Why can't I just WORK?

[brody182]

I've been struggling with this problem for many years. It sounds so simple, there must be more to it.

Basically, I have a really hard time just sitting down and doing the work I need to do. I'm just as capable of doing the work as my co-workers are. But I get far less done than them. To some degree, I guess it's procrastination, but it seems like it goes beyond that. Right now it is an hour before I need to be at work. I can think of about twenty things that I should work on. There are four or five things that absolutely MUST get done today. I tell myself - I am going to go to the office, sit down and immediately start working. It is very simple. But years of history tell me that won't happen.

I'll get to the office. Get a cup of coffee. Check the news websites. Check my email. Tell myself to get to work. Keep surfing the web. Do 10 minutes of work. Check my email again. Go to lunch. And so on. This is SO FRUSTRATING. Consciously, it seems incredibly obvious that I need to just stop browsing the dang web and do my work. But for some reason, it almost never happens. Some times over the course of my career, I've been able to fix this problem for a few days or even a week or two, but then I lapse into the same habits.

One possibly related issue I've noticed is that as soon as I run against ANY difficulty in a task, I instinctively want to stop working on it. I don't think this is at the root of all of my problems, but it does exacerbate them because once I do finally force myself to work, it can be short-lived.

I really need to fix this. If I didn't have these habits, I would be much higher up in my company I am sure - I am actually very good at my job when I do it. I've tried normal strategies like keeping to do lists and I read Getting Things Done and tried to follow it for a while, but it didn't really help that much.

Has anyone else struggled with something like this? Can anyone tell me what's wrong with me? How do I break this habit?