I think I might be starting to get what @visakanv talks about with coercion a little more
when I get in my own way, or spend time in a way that I later regret, it's usually not with "fun" stuff. I play a game for a couple hours, I enjoy it, I shut it off
the time that I tend to look back on as least productive is when I end up writing code that solves the wrong problem, or struggling for ages to write something that I actually just didn't understand enough yet
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"
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.
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