For some reason, I have done it more recently.  Maybe this is because I’ve had to do things on my computer that are hard on a couple different axes.  Most of the things have just been email anxiety (like sending emails to professors out of the blue- eep!), some of them are the difficulties of trying to spin up one job (research) while the other one (err my real job) has fried my brain all day, some of them are just other logistics like buying plane tickets.  If this is the case, it’s not an easy problem to solve.

Maybe this is because procrastination has gotten easier thanks to Google Reader, The Facebook, and Twitter.  I’m not sure this is the case, because I feel like I just want some information to eat.  I got into Hacker News for a while until I quit that, and now I go to the Stranger when I want some more info.  So I could quit the Facebook or something, but then I’d just snarf up more info elsewhere.

Maybe the trick is to take my hard problems more seriously.  When I say “I need to email this professor, because maybe our researches will overlap and we could meet and talk about ideas or something”, I should treat it as if I were going to do 20 push-ups.  Not easy.  But doesn’t really take that long, and better to just meet it head on.

But man, this is the kind of thing that’s tough, because you don’t even know you’ve lost the fight until it’s over.  As I was writing this, I suppressed an urge to check my email once- if I had waited a half second, a little ctrl-T and bam, my brain is scattered between this post and gmail.  It’s as if I need a mindfulness Chrome theme or something, that instead of displaying a shiny new tab page, says “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO NOW” and then freezes for 5 seconds before I can continue.

Hey, that’s a neat idea.