The scanner doesn’t care about your mood. Start anyway and let the mood catch up.

Motivation is not a requirement for starting, though it often pretends to be. The work in front of you is indifferent to how you feel about it, and that indifference is quietly good news: you can begin without first fixing your mood. Action tends to drag feeling along behind it, a few minutes late. Waiting for the feeling first is how whole afternoons disappear.

Next time you are stalling, give it four minutes of the most boring version of the task. Open the file, stack the first ten boxes, play the first line. Decide after those four minutes whether you still want to stop.