I only write this post as a reminder, both to myself and to other people who are dealing with this, of just how much time you can lose by not necessarily doing something unproductive, but by doing nothing.
I talked about this multiple times in the past, since it's the one thing that I've been struggling with for a very long time when it comes to the amount of progress I make in my work or simply the amount of things that I don't get to do due to this. This "thing" that completely eats up my time and leaves me with nothing but frustration and a miserable feeling of desperation is idleness - not doing anything.
This idleness comes from different sources. It comes from my "fear" of doing something that won't result in anything substantial, and basically wasting my time with the wrong activity. It comes from my unwillingness to try to do something that I know that I can't do very well, which can, once again, result in wasted time. It also comes from my unwillingness to try something new, that I don't know if I like, out of fear that I might regret wasting time on that thing.
All these things result in a paralyzing feeling that makes me do nothing. Instead of doing something, anything at all, I just sit around, watching random videos on YouTube, scrolling through Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, all in an unconscious attempt to forget the frustrating feeling of wasting my time.
It is a bit ironic that this idleness is what wastes most of my time.
Idleness is, at least in my case, fairly easy to overcome, at least through "raw force". If I just force myself to always start doing something instead of just aimlessly browsing the internet for some empty entertainment, then I can be productive through the entire day. And when I say productive I don't necessarily mean when it comes to work. Even making progress in a video game that I want to finish counts.
But in order to get there, I need to constantly realize what I'm doing - that I let myself be confused and defeated by baseless fears, which eventually lead me to the only escape I always go to - not doing anything and trying to forget about it.
Regardless of what I do, as long as I move forward, that's important. If it's writing articles and increasing the amount of content that I put on the internet, reading from books and learning more from them, playing a video game and advancing towards its ending, all this amounts to something. But just sitting around, shrunken by the fear of wasting time, while doing that exact thing at that moment, all until I realize, at the end of the day, that I did nothing with my time, just to feel miserable at that point, is way worse than forcing myself to just do something, anything, and move forward.
I spent a large amount of my like procrastinating.
I don't think it is idleness, as such.
It takes a lot of energy to avoid doing the thing you are avoiding. And yeah, it's unpleasant too. Like you, I avoid starting something for a fear of it not being any good (or I'd give up if it wasn't good straight away). What I've learned is that the perfect thing is rarely done in one take, the perfection comes in the editing process (or practice).
That's the problem with me. It's not necessarily that I avoid doing something out of fear that it might not be perfect. I avoid doing something out of fear that I will waste my time without accomplishing something valuable enough. Then I just sit around doing nothing in order to (ironically) avoid the time wasting task. I just waste time by doing nothing instead of wasting time taking a risk and doing something that might fail.