you've just obviated tons of approaches to procrastination. I can't believe how obvious this is in retrospect. thanks, you may very well have significantly changed my life.

I'm not quite so positive about that. Despite Eliezer's enthusiasm for having a deep theory that explains everything, it can be a lot less useful in practice. In this particular case, all I've explained is the difference between what works and what doesn't, not how to get from one to the other!

There is a little bit more that I wrote about this in a recent blog article, How We Get Stuck. But probably more to the point is that you need to know how not to believe your "meta" thoughts, which can easily trick you into imagining something else.