motivation

I'm doing my half an hour of productivity a day in order to earn my star, but not much more than that. I keep thinking I'm ready to start working properly, but I only seem to be asymptotically reaching that state. The last few times I've talked to my advisor, I've actually had a couple of things to contribute, kind of, and I've left each meeting feeling like I know what I need to do and can actually do it. Sadly, I fairly quickly end up just reading blogs (although I still have hundreds of unread posts, somehow) and wasting time. I think my problem is that the things that I really need to do next to make some progress are big, undefined, thinky things, like come up with an overall plan for each project.
I finally got my GTD system set up this week, with projects and contexts and everything. I thought that might help me get more work done, but instead it's just helped me feel more productive without accomplishing anything work-related, because I can always find next actions for things that are more fun (I signed up for a photography class this weekend!) or just easier. Maybe it's just a question of breaking the broad, undefined tasks down into smaller pieces, but I can hardly bear to even think about them enough to do that.
A while ago, Jeremy mentioned the Kurt Vonnegut story, "Harrison Bergeron", about a genius who is reduced to normal intelligence by a transmitter that plays a distractingly loud noise in his ear every 15 seconds. Jeremy was likening meeting-derailing comments to this "Bergeron beep", but it seems like procrastination serves a similar function for me. Every time I think I might know what I need to do to build up some momentum on a project, I feel compelled to read blogs or check my email or do any number of small, insignificant tasks. The only work-related things I can actually get done are those that don't require any concentrated effort, and therefore don't lead to much progress. Of course, I'm not starting from genius-level to begin with, so all this procrastination sets me back to incompetence level, rather than merely normal.
My advisor suggested this week that I could just abandon my current project (which should have been completed last year) in favour of getting New, Exciting Project going. I found myself arguing that I could finish this one while getting things reading for NEP, because I don't want to have wasted all this time for nothing*. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time (and it would be, for anyone with reasonable motivation), and my advisor ended up agreeing, but now I'm wondering how I thought I could do two (or possibly three - there's a second NEP) projects at once, when one has been far too much for me so far.


*It doesn't help that two (intimidating) faculty members asked me how my hypothetical paper was going this weekend.