Ok, so are you a student? Office worker also doing music? Entrepreneur? Like depending on what kinds of things you are actualy dealing with it's hard to suggest anything.
Here's where I'm at in the same theme:
I would love to spend all my time with music. I would be a full time music student, I guess. I am in my fifties, so I can aim to learn and develop as much as possible, but regardless of the potential I have (and apparently it exists, I'm told, possibly not in a small measure) I will never reach things I would have if I had started at a young age. I can't stand doing everything amateurishly through guesswork. I am good at winging it for many things, but I would like to have proficiency and some kind of expertise, i.e. properly learned and taught, in music. That is the thing of choice. It will not turn into a career. I might teach some time far in the future. I can't even think that far. All I want to do right now is learn mentally and physically. That's what drives me.
Except ..... I have to earn money, pay bills, and what I "have to do" takes time away from what I want to do.
There are some issues that I have to take care of, decisions to make, people to talk to, and these things will create changes where I want them so I can come closer to what I want to do. Among others, the music thing needs some kind of support - I can't be teaching myself - and things have to happen here and in areas affecting it. This part is taking up a lot of my time because decision-making is hard. This is where I'm writing on the boards, procrastinating, while my thoughts flow together. It's not that productive. But I can accept the state of flux because it's part of the process. I go off and do these senseless things like writing in forums, and when I stop it seems my thoughts have clarified a bit more.
The thing is that I know roughly what I want to be doing, and while I started by being dissatisfied with the status quo, I'm not staying there. It took a while to define what I wrote about and this organizing, deciding, arranging part is the hard part. It's time consuming, slow moving - I'm often frustrated and irritated, but I've had to accept that it (I) won't move faster than snail's pace for this part and that's just how it is. Once my pieces are in place, that stage will be done with.
Roughly having the various goals in place, there will have to be routines of some kind, some kind of a flexible structure that can be bent totaly out of shape but it will be there. The first thing was knowing what I want to do (sort of). I would be unmotivated and unable to get much done if I resigned myself to the status quo. I have to make changes.
So that's the hard part, what I just wrote about.
In "regular life" there are the regular unroutine-routines. I have to fit the decision-making arranging part into it. These are the things we can avoid forever and it's hard to get ourselves into gear for them. It is a decision to work on them and bring them forward. When a decision is made, it can be acted on. Decision making is uncomfortable. I'm forcing myself like my own taskmaster.
Then there is "life". If a translation job comes in I have to do it, and it has to be professional, with full concentration and absolute accuracy. My mind has to be totally on it. I respond to that by being as efficient as possible so that I can maximize my time. I also have a working routine - three steps - and I simply go through those steps. It's like being on automatic. The reward is getting done, seeing that it's an excellent job, and knowing that I will get paid. In self-employment there is at least that: your actions are immediately linked to reward (payment) while if you are salaried you get paid no matter what you do.
I have a routine with part of my music. Theory and piano, though piano is not my main instrument. The main instrument is part of the flux and issue so it's sitting aside for the moment until I can get my act and situation together. I have the things I am working on stacked in a certain way. I have a list of my routine taped to the wall, about 5 things, and some time during the day I go through them. For some reason this keeps me steady. I'm working on the things that are personally important to me, and there is progress. It allows me to work on the things that I don't like doing.
I think the fact that I am doing what I want to do each day is the key. I have established these as important, priority, and not trivial.
What is the killer is when I can only do music in small bits and pieces. Not much can be accomplished that way. I think that this is something you mentioned. In my case, however, I know that I will have days in which huge chunks of time are available. I am not on a relentless hamster wheel. I think the "daily grind" is what wears people down. I don't have that, but with enterpreneurship I have also placed myself in a state of insecurity. I never know when the next job will come in, how large it will be, how much I will earn in a given month.
I spent a fair amount of time analyzing where I was at, what I wanted, what the options were, where changes were needed. Sometimes the changes were not externally but within routines, or attitudes, or time organization, or "having too much stuff". Now I'm at the stage of putting some of that into action and since change is scary this is where the procrastination is coming in.
Can you use any of this?
Topic: How to work on tedious projects?