It's also good to remember that Jim is often wrong.
Last week I found myself procrastinating for hours because something was going to be hard, was vaguely defined, wasn't going to work... and in the end it turned out to be five minutes work to try the first thing that came to mind, which was enough to solve the problem.
So in order to fool Jim, don't think about doing that whole big thing you need to do. Just tell yourself you'll only work on it a little bit for, say, ten minutes. Jim can hardly object to that.
And then much of the time, you made some kind of concrete start in that time, and the objections disappear.
> The problem is, while it’s easy to lie to yourself, Jim isn’t fooled.
While you claim:
> So in order to fool Jim, don't think about doing that whole big thing you need to do. Just tell yourself you'll only work on it a little bit for, say, ten minutes.
I will say that Jim can sometimes be fooled to a ridiculous degree.
When I’m out for a run and the going gets tough, Jim really wants me to stop. However I can just tell Jim that OK, I will stop but not before I reach the next light post, which is super close. Once I reach it, I’ll just shift the goal to the next light post.
This works wonders and I can keep going for miles. Often giggling to myself how easily Jim is fooled, as I’m literally thinking in that moment that I’ll just keep shifting the goal.
The solution I found to this is to use Pomodoro. I don't have a problem to keep focused after I start something, the problem is always not starting it. I force myself to do one pomodoro, but after the first one I am still not convinced I should keep working. It is incredibly unsatisfying, but because it is only 25 minutes, I can endure it. Then another one, and by the fourth I have finally understood a bit more about the problem I'm trying to solve and fog starts to dissipate enough that I feel a bit more motivated to work on it the next day. After I am finally able to forsee the payoff, I just ditch Pomodoro and keep working.
This works well for me. I'm in the middle of replicating someone else's research for a paper, so it's fiddly, not very exciting (I expect to confirm their conclusions, +/- some error bars), and hard to remain motivated. But I tell myself "work on this one little part for 30 minutes today" and eventually if I stack enough of those parts together it'll be done.
I’ve noticed this happening often enough that now when I need to do something hard, instead of trying to do it, I think “I’ll just attempt it for 15 minutes to learn more about the task”.
Sometimes it turns out the task I had been dreading can actually be mostly completed in that time, and I was just wrong about it being hard.
Last week I found myself procrastinating for hours because something was going to be hard, was vaguely defined, wasn't going to work... and in the end it turned out to be five minutes work to try the first thing that came to mind, which was enough to solve the problem.
So in order to fool Jim, don't think about doing that whole big thing you need to do. Just tell yourself you'll only work on it a little bit for, say, ten minutes. Jim can hardly object to that.
And then much of the time, you made some kind of concrete start in that time, and the objections disappear.