemed the only explanation left. I'd tried the systems, the routines, the workspace reorganisations, the diets, the rewards, the punishments, the hundreds of hours of productivity videos. Each one worked for a day or two and then stopped. When every method fails, you stop suspecting the methods.
I was wrong, and it took me an extremely long time to see how.
Look again at that day. Twelve promises broken. But notice what each promise was doing. It wasn't helping, clearly. It was managing a feeling. I'd miss a start time, feel that small unpleasant drop of guilt, and within about ten seconds I'd have patched it over with a new commitment. And the relief was immediate. The possibility of redemption was back on the table. The day wasn't a write-off yet.
That's the mechanism. Not the missing. The patching.
Because here's what a rescue promise actually teaches you, repeated a few thousand times: a start time doesn't mean anything. There's always another one coming. And once that's true, no start time can ever carry any weight, which is precisely why you don't show up for them.
Which brings me to the method in my book, After You Don't Show Up. It's three steps...
1. Pick a specific start time.
2. If you show up, good. If you don't, that's it for the day... you lose the option of doing it for the day.
3. Then go and enjoy the rest of your day.
I know exactly how that reads. Everyone's first reaction is that it's letting yourself off the hook, and it took me a while to accept it too. But consider what you're actually giving up. You're giving up the option of doing the thing at a moment you didn't choose, on the back of a promise you've broken eleven times already.
What you get in exchange is a start time that finally means something, because there's something real behind it. And an evening that's genuinely yours, because the day is settled either way.
That last part is the bit people don't anticipate. Readers come to this wanting to get more done, and they do. But months later, what they tell me about is almost never the productivity. It's the rest that finally felt like rest. The weekend that wasn't shadowed. The knowing that when they say they'll do something there's a very good chance they will, and that if they don't, they know exactly how they'll handle it. That reaches a long way past work.
The book is short on purpose. One idea, examined honestly, with first-person accounts from people who've used it, including several who couldn't stomach it at first. It asks you to test it for five days, which I think is a fair trade for a problem you may have been carrying for twenty years.