I recommend you three books, because as academic I expect you to like thinking:

  1. The now habit. Understand what anxiety and procrastination is. Where does your anxiety comes from? You probably are comparing yourself with what you should be doing, or with what you should have done in the perfect world. There is no perfect world.

  You were the "planner", the strategist, but someone else did the dirty job, the boring stuff. A good planner will usually become a terrible action man, because it requires a completely different mindset.

  Action or execution requires totally different strategies from managing-planning. First, it requires no planning, no time spent planning and deciding because it has already been decided.

  People that are good strategists usually are people that love to think all the time, hence it becomes natural to them. Now, if they need to execute something that has been decided(even by themselves!!) they continue expending time and effort looking for a better solution, for a better plan and the law of diminishing returns kicks in. As planners they could spend 100% on it, be specialists, but now it is a terrible strategy.

You need to be able to be two personas in one. From a person that only cares about planning and making decisions to someone who only cares about what is in front of his or her until the work is done.

  2. Atomic Habits. Use proven strategies that work. Do not care about results, only care about good habits, because they produce results automatically.


  3. The book of no. If you have problems, you state them clearly. We don't need another PhD, we don't care. Do you care about what you are doing?  Nobody forces do to do it, you do it because you want it or else you just don't do that.