I have experiences that I would say match tcheasdfjkl’s description, but I attribute them to anxious ugh-field avoidance of the actual tasks, where “but maybe I need to think about this more” acts as an ambiguously bogus retroactive justification that takes more energy to refute than any completely unrelated justification and therefore winds up stickier. I am in turn curious whether tcheasdfjkl’s experiences also match this description or are different.
Sometimes kind of! Though I wouldn’t say it’s “bogus” for me exactly, just that there tends to be a tradeoff between time spent planning/reflecting vs. time spent taking concrete actions, and I’m somewhat prone to a bias in favor of the former—but I do think most of the time when I do this kind of thinking I do find it useful, it just isn’t always the most useful thing I could be doing.
Also sometimes the stuff on my mind that I feel I Must think about is not actually related to the stuff I’m trying to concretely make progress on, but is separately useful to think about. Here too I don’t always think this type of reflection is the most useful thing for me to do right then, but it’s sometimes hard not to.
I have experiences that I would say match tcheasdfjkl’s description, but I attribute them to anxious ugh-field avoidance of the actual tasks, where “but maybe I need to think about this more” acts as an ambiguously bogus retroactive justification that takes more energy to refute than any completely unrelated justification and therefore winds up stickier. I am in turn curious whether tcheasdfjkl’s experiences also match this description or are different.
Sometimes kind of! Though I wouldn’t say it’s “bogus” for me exactly, just that there tends to be a tradeoff between time spent planning/reflecting vs. time spent taking concrete actions, and I’m somewhat prone to a bias in favor of the former—but I do think most of the time when I do this kind of thinking I do find it useful, it just isn’t always the most useful thing I could be doing.
Also sometimes the stuff on my mind that I feel I Must think about is not actually related to the stuff I’m trying to concretely make progress on, but is separately useful to think about. Here too I don’t always think this type of reflection is the most useful thing for me to do right then, but it’s sometimes hard not to.