Posts and comments here share personal experience — not medical advice. For treatment questions, talk to a clinician.
Split your to-dos until they become tangible, realistic, and imaginable in your CURRENT SITUATION (not some ideal version of yourself where everything is perfect) and celebrate it when you get it done. I could use this app perfectly for that, but in my own way. Over the past 3 days, I’ve managed to break out of the cycle and those self-sabotaging impulse thoughts. And it actually feels like the right thing, not just something temporary where I fail to stay consistent after a while. I add tasks to the app after I’ve completed them, not before. That really helps me avoid the “just as you should” and the “it’s exhausting just to do the bare minimum” thoughts. In my experience, that’s the biggest hurdle to getting back into a workflow and feeling like you’re fighting a battle you’ve already lost.
I either go bug someone to do work together. Making a full plan of just doing work and with someone else, it forces me to actually do the work and since the plan was made, can’t get out of it. Or… I literally go somewhere else and put on a pomodoro timer to just start the process. Could be initially starting 5 minutes (I usually do 10). It helps you just start the work so you already are doing something. If you can’t keep going, break time, but that’s on a timer too. You kinda have to force yourself to follow the law of the timer.
The app, ‘Exocus’ is a nice visual pomodoro timer and it literally does not give you an option to pause. If you stop, you lose all your progress. Might be useful. The app ‘Cat on Chair’, does something similar, though you have a cat that gives gifts. Also has no pause button and if you stop, it gives you trash.
I put something on my daily checklist that I can check off very easily OR that I have already done so I check it off right away. The. I might think of something I actually want to do, add it to the list, check it off and once I start I want to check more things off so I end up doing more.
It is very hard and Im in the middle of it. But what helps me is to start with the most smallest step you can think of. That one little step most of the time leads to another little step, etc
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