Hillary Rettig

I’m the author of The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism, and Writer’s Block, one of Amazon’s top-selling productivity books. I help people increase their productivity in writing and other areas, and have taught productivity and time-management classes at the Mark Twain House and Museum, The Loft, Grub Street Writers, and many other top writing, business, educational, arts, and community organizations. The core of my work is the idea that procrastination, blocks, and other forms of underproductivity are symptoms of disempowerment.Disempowerment means you’re not missing anything you need to be productive: you’re only separated from, or have lost access to, that which you have–i.e., your strengths, skills, talents and energy.Laziness, lack of discipline, lack of commitment, and other supposed deficiencies are all symptoms of the disempowerment, not causes, so please don’t focus on them. (And don’t use them to negatively label yourself or anyone else!) All my work is devoted to helping people locate and remediate the disempowering forces in their work and life, including perfectionism, scarcity, time constraints, and ambivalence, so they can reclaim their joyful productivity.My articles have appeared in Psychology Today, Huffington Post, Future Buzz, Time Management Ninja, Tomorrow’s Professor, Authors Helping Authors, and numerous other publications; and I’ve been interviewed in Entrepreneur.com and elsewhere. Please visit my website vegan, free software advocate, and lover of life and dogs. I’m also a former foster mom of four teenage Sudanese refugees (a.k.a., “Lost Boys”), now all adult and living independently. And I’m a living kidney donor. I also have an abiding interest in social justice–my first book,
The Lifelong Activist
, is a self-help guide for progressive and radical activists–and it was from my activism that I gained insights on personal power that inform my current work.