Alex Fayle wrote an ebook, How to Cure Procrastination and Start Being Happy, as an incentive to get readers to sign up for his newsletter. He certainly has the credentials to talk seriously about solving procrastination — among other achievements, Fayle is a past president of Professional Organizers in Canada. But overall, the ebook needs a little more pep and a little more focus to really shine. It’s also worth noting that Fayle refers to his ebook by its subtitle, 84 Tips for Curing Someday Syndrome, in various spots on his website.

The Content

When I say focus, I’m talking about audience. Fayle’s audience seems to be simply procrastinators — which is overly broad. In following that audience, he’s written a series of ‘tips’ that wind up reading more like a list of aphorisms. Take a look at his sixtieth tip:

Growth doesn’t happen all at once – expect backsliding and accept it.

A shallow audience would offer the opportunity to list actionable tips: Fayle has some good material here, but it’s frustrating because I can’t immediately leap to taking a step on most of his tips. All I can do is say, “Hmm, that’s deep,” and move on.

Action is crucial when an ebook is meant to generate traffic for your site. While brilliant thoughts are all well and good, the fact is that most people will not actually connect things to think about with coming back to the site. With an actionable tip, however, you can direct readers to resources on your site, as well as keep them engaged with the ebook.

The inclusion of a page explaining how to use the tips helps, although the suggestion to “spend the rest of the day viewing your life through the filter of the message in the tip,” could still be made more actionable. The how-to is absolutely necessary in light of Fayle’s approach to design.

The Design

The concept behind the design of How to Cure Procrastination and Start Being Happy is excellent: the ebook is laid out as normal pages, with lines between each of the tips. It’s meant to be printed out and sliced up, so you can really focus on one tip each day. At a glance, though, I would be that the ebook was laid out in Microsoft Word. I think that there’s still room for growth with this design, but it’s a great start. A few design elements, a cover — even a picture or two — could make a pretty significant upgrade.

Download the Ebook

You can get How to Cure Procrastination and Start Being Happy for free from Someday Syndrome. To do so, you’ll need to sign up for the site’s newsletter — the ebook is a free bonus, which you’ll get a link to once you’ve confirmed your subscription. This model is increasingly common, of course.