even those aren't bad examples- sometimes I'll just realize I've been flicking between two PDFs for like, fifteen minutes

and I'm starting to realize how much of that comes down to just giving in to a low-level impulse to just do something, anything, that looks like work

the part of my brain that is doing that isn't very sophisticated, and that's what makes it not super useful for moving toward goals. it's not a stern taskmaster keeping me on track- it's a little kid wearing his dad's tie, slapping the keyboard while muttering "reports"

and because that's all it's controlling for - the very superficial, crude appearance of work to satisfy a brain-cop that doesn't exist - it hurts a lot more than it helps

sometimes, by luck, it latches onto things that I really do want to be doing, but even then, there's often something easier/more immediately rewarding that still satisfies the bare-minimum criteria that we drift off to

so, still a bit counterintuitively, sometimes the most useful thing is to try to give myself permission to sit there and do nothing- turn down the gain on that signal.

do nothing which is useless, etc.