1. Ask yourself why do you think this is a problem and debug deeply. Maybe, after all, spending day watching videos is fine and what you want to do and the story that you don't is unnecessary.
2. Once you bring it to your conscious mind, you face a decision, do I want to watch videos and maybe learn something and relax, given that it comes with not delivering some things I promised and doing the thing I've been thinking I need to do for a long time, or do I want to do e.g. that thing.
3. Then do what you want. It requires no effort. You do what you want. I know habits and dopamine addiction narration, but there is no substance dependence here and the trick is that we cannot really hold contradicting beliefs in our conscious mind (we have plenty of them in the background but once you collide them actively you usually end up creating some micro-rationalization). But here your focus is consciously facing the choice. Plus there's plenty of dopamine for something that's been on todo for a long time.
I think we have completely different brains. What you said hits me like someone telling me to "be happy" when I'm depressed. It's not a matter of rationalization.
I am jealous this works for you. Life would be so much easier if my intrinsic motivation was well-aligned with my rational thinking.
If that's your experience most of the time, you might have ADHD. Here's a good (chest yet informative) introduction to the subject: https://m.youtube.com/c/HowtoADHD
I suspect they are not that different. Rationalization doesn't work, it's what creates "I should be doing X instead" in the first place.
I don't know if it can help you in whatever you want to achieve, but to me just realization that I always do what I want was huge. You can't honestly tell yourself you want to be doing this right now and that you don't want to be doing it right now. Once you unpack what does that mean in your head that you want it (requirements, consequences), whatever that means, you find some contradiction. But it took me some practice to be honest with myself and eliminating wishful thinking.
Accepting reality as it is, is huge. When you have in your head that if you spend time doing A you can't be doing B during this time, or that you can't achieve goal without going through steps you think are necessary, there really is not much left to do. Whatever you choose is fine, it's what you want.
E.g. I used to be thinking "I don't want to clean the kitchen, I have more interesting ideas for my life". Right now, it's a simple choice - don't clean the kitchen and have it dirty or clean it and have it cleaned up. Both are fine. Debugging gets complex when you have other people involved in your life etc but it still drops to the same thing.
Life's too short for telling yourself that you don't want to be doing what you are doing.[1]
If you take it deep enough, with our current understanding of the universe, there is no objective argument that working on renewable energy is better than watching youtube all day.
OK, I'm quitting this topic on HN, I've been selling this idea in many of my comments lately, just because it made my life so much better, but it's too verbose.
Btw if somebody knows this kind of thinking from a different source I would appreciate some pointers, because I'm sure I'm not the first one to come up with this but I haven't stumbled upon it yet and I would much prefer to point people to that direction.
1. And just to be clear I'm not ignoring very difficult situations that people are in saying that people are always doing what they want. The situation is difficult, whether that's hunger, war, illness or death. But that's reality. Given that terrible situation you decide to do something (or do nothing). It's what you decide, it's what you want. Telling yourself that you want to do something else that's not possible in that salutation is just wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is pure suffering. I strongly suggest stopping whatever you're doing if you think you don't want to be doing it and either stop doing that or fix the contradiction in your head.
> Btw if somebody knows this kind of thinking from a different source I would appreciate some pointers, because I'm sure I'm not the first one to come up with this but I haven't stumbled upon it yet and I would much prefer to point people to that direction.
I just finished the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time management for mortals. Similar thinking in that a lot of suffering and procrastination is caused by not accepting the reality of our finite time on earth, that we can never do it all, and we have to make tough choices and most people try avoid the anxiety of facing those by distracting themselves. I loved the book, and your comment, as refreshing take on “productivity” but I recognize it’s also extremely difficult for many people to practice.
1. Ask yourself why do you think this is a problem and debug deeply. Maybe, after all, spending day watching videos is fine and what you want to do and the story that you don't is unnecessary.
2. Once you bring it to your conscious mind, you face a decision, do I want to watch videos and maybe learn something and relax, given that it comes with not delivering some things I promised and doing the thing I've been thinking I need to do for a long time, or do I want to do e.g. that thing.
3. Then do what you want. It requires no effort. You do what you want. I know habits and dopamine addiction narration, but there is no substance dependence here and the trick is that we cannot really hold contradicting beliefs in our conscious mind (we have plenty of them in the background but once you collide them actively you usually end up creating some micro-rationalization). But here your focus is consciously facing the choice. Plus there's plenty of dopamine for something that's been on todo for a long time.