I enjoyed this article by itseieio, ‘Measuring something changes it - and sometimes that’s enough’, and see a lot of it in myself:

So instead of force of will I turned to measurement. I made a simple Google Form with a few questions:

• When did I go to bed?
• When did I wake up?
• Was I tired when I woke up?
• When was I ready to do something (write code, see friends, etc)
• Did I play piano / exercise before starting to do something else?

I committed to non-judgmentally filling this form out every morning. And I waited.

And my behavior began to change! Some of these changes were relatively intuitive to me. I was more conscious of my bedtime and found myself saying “it’s past 1:00 AM, I’m not doing anything worthwhile, and my data will look better if I go to bed.”

But some of my behavior changes surprised me. I was more conscious of how I spent time in the morning, but also conscious of how I’m often not ready to do “hard” things immediately after waking up. Historically I’ve dealt with this by wasting time mindlessly browsing the internet which ~never makes me feel good. But quantifying how much time I’d spent on this each week pushed me to replace that time with something I enjoyed more. Often that was playing a game! Which isn’t a particularly productive activity - but swapping out “mindless browsing” for “playing a fun game” has consistently made my days more enjoyable.

It all makes sense. It’s easy to convince yourself that things aren’t as bad as you might think, but very hard to ignore hard data. Maybe I need to start observing and measuring more of my behavior to get better in control and able to make changes.