I might have cracked the procrastination nut.
One of the things that's plagued me for years is that a heavy, intense period of doing lots of good stuff is frequently followed by a crash.
The crash partially negates the gains from having a good period. If you put in an excellent, intense four days of creative work, that's good. But if you can't look at your work and projects for half a week afterwards, you negate some of that progress as compared to just slowly, steadily putting in time.
What's worse is that, for me, the crashes tended to be full-on, nothing-valuable-happening. I don't mean not working. I mean nothing valuable. When I'd crash, I'd usually not be reading good books, spending time in nature on the beach, or whatever. It'd be more like getting into high stimulation distraction, where it sucks your time without giving you anything back. Without even recharging you, even.
So, I started looking at how crashes come on.
For me, it's usually not, "I feel exhausted, I'm going to take a couple days off." I actually don't mind when I do that, and taking a couple days off usually works well.
More like, I've been really blazing fast on a project for five days in a row, many hours a day, and on day six I get stumped. Then I say, "okay, I'm just going to take a short break" and I click over to - Hacker News, or... whatever.
And then it's 10 hours later and the day is shot. Yucky.
Partially, I think the problem was, on day six I'd be trying to keep going on whatever project I'm on. So instead of saying, "Okay, I'm going to shift gears for a little bit," I'd say, "I'm just going to take a break." But then the break lasts a couple days.
So I'm rolling a new way of doing things - my new mantra for the area is, "anything valuable" - for a while, I was prioritizing the most important things to make sure I didn't do busywork instead of the most important and meaningful stuff.
That's not really a problem any more. I shifted gears upwards in that department, but now I'm getting a mix of valuable stuff and the occasional totally useless crash time. (Again, real relaxation isn't useless - it's great. Crashes tend to not be really relaxing and rejuvenating)
New way of dealing with it? Anything valuable. I'm not forcing myself to do any one project right now at any time unless a deadline is looming. So if I'm not feeling it, or not creative, or not high will, or whatever - well, that's okay. I can pre-cook a bunch of food, clean, catch up on phone calls, research some of the next stuff I'll be working on, etc. Anything I've deemed valuable in advance.
It's new, but so far it's working quite well. There's always a boost from getting on a new initiative, but I think even once the novelty wears up I'm going to pick up a few hours a week that would be spent in burnt out vegetation state and put it into reading, researching, general little life stuff, errands, catching up with people, etc.
A few hours a week? I'll take it. New mantra: "Anything valuable."