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by heroHACK17 1965 days ago
Man, I am the same way. How have you coped with this? I work in a pretty open-ended environment without a lot of processes, so you can imagine it has been a struggle for me. I have tried to create tickets for myself but I seem to also struggle with defining the "done" state.
4 comments
JohnBooty 1965 days ago
Same boat. It's not a magic cure, but my semi-okay-coping mechanism is to make daily to-do lists.

The key though, is not just "making to-do lists".... it's right-sizing the items on them.

Every task should have a finite end state and (this is crucial) shouldn't be longer than 15-20 minutes or so. If they are longer than that, it almost certainly needs to be broken down into constituent tasks.

So even something like "clean my office" probably needs to be broken down a little more -- when I'm on my game I break it down into "vac office", "dust office", "organize desk drawer", etc.

This pairs nicely with the "Pomodoro method" if you've ever tried it.

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renewiltord 1965 days ago
Not super related, but a friend of mine recently said "If you're the kind of person who is satisfied by a large task list, you shouldn't make todos. If you're the kind of person who hates them, you should."

It seems obvious after it being mentioned, but I noticed a useful corollary: a list of done tasks actually makes me unhappy. So I avoid todo pages where a done list is visible. Hiding done tasks (i.e. archiving done cards on Trello, deleting a row on your todo list instead of strikethrough), etc. has led me to use it better.

This isn't your problem, clearly, but just wanted to share a useful tip.

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delecti 1965 days ago
My only strategy for that problem is to break things down as much as possible into subtasks. That helps because I'm at least more likely to get something done if there's a list of things I can weigh the terribleness of. As the GP comment said that they'd clean their apartment rather than get work done, I'll do the tasks with more clarity to procrastinate doing the tasks with more ambiguity. Eventually, doing the tasks with clarity help clear up the ambiguity in the others.
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hnick 1965 days ago
Maybe the concept of the "wall of awful" will help you understand it more. I struggle with it too though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg

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