[bityard]

I identify with all of this, but this:

> to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?".

this too can have its pitfalls. In my case, I always feel like I have BOTH too many things that I WANT to do and too many things HAVE to do and whenever I step back and try to look at the bigger picture, I realize that I don't feel like I'm making tangible progress on any of them. And then the anxiety sets in and I feel like, "well, if I'm working this hard and not even keeping up, why am I working at all?" And so I sort of "give up" for a few days or a week and feel even MORE guilty because literally nothing is getting done and I'm getting even further behind.

A lot of the comments I write here may sound like I really have my shit together, but that's just because I have a lot of generalized experience that just basically comes from lots of introspection and time being alive. But I have yet to figure out the one weird trick to being both productive (making progress toward future life goals) and happy (enjoying what I have in the present).

[robocat]

Perhaps try to distinguish where your wants and pressures come from?

So many of our "wants" are social status goals, or social expectations.

I find it very hard to discriminate my own desires from my unconscious programming by others.

Whenever you feel pressured, try and find the root cause of the pressure?

Just an idea - perhaps damaging but hopefully enabling.

[billti]

I joke about my procrastination with my team: "I looked at my TODO list for the day and there's no way I can get to 90% of it, so I might as well just not get to 100% of it". Sometimes there's a lot of truth to the joke, however.

As much as I know I should prioritize it based on urgency, highest impact, what I could delegate etc., if the willpower required to do that is more than the ramifications or not doing it, it can be a losing battle.

On days when I push through a ton of work, I'm energized at the end of the day. Compared to the feeling of guilt that I just wasted a day when there's so much to do and I achieved little. Yet knowing that still just doesn't provide the necessary motivation some days. I've yet to figure out a reliable solution for it.