Procrastination is driven by our desire to avoid difficult emotions, says expert

I could just as easily say "my ex roommate was an orthopedic surgeon and had supercars and mansions". Does that mean they're doing hip replacements that aren't needed? No, all it tells me is they have a successful practice.

Looked it up on amazon and the book was free with an audible trial. Hope it works.

There was one other book, a very short one, it's more like an excercise book really with space for you to write your answers.

Has a very "commercial" title I'd say, it's called Self Discipline in 10 days.

It's a bit of a psychological rollercoaster and but I did find it pretty effective when I went through it years ago. It will ask you to write down and articulate your biggest failures fears etc.. Try it out :)

It's the only thing that seems to consistently work for me. When I was so emotionally overwhelmed I couldn't focus and it took me half a day to begin working, I would switch to doing pomodoros and rewarding myself for achieving a certain amount any given day. I tried punishing myself through not achieving too (via Beeminder), but that ended up worsening my emotional negative feedback loop, so I stopped.

Over the past decade, with tremendous help of my wife, I've managed to resolve some of my anxiety issues, so these days my main sources of work anxiety are: 1) trying to do a thing I have no first clue how to approach, and 2) the tension between spending time coding for money vs. doing hobby projects. If I do too much of the latter, I don't have money, but if I do too little, I burn out quickly. So I reward my work time with hobby project time. I keep a small pad on which I put a tally mark for each pomodoro spent on working. These tally marks represent pomodoros I can then spend on hobby projects (software on otherwise) guilt-free. This satisfies my emotional self, as I literally work to earn time to spend doing something else.

In practice, I end up buffering tally marks and then spending them in batches, this fits well with me being an independent contractor (I can work less today if I worked more yesterday), and also works well for the state of flow: if I have 10 pomodoros buffered up, I can let myself spend them all in 5 hours of continuous hacking.

I'd say the key thing here is getting rid of the guilt: I've agreed with myself that as long as I never exceed the accumulated pomodoro budget, I can spend it without feeling bad about not working.

(Well, the second big trick was to block HN on my router during work hours; this ensures I actually get to both earn and spend my pomodoros, instead of procrastinating here all day.)

(EDIT: Well, the third big trick, one which lets me keep anxiety down, is that I keep running journals - both personal and work - and I dump my train of thoughts straight into them whenever I start feeling even slightly anxious or confused. I almost never read them again, but the act of going through my thoughts in writing calms me down, and lets me pinpoint the sources of anxiety.)

Thank you for writing, this really jives with my experience. I would read HN or various articles or do "fun" work to get dopamine hits, but the reality my psychotherapist revealed was that I internalized a lot of external pressures/expectations to do X Y Z in my career. It led to me resigning my job as an SQL/R programmer in February...bright-eyed looking for the next position...

And now I'm unemployed, so things are going super.