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The source of some of the negative mood is not merely that a task sucks, but that we don’t know where to start. The task is ill-defined or amorphous, and because we have no point of entry we feel a certain sense of dread. Better to do something to alleviate that dread than to merely keep feeling it, so let me alphabetize the spice rack. I try and remind myself in moments of that peculiar helplessness to try and define just one next-step. So instead of “start project” it’s “open a browser, read three serious articles about one aspect of the project, summarize those articles”. The concreteness means that I’m doing the “easy” work of following an algorithm, not the hard work of figuring out what to do.