[kranner]

Previous discussions on psychonetics and deconcentration of attention seem relevant, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028317

Personally I've found a continuous open awareness style of meditation has really helped me balance things out, as I went from someone with very little doggedness to e.g. being two weeks into cataloguing all my books with Delicious Library before realising it was kind of pointless. The open awareness practice (very different from focus-on-your-breath and also the visual deconcentration discussed in the link above) is about encouraging the recognition of this-is-how-things-are as it naturally and spontaneously occurs; doing this more and more also builds confidence in one's intuition about (in this context) whether to persevere at the current task or whether to step back.

I don't think there is a foolproof system that can be developed as a substitute for this kind of intuition. Speaking for myself I can and will continue to second-guess over time any external system that may feel definitive when it is first established. But I can learn to trust the (unfortunately) indeterminate part of myself that tells me I'm doing the right thing.