When I try to 'work hard', I make the mistake of measuring the endeavour by the amount of sweat and grunting involved. For a knowledge-work task, I measure by the not-happening-ness of it.

It is  easy to confuse the effect with the result. I seem to have developed a tendency to associate not-completing , not-achieving with working hard. It's an easy cop out.

I tend to plan & structure work in an outrageous way such that  it never completes. Then, when I set to do this futile task after binge-ing on some secret-agent based tv series, I feel like I am working hard. Or punishing myself. The rationalisation doesn't get caught . Actual work gets done when someone asks for it. Left to myself, the task is planned perfectly and then abandoned. **

The normal - planning actual work to complete in the given time for an expected result, then doing it -   gets avoided but feels amazing when done. 

Maybe normalising this takes away an easy /within reach /dependable hit, and the novelty is needed to keep it fresh. Solution is to suck it, and seek better sources of happiness - like higher results than completing given tasks such as , say, completing a product ...

essentially the delayed gratification muscle is atrophied beyond recognition.

** solution here is to not plan the task in abstract to the end, but get off the ground in small chunks....

fomo.

when stepping into a task with a probability of failure, there is fear of never coming back to the happy place i started from - the environment, the identity, the fantastic self constructed from hours of day-dreaming and copy-paste-ing from online media and tv..

Ever since meetings have started ,maybe its 1.5 year long fatigue or what, I have 2 months worth of tickets proceeding at a glacial pace

I can jump ahead when someone's talking to me but I need to leach off others' mental constructs....