Procrastination is a more general concept. Idea Debt, as described in the article, is a particular cause / 'method' of procrastination.

I do about 3 hours of legit work when I'm in my usual situation (family, work), but I do way more when I'm alone, both on- and off-the-grid: 12 hours or even more (of course assuming that the problem I'm working on is workable and I don't hit any serious brick walls). My last superfocus period lasted for about two weeks, it happened when my family went on vacation, and I took a mini-vacation from work myself (though the task I was working on was pretty trivial). My longest superfocus period was about 45 days, it happened on a long off-the-grid vacation.

I stopped reading political news 2.5 years ago, and haven't looked back since. I now view news as an addiction, similar to fast food, alcohol or gambling. I occasionally consume a bit of political news here and there, and it always leaves a bad taste in my "mental mouth", almost physically, as if I've eaten something too big and sugary to be healthy.

(This is despite the fact that I live in Russia, a country in which news seemingly have higher survival value than in developed countries. Plus, I live in a region bordering eastern Ukraine, which now flickers between a failed gangster state and an active war zone -- and I have relatives living there, right on the front line between the Ukrainian army and the rebels! Instead of reading the news, I just call them and check up on them directly.)

My strategy for getting important news is:

• Have friends and talk to them occasionally.
• Have relatives and talk to them occasionally.
• Have coworkers and talk to them occasionally.
• Ride in taxicabs and talk to the drivers occasionally.

Or, if you are not a social person:

• Don't be a hikikomori and go out occasionally.
• Browse the Internet occasionally.

If there's a high-impact event happening around you, you just won't miss it, even you don't talk to anyone. You'll overhear people talking about the event, you'll see threads with huge karma on the front pages of Hacker News and Reddit, you'll have your aunt calling you about that. I don't think you'd be able to miss 9/11 or Katrina during the days they were happening.

Edit: I just noticed that my strategy for getting meaningful news boils down to this:

• Talk to people, or
• Observe people talking.

This applies to any news domain: general news, professional news etc. Personally, I think it is safe to disengage from general-life communities (e.g. Facebook) but not from professional communities (e.g. Hacker News, CGTalk etc.). This way you'd get ultra-high-impact general news, and all high-impact professional news. If you're in science, I don't think that you had any chance of not seeing CRISPR on the front page of your community. If you're in tech, you certainly couldn't miss the Snowden story. And you wouldn't miss 9/11 in both these communities.

Edit2: Here's an even simpler strategy:

• Be available to people.

If a news item is of any importance, it will hit you from multiple directions. My personal recent example is the european refugee problem. I heard about it from three separate sources: Reddit, a friend in Germany and a local friend addicted to news.

Buy and read this book right now: "No More Mr. Nice Guy" by Robert Glover

(I can't tell from your post whether you are male or female, but it doesn't matter. The book is equally good for either.)

In essence, this book may help you learn how to stop being a victim, how to set your own limits, and how to get your own needs met. It also may inoculate you against getting into future relationships like this.

I don't have a blog or even Twitter for it yet, and I guess I need to set these up, but I still haven't came up with the final product name. (Am I yak-shaving? Maybe it would be better to just start blogging and worry about the name later?)

Just checked out Google Calendar and indeed, it handles recurring tasks much better than most todo apps I've seen. When I enter a recurring task, it fills it into my future schedule, and lets me edit a concrete instance of that task, as opposed to editing the entire future schedule. Thanks for the tip!

As for Todoist and other features: does it allow to dismiss a dateless task temporarily without making it dateful? I have Todoist installed on my phone but haven't found how to do that.

Haha, thanks, but I already specced out and outsourced Stage 1 of the MVP :)))

Anyway, here's what I find lacking in other personal Todo apps:

1. Recurring Task Fragility

I rely on recurring / repeating tasks a lot, I use them to automate my life. The problem is, in most todo apps recurring tasks are too brittle.

