I can really empathize with the last two paragraphs -- I tend to not emotionally feel so well when I'm trying to optimize hard, because I won't know for a while whether I'm optimizing hard enough. Maybe this is where the whole 'goals' thing comes in -- it seems to be setting up a feeling of 'I will be satisfied if I achieve X', where X is something that you know whether you accomplished.

I'm interested in the structure of your file, as well as the contents of your 'Rules and Heuristics' section -- can you give any more detail on this?