Are you relying on willpower? I’ve found it useful to see myself as a dumb robot that responds instinctively to its environment, and focus on data driven behavioral interventions instead of personal decisions. For example, instead of “committing to spend less time on Facebook”, I got a chrome extension that makes me wait 30 seconds before o can access Facebook. Instead of trying to will myself to brush my teeth every night (which wasn’t very effective), I kept a bottle of gummy vitamins in my bathroom and I got to eat one if I brushed my teeth after. To get myself to do work, I put up my daily pomodoroS on a board my housemates could see. These feel stupid, but worked much better than any personal goals I ever set.
I also realized that working on my depression made the small stuff come more easily. That may not be your situation though.
I’m using a complete blocker for those things, but then I get distracted by others. I don’t think the gummy vitamins would work for me because I’d just end up eating them all with or without brushing my teeth. (I forget to eat until my hands start shaking, and I have emergency peanut butter set aside for that, but if there’s something else that’s easy to eat it might become the new target.)
I try to offload as much as I can to checklists, but I can’t get started with the task (and there’s no guarantee I’d finish it even when using the checklist; even going to a different room resets everything). I also made e.g. something that reads my calendar events out loud because the notifications don’t do anything.
There is pretty much zero automaticity in anything I do, though. If I did react consistently to the environment, I think I might have been able to figure something out by now.
Are you relying on willpower? I’ve found it useful to see myself as a dumb robot that responds instinctively to its environment, and focus on data driven behavioral interventions instead of personal decisions. For example, instead of “committing to spend less time on Facebook”, I got a chrome extension that makes me wait 30 seconds before o can access Facebook. Instead of trying to will myself to brush my teeth every night (which wasn’t very effective), I kept a bottle of gummy vitamins in my bathroom and I got to eat one if I brushed my teeth after. To get myself to do work, I put up my daily pomodoroS on a board my housemates could see. These feel stupid, but worked much better than any personal goals I ever set.
I also realized that working on my depression made the small stuff come more easily. That may not be your situation though.
I’m using a complete blocker for those things, but then I get distracted by others. I don’t think the gummy vitamins would work for me because I’d just end up eating them all with or without brushing my teeth. (I forget to eat until my hands start shaking, and I have emergency peanut butter set aside for that, but if there’s something else that’s easy to eat it might become the new target.)
I try to offload as much as I can to checklists, but I can’t get started with the task (and there’s no guarantee I’d finish it even when using the checklist; even going to a different room resets everything). I also made e.g. something that reads my calendar events out loud because the notifications don’t do anything.
There is pretty much zero automaticity in anything I do, though. If I did react consistently to the environment, I think I might have been able to figure something out by now.