I find myself with a lot of stuff that I have to do that I don't want to do—chores, errands, supporting my apps, running the homeowner's association for my neighborhood, and so on. My main technique for trying to make sure that I get the important things done is to track it in a to-do list and then just make sure that I do all of the crappy stuff before I get to the fun stuff. The fun stuff, for me, is usually things that work best when they have a few uninterrupted hours: gaming and creative endeavors, primarily.
I'm starting to think that it might be counter-productive though. I can force myself to get those tasks out of the way before I get to the "big," planned fun stuff, but I'm finding that I still procrastinate with "little" things, like browsing Facebook and the news and clicking a web of links from here to there and then researching something about a game and then checking prices of things on Amazon and then reading about the album I might add to my Spotify queue. And those little things, as we all know, can add up quickly. I can easily procrastinate a couple hours before I get to the important un-fun things, and then that's two hours less that I can spend on the thing that I wanted to do in the first place—which now I might not even have the time to really even start before I need to start getting ready for bed.
So obviously the real problem is the procrastination with "little," easily distracting things. That needs to be addressed, but what I'm wondering is if my plan to get the crap out of the way first is just enhancing my desire to waste time. Time is increasingly my rarest and most valuable resource, and I'll freely admit that I spend too much of it on things that aren't that exciting. So while the procrastination itself is the real problem, the way I'm treating it might just be making it worse.
