@7666 this was really great. I'm glad I stopped to watch the Adam Savage video first, to give some background and set the tone.

With work projects, I've learned to just never take anything seriously in the least. My priorities wind up changing from day to day and sometimes hour to hour, so it just is what it is. It actually kinda works for me because I work in fits of furious brilliance interjected with fucking off to read fedi for 20 minutes, so it isn't too bad. Besides I get paid the same regardless of how much I bust my ass, and the same "mid" performance review, so fuck it.

For personal projects, I've definitely done the 'gaming' business where instead of doing Thing X that's intimidating I just do Thing {A,B,C,D,E,F} instead while killing time and feel a lot more accomplished. Its why it took me 4 days to get around to read your post, I was dodging it because Wallabag said it was a 15m read and boy that 5 minute 404 Media article is a lot lower hanging piece of fruit isn't it? Anyway.

The ability to "not" for a while is something I had to learn the hard way. I don't have any magic tricks to do it, I just had to kinda slowly convince myself "yes its okay to just go play a game for a few hours instead of engaging in some way with the laundry list". I'm not a workaholic by any stretch of the definition but I'm definitely a busy-bee type, always having half-done stuff lying around, but you know what, it'll be there tomorrow. Dying with a long to-do list sounds alright to me, because if I didn't get to it, did it ever matter? What was I doing instead? Probably enjoying myself or spending time with loved ones. Time you enjoy is never time wasted.

RT: https://comp.lain.la/objects/0235e29d-fa20-4987-903f-ce1af55d3ad4