Interesting. I don't usually have a problem going forward with my intentions at a macro scale. The most frustrating part is I hit a rut every now and then at a mini-step and may end up avoiding it a few days(or weeks at worst!). It helps to have a friend or two to not only call your BS but actually lend you a hand. I have couple friends who'll go ahead and do the mini thing I've been avoiding. Like I said, in reality it's usually a pretty small thing(like making a call) but in my head it becomes a huge thing until someone shows it's not.
I suffer from that. What always amazes me is that even after all those years when I kick myself in gear and get it over with it usually is less than an hour, two at the most to get that molehill-that-became-a-mountain out of the way.
This is a very annoying character trait and I do everything I can to get it out of my life, including the tricks I outlined above. The golden rule seems to be don't make promises you can't keep. Treat those statements about what you are going to do exactly like you would treat a solemn promise.
Sometimes it's stronger, sometimes it is less, but on the whole this is really a bad element in my character and it takes a lot of effort to get (and keep) it under control.
I am not sure if I'll ever be free of this particular demon but I'm definitely going to continue to work on it.
Just one example to show you how bad this can get. I do some contracting and had to move a bunch of tickets over from one ticketing system to another. Not rocket science, simply take one database, do a format conversion and import into another.
All told it was less than 4 hours of work. But it took me 4 days, and I finally did exactly what I said above, I mailed all the users of the old system that their new system would be up later today.
That sort of clinched it for me, now there was no backing out. Several hours later, job done, users active on the new system. Why it took me that long is simple, it's a totally boring job, anybody could do it, there is 0 challenge in it for me.
Give me a puzzle and tell me that I can't solve it and I'll be on it like a shot though :)
Exactly! If you are like me, you probably spent more than four hours just thinking about that monkey on your back. This happens almost on a daily basis for me. I deal with it by at the least telling myself that it's ok to not do something, but it's not ok to be thinking about it all the time. At least this way whenever I do get to it, I wouldn't have wasted hours fretting about it which is the real time sink.
