This happens to me all the time, and I find that banning myself from the semi-productive or unproductive stuff just puts me even further down into uselessness.
I once caught myself laying on my couch, counting the stitches on the sleeve of my t-shirt because I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t do anything else until I’d finished the thing I was procrastinating over. I recently started playing World of Warcraft again when I realized that, after deciding to take a break from the game, all the time I had previously spent on the game was not going into something more productive, but towards reading increasingly worthless fanfiction and unnecessary snacking.
When there’s just one thing on the to-do list that’s blocking you up like that, it is really just a matter of noticing what’s going on and realizing the effective urgency of the thing being procrastinated over. I think it’s actually harder when there are several not-actually-unpleasant-but-equally-appealing things on one’s to-do list. I still have trouble with that. Several equally-productive, equally-urgent things I want or need to do, and I find myself doing none of those things, and banning myself from really-nonproductive time-killers doesn’t seem to help; I just start counting threads, so to speak.
I think maybe I have trouble establishing subjective priorities when my objective priorities are not obvious. I usually don’t have a problem with procrastination (anymore) when I feel sure of any one task or project being more important than the other things that are competing for a given chunk of my time. But that’s just a guess, and if correct I’m still not sure where the line between that and my general (extreme)reluctance to start anything that might be interrupted before being finished, is.
This happens to me all the time, and I find that banning myself from the semi-productive or unproductive stuff just puts me even further down into uselessness.
I once caught myself laying on my couch, counting the stitches on the sleeve of my t-shirt because I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t do anything else until I’d finished the thing I was procrastinating over. I recently started playing World of Warcraft again when I realized that, after deciding to take a break from the game, all the time I had previously spent on the game was not going into something more productive, but towards reading increasingly worthless fanfiction and unnecessary snacking.
When there’s just one thing on the to-do list that’s blocking you up like that, it is really just a matter of noticing what’s going on and realizing the effective urgency of the thing being procrastinated over. I think it’s actually harder when there are several not-actually-unpleasant-but-equally-appealing things on one’s to-do list. I still have trouble with that. Several equally-productive, equally-urgent things I want or need to do, and I find myself doing none of those things, and banning myself from really-nonproductive time-killers doesn’t seem to help; I just start counting threads, so to speak.
I think maybe I have trouble establishing subjective priorities when my objective priorities are not obvious. I usually don’t have a problem with procrastination (anymore) when I feel sure of any one task or project being more important than the other things that are competing for a given chunk of my time. But that’s just a guess, and if correct I’m still not sure where the line between that and my general (extreme)reluctance to start anything that might be interrupted before being finished, is.
tried dice?