I’m rather prone to both the Planning Fallacy and what you call vortices of dread due to overestimation of time/difficulty. I do indeed benefit from trying to solve the latter with timers and such.
For example, I used to always take forever to get ready to go to bed, because as I went about the house doing all the related tasks I had my phone with me to listen to podcasts because getting ready for bed was so boring I couldn’t do it without some entertainment, and since I had my phone with me I kept getting distracted by things on it. One week, I decided to make a rule (importantly, a temporary one, only for that week! otherwise I would’ve been too scared to institute it) that I would set an alarm each day at 11:15 pm, and when that alarm rang I had to put my phone down and get ready for bed and not touch my phone until I was in bed already. The alarm was set a full 45 minutes before the time I intended to actually go to sleep because I expected that getting ready for bed would take up a big chunk of that time—but I found that actually, if I do all the tasks without procrastinating, they take no more than about ten minutes, which is in fact a pretty tolerable amount of time to be bored for. So now that feels doable and getting ready to bed no longer takes forever for me.
Similarly, during the aversion factoring exercise a couple days ago, one of the things I thought about was that I procrastinate hugely on emptying the trash cans in my room and in the bathroom, which can get pretty gross. I arrived at the thought that one way I can make it less scary is by setting a five-minute timer while I do it, because probably it will only take about five minutes or not much longer, but time doesn’t feel real to me so it’s hard to benefit from the fact that it’s a very short task unless I make that extremely salient? Anyway, I set the timer and I did the task and it actually only took about three and a half minutes, which was even less than I expected. I predict that in the future I will take out this trash more promptly.
A thing I’ve been thinking about doing but haven’t yet gotten around to is calibration training on whether I will make it to various plans I make, and if so how late I will be to them. I’m very bad at punctuality and also somewhat flakey due to low energy and brainstuff; actually improving this seems too hard to tackle right now (and is not my highest priority), so I’ve been trying to get into the habit of warning people that I might not make it to things, and ideally give a probability estimate of my making it. But I realized I actually don’t have a good way of knowing what the probability is, beyond a felt sense which I assume is better than chance but probably not quite correct. So I want to make some predictions about it and see how I do. Haven’t done it yet, though.
I’ll try the calibration on predictions of how long individual tasks will take, too, though not today, as today is not a particularly worklike day.
I’m rather prone to both the Planning Fallacy and what you call vortices of dread due to overestimation of time/difficulty. I do indeed benefit from trying to solve the latter with timers and such.
For example, I used to always take forever to get ready to go to bed, because as I went about the house doing all the related tasks I had my phone with me to listen to podcasts because getting ready for bed was so boring I couldn’t do it without some entertainment, and since I had my phone with me I kept getting distracted by things on it. One week, I decided to make a rule (importantly, a temporary one, only for that week! otherwise I would’ve been too scared to institute it) that I would set an alarm each day at 11:15 pm, and when that alarm rang I had to put my phone down and get ready for bed and not touch my phone until I was in bed already. The alarm was set a full 45 minutes before the time I intended to actually go to sleep because I expected that getting ready for bed would take up a big chunk of that time—but I found that actually, if I do all the tasks without procrastinating, they take no more than about ten minutes, which is in fact a pretty tolerable amount of time to be bored for. So now that feels doable and getting ready to bed no longer takes forever for me.
Similarly, during the aversion factoring exercise a couple days ago, one of the things I thought about was that I procrastinate hugely on emptying the trash cans in my room and in the bathroom, which can get pretty gross. I arrived at the thought that one way I can make it less scary is by setting a five-minute timer while I do it, because probably it will only take about five minutes or not much longer, but time doesn’t feel real to me so it’s hard to benefit from the fact that it’s a very short task unless I make that extremely salient? Anyway, I set the timer and I did the task and it actually only took about three and a half minutes, which was even less than I expected. I predict that in the future I will take out this trash more promptly.
A thing I’ve been thinking about doing but haven’t yet gotten around to is calibration training on whether I will make it to various plans I make, and if so how late I will be to them. I’m very bad at punctuality and also somewhat flakey due to low energy and brainstuff; actually improving this seems too hard to tackle right now (and is not my highest priority), so I’ve been trying to get into the habit of warning people that I might not make it to things, and ideally give a probability estimate of my making it. But I realized I actually don’t have a good way of knowing what the probability is, beyond a felt sense which I assume is better than chance but probably not quite correct. So I want to make some predictions about it and see how I do. Haven’t done it yet, though.
I’ll try the calibration on predictions of how long individual tasks will take, too, though not today, as today is not a particularly worklike day.