For example, I have a task on 15th of each month. One month I decide to do it earlier, on 12th of the month. The natural way would be to just reassign the due date from 15th to 12th, but doing that would change the recurrence condition of the task: it will now recur on 12th of each month! And God forbid I delete the task because I don’t need it this month -- this would delete all future recurrences!

Because of all this, I’m forced to walk on eggshells around recurring tasks. I’m afraid to treat them as normal tasks. I can’t rename them, can’t delete them, can’t move them to another list, can’t change the due date.

This happens because most todo apps conflate the recurring task instance with the definition of recurring task. I want to de-conflate these concepts. In my app, the recurrence logic is defined by a Schedule Item, which ‘spawns’ recurring task instances that can be deleted, modified, renamed etc. You won’t accidentally change the recurrence settings of a task by editing it in the task list. If you want to modify the recurrence settings, go to Schedule and do that explicitly.

(As a bonus, in the above system all recurring tasks will be visible in one place, the Schedule. This is essentially my life program, my human crontab. I like the ability to edit my life in one place.)

(And there’s another bonus to this system: forward visibility of recurring tasks. Most todo apps don’t display recurring tasks in forecast views. My app will. When you define a Schedule Item in Schedule, the recurring tasks ‘spawned’ by it will be visible across the entire future timeline. That is, you can literally look at the day Sep 1st 3215 and see that you have to walk the dog, buy the groceries and arrange a check up with the doctor.)

2. Due Date Pollution

My personal productivity system is closer to Autofocus than to GTD, so when I have a task in my list, and don’t want or cannot do it at the moment, I want it to temporarily disappear from my list until I’m ready to do it.

The only way to “disappear” a task in most todo apps is to set its Due Date to Tomorrow or such, but if I do this to a dateless task, it would become dateful! Why the hell must I make my dateless tasks dateful just to dismiss them for a while?

A Due Date should only be used on tasks that must be done on that specific date, so it doesn’t make any sense on dateless tasks. Which brings us to the next topic, Dismiss:

3. Proper Dismiss.

So, to combat Due Date Pollution, I need a proper Dismiss Until command that hides the task until some condition is met without making the task dateful. For example, Dismiss Until Tomorrow Morning, or Dismiss Until September 1st, 2015. I would like this function to be easily accessible, for example via the swipe-away gesture on list items.

Now, Dismiss Until Tomorrow is nice, and Dismiss Until Evening is great, but I also want Dismiss until I’m at Work, Dismiss until I’m in Boston, Dismiss until I’m near Bob Smith, or even Dismiss Until (NASDAQ:AAPL < 100) AND (Weather in Moscow is Good). Which brings us to our next topic, Contexts and Triggers:

4. Contexts and Triggers

For example, I have a task which I want to do only on workdays, in the evening and outside of work. When these conditions are met, I want the task to be visible in my list, and otherwise it should stay hidden.

To implement this, my app will have an Active When field, which can specify activation conditions for the task. For the above task, that would be something along the lines of @workday AND @evening AND (NOT @work).

@work, @evening and @workday are Triggers. The terminology is not final, and I don’t yet know how to call them, but essentially Triggers are boolean functions that can be incorporated into tasks in order to activate them when certain events happen.

Triggers can also be used in Dismiss Until command, and I plan a version of Schedule based on Triggers. That is, you can specify conditions, and when these conditions are met, a specified task will appear in your task list.

5. Multi-line Todo Items.

I need multi-line todo items in order to word my tasks properly. A task titled “Widgets!” is much less meaningful than a task “Decide which Widget to buy. Ask Bob, he’s the expert on Widgets.” This may sound trivial, but many popular todo apps display todo items as single-line -- and Wunderlist is among them!

I’m not worried about the screen real estate occupied by multiline items. The primary way to consume a todo app these days is mobile, and scrolling on mobile is effortless.

So, to sum up, this is a hybrid of a todo app and IFTTT / Tasker for humans. I don’t think that there’s currently anything on the market that offers that. Anyway, the work is already underway, and the MVP should be ready by the end of the year. I’ll announce it here on Lesswrong.