Have you ever been endlessly procrastinating on some task, but then once you eventually, finally do it, you realize that it is not half as bad as you thought?

Somehow, many of us keep overestimating how unpleasant it will be to engage with certain types of work to a degree where we put them off for months, building up guilt and resentment, when ultimately all we needed to have done was to grapple with some minor inconvenience.

On the other side, many of us know the feeling of having some drive to continue a thing once we've started it, even though it's supposedly unpleasant. I can dread doing my taxes for months, yet once I set a 5-minute timer to start working on them and get over that initial little hump, the sound of the timer causes disappointment in me rather than elation.

I think there are two primary [...]

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