A weekend at work

I have been day tripping to Ottawa for work on a weekly basis so have locked into the routine of getting out of bed at 6AM every day. This weekend I stayed in town and worked at unholy early hours. This isn't so bad because for every hour I work on weekends when nobody is around, it's the equivalent of three hours during the week when the phones are ringing and everybody is on my ass. No complaints though. What I realized yesterday is that I get a sick demoralizing feeling when I am in a work paralysis state. I think everybody gets in that funk, you know where you surf the net, do busy work but don't get around to doing the tough crap work on your list. Joel Spolsky has a good article about this on his blog. Lucky for me, all I usually have to do is hit the crap stuff on my list and I get into a crap killer trance and rip through the stuff I have been procrastinating and then, well then I feel great. I think that a lot of it relates to learned helplessness, when you put off doing one tough thing, it's not so hard to put off a second and third and fourth and then finally you feel like you have no control over the ever mounting list. I get control back by knocking down one pin and hopefully the rest come tumbling down after.