the way you see the problem IS the problem
Brent said:
Regarding my definition of inboxes: I do see every blog in the world as a potential inbox.
Well, right off the bat, see
no blogs as “inboxes” and you’ll make a giant leap toward fixing your problem.
Katherine is right. You are procrastinating. Even if you are not aware that you intend to put off other work, the bottom line is that you are. And procrastination often takes the form of doing easy, low-payoff activities rather than the important, high-leverage ones. It's not the absence of all activity: that's called death.
However, a bigger problem is that
you don’t know exactly what you are putting off. Maybe you're putting off defining and committing to some challenging goals. I hate to say it, but there you are missing the point of GTD. One of GTD’s major successful outcomes is to be fully aware of what one is committed to. You are not aware of what you’re committed to. It’s time to examine your application of GTD to see why you’re not achieving that successful outcome.
If excessive focus were the only problem, a solution would be to set a timer before you go online, then force yourself to review your NA lists and even project lists when the timer goes off. In theory, that 'interrupt' strategy should force you out of your state. But I have a gut feeling that it won’t work because I'm guessing there are deeper roots to the behavior.
The key symptom IMO is rationalizing. Your definitions of “task” and “inbox” are so generic that they are not useful; in fact, your definitions are counter-productive. Your idea of “task” seems to be anything and everything, including low-effort, low-importance, low-urgency, low-impact activities like reading Google News and various blogs. Repeatedly checking websites as you described in your initial post is NOT focusing on a project. You are kidding yourself.
You have taken the concept of “inbox,” a little piece of the GTD productivity puzzle, and mis-applied it to every source of data, even data that is 1) directed at the whole world, not specifically to you; and 2) not likely to be actionable or to support completion of meaningful, important projects. Your outcomes of blog processing, for example, mainly appear to be a) printing and filing for future reference, and b) doing more "research" -- i.e., a self-perpetuating collection loop!
By inflating web sources of information like news and blogs to the status of inbox, you risk becoming a passive collector of other people’s ideas rather than a proactive achiever of your own goals.
The outcome is that you are overly dependent on bottom-up inputs while being unaware of higher-level goals. My gut feeling is that the root of the problem is not being committed to meaningful, important, inspiring, and challenging higher-level goals. Your Weekly Review you described on another thread does not seem to include much thought about higher-level goals either. In terms of the GTD model, what are you committed to at 50,000 feet? 40,000? 30,000? 20,000? And be brutally honest, how well are your projects and actions achieving those higher-level goals?
If you fully commit to clear, meaningful, and compelling goals and review them frequently, you won't lose sight of them when you go online unless you have a clinical problem. You may avoid them at times, but you'll know what you're avoiding.
But of course, I could be wrong. Especially if there are other critical factors you're not telling us about. ("Oh didn't I mention, I've been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder". . .) I am not trying to be obnoxious here; I've had this experience on forums where someone asks for advice for what seems to be a simple, common problem with straightforward solutions, but it turns out it is a much deeper problem.
At least it scratches to itch to see what's new out there.