I have a few tricks for handling procrastination that are in this ballpark:
1. When I see myself wanting to procrastinate, I ask myself 'If I follow this feeling, will it increase my power (i.e. capacity/agency/utility) or decrease it?'. Then I have a dialogue with myself: Nope, let's refocus, maybe try reading things out loud or draw a diagram or some other perspective change OR Yeah, I should stop for now, do something else, as long as that increases my power.
2. I observed that usually procrastination really is tied to novelty, quite similar with how it's presented in the article so I did this thing: instead of going on YouTube or games I started typing exercises online. After some time, I realised that I could get better at typing and get some extra-novelty by typing an existing book! So I have a Tampermonkey script that, whenever I try to go on a random typing website, redirects me to a website where I can type books (I could push it as a gist if anyone's interested). It stores in Local Storage what page I reached and from where I left them of. I got to read On the Origin of Species this way and now I type around 100 WPM from 80 WPM.
Could you share the Tampermoneky script in the gist? Would love that.
But how much have you learned about the Origin of Species?
Quite a lot. And I'd say that I process more info by typing than by simply reading. I typed the first edition and got the printed second edition too after.
I always searched videos of what he was exemplifying and found quite amazing material for many (enslaver ants, ants tickling aphids, honeycomb construction). Was super impressed to hear about Darwin's peers which he calls out by name every time, how there were people specialised in breading races, judging what constitutes species.
Was kind of stunned to find out that people didn't know dogs were all the same species, how hard it was even for specialised breeders to identify that their pigeons were changing, since they were not really taking pictures.
How Darwin published a book that was approachable to common folks, how the book was built on mountains of hand-collected data.
There's so, so, so much more I could talk about (tree of life, organs, descendant resemblance happening at the same age, embryology weirdness) but biggest mind-fuck would be the anti-teleological stance he holds. Basically, out of nowhere (although I saw that he read Hume [0]), Darwin figures out that things don't happen 'for a reason'. Things don't live because they're 'better'. All the creatures we see today are simply the things that survived. There's no final goal, no 'ought to be' in the world. We're simply patterns that survive that resemble patterns that happened to survive.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
Yes, please share it!
https://gist.github.com/ouatu-ro/5ca4abca26bd65630de3d4768fe...
I also sometimes like to use typing test pages to kinda warm myself up before I start a project. I want to do really well and race someone else or type faster than I usually can, then ride the high of victory to get something done or break procrastination. But this is a much better way to do things; this way I can make that activity help advance my other goals.