i have this habit of not letting myself do a thing i really want to do until the work i don't want to do is done.

this served me well in college and i think it's ok if the things you don't want to do are fairly limited in scope -- like writing that one paper, or maybe paying the bills or washing the dishes.

but i find that it's contributing to very bad burnout now, at a stage in my life when the things i don't want to do are very large in scope (indexing a 1000 page book, for ex).