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I had a relatively minor case that sounds very similar to this for a couple years. This is what worked for me, in case it works for you: 1) Reframe sunk-cost thinking on "not working" vs "working" by forgiving yourself on bad days. I would get into a state where I wasn't as productive as I could have been, and it made me feel bad when trying to be productive again. I would avoid engaging because of the emotionally painful feeling. Stimulants would allow me to push through, but at the cost of anxiety when coming down and other health issues. A lot of the framing and advice I got from friends and professionals ignored this highly emotional angle that I was not socialized to recognize and focused on either drugs or productivity tools to paper over it. However, recognizing that this was an emotional trap happening, and that the anticipated emotional pain was a self fulfilling prophecy, allowed me to forgive myself some days and focus on making small incremental progress. It is okay, normal, and probably unavoidable to have 0.5x or 0.1x days. The trick for me has been to not let them snowball by framing incremental progress as a win. Avoiding black and white thinking about productivity. 2) When that fails, as it will occasionally, try to harness the urge to disengage with emotionally risky tasks to do tasks you are less anxious about. Have a queue of productive but less stressful or exhausting tasks to do. Maybe you can get up from the computer and procrastinate by doing the dishes or cleaning. Maybe you can procrastinate cleaning by scheduling a doctor's appointment, doing taxes, or working out. Maybe you can procrastinate working out by writing unit tests and documentation. Eventually procrastinating the unit tests and documentation by writing features and closing the original tickets. This won't work for many jobs that do not provide autonomy, but has worked wonders for me.
Part of what I think is happening here is that there can be a decoupiling between feeling rewarded and completing tasks, if tasks take too long to complete or are only followed by more of the same. Something akin to a low grade burnout can be stopped before it gets too serious by doing small immediately rewarding tasks when the urge to procrastinate is high. 3) Think of your productivity as part of a whole healthy emotional and physical life. Modern life makes it easy to ask absurd things of our animal body - we feed ourselves nothing but sugar, meds, coffee and nicotine designed to induce a flight or fight response for hours, then wonder why we are panicking at the thought of not finishing some minor task or the possibility of some bad behavior repeating. Shipping excellent code is a long voyage, one of many voyages in your life, and your mind is the irreplaceable vehicle that has to be kept in working order to complete all of them. Regular meals, sleep, and a little exercise, are not distractions from productivity but hard requirements for sustained productivity. |