One reason that procrastination is so appealing is that it's designed to be simple and easy to digest.
Mediums like Reddit and Youtube are designed to make it easy, painless, and fun to navigate around them. The learning curve and difficulty of using computers and web applications has come down tremendously, and it's easy and pleasurable to consume on an iPad, Kindle, or through Netflix.
When you tune into one of these channels, confusion melts away. You're given an easy to use interface that plugs you right into fantastic entertainment, relaxation, or semi-productive activities. These can be quite seductive.
Or, even if you're committed to a solid workday, how easy is it to get caught into low-quality time just processing admin and email? That's important to handle, to be sure, but is it really moving your life tremendously forward?
Compare the simple forms of entertainment and low-quality busywork with actually tackling hard problems. With quite hard problems, you might spend 80% to 90% of your time confused and not able to take great action, just trying to think on how you'll tackle the challenge and make progress.
The state of confusion can actually be physically painful. If you've seen a child who has a very difficult time reading, you've seen a facial expression very similar to actual, visceral, physical pain.
Yet, many of the biggest gains in your life will come from breaking through in critical areas that you don't understand yet. There's ways to get great insights here -- speak with mentors and colleagues who have relevant experience, get training, do relevant research and read the right books -- but at the end of the day, you'll have to put solutions to work in your own life, and that means you're going to need to spend some time confused and unsure of what the right course of action is.
And you need to learn to love that confusion.
It's the confused, puzzled, quizzical disentangling and painfully-thinking-through of the world that leads to real breakthroughs. If you haven't been confused lately -- on finance and managing cash, on sales and marketing, on getting great people into your life on a personal or professional level, on keeping morale high, on continually developing your physical health, on questioning your beliefs and refining your ethics, on being organized, on running operations smoothly, on growing, and so on -- then shouldn't that be a warning sign that you're not growing as much as you could be?
It's tempting to run to simple mediums and simple actions. Confusion hurts. But it's where a lot of growth comes from.
Learn to love the confusion and make it your friend. On the other side of the fog is a lot of treasure to be had.