You don't have to spend hours on each task
Snacking is the concept of eating quickly without any commitment on duration or type of food. You just eat what you can when you can.
While this is not too good for a diet, why is it only applied to food? This very concept can be a healthy one when ported to creative work.
When you insist on spending a long time on any kind of task, the problem is two-fold:
- By Trying hard to do something, well, you're trying hard, and it turns the task into a chore. Next time you think of doing it you remember it as a chore and thus aren't motivated to do it again. Complexity cancels motivation, and Things get accomplished by iteration.
- And something I notice personally, you waste time spending too much time on a task which often doesn't require that long, i.e. Parkinson's Law. I can't count how often have I ended up with that knot in my stomach, having stayed too long doing something, having not reached an arbitrary (and often too vague, too abstract) objective, and feeling almost compulsively obligated to keep doing the task yet knowing I'm wasting time and going nowhere. Like the candle that burned twice as bright but burnt twice as fast, I felt burnt out at the end of the day. A little every day is enough.
Most of the tasks during a day don't warrant spending hours on them. But you still want to do them. So think of doing them as snacking. No obligation, no commitment (neither in time or achievement), just hop in and out of the task freely. A great way to do it is during Crumb time.
Snacking during crumb time is the solution to the The illusion of one sitting.
It's funny that snacking is something we do naturally when we're procrastinating, or doing anything that's not considered productive or work. Have you ever put yourself under pressure to scroll social media for a minimum amount of time? Or to finish a TV show? That may be why we don't hesitate for a second when doing such things. Because we approach these in the snacking frame of mind. Why not doing the same thing for work or productive stuff? Let interest drive you toward the activity, and prevent obligation and commitment deterring you from doing it.