Robot mode

Most of the time, we want to keep our reflective self engaged, that part of us that keeps a watchful eye over our actions and occasionally pipes up with "hey, is this really the thing you should be doing? Is this really the right way to do it?" The rest of us is usually content to just do things and not worry too much about the bigger picture, but that makes it easy to end up stuck in dead ends or bad decisions caused by just blindly going from one step to the next.

At its best, that judgemental process also keeps you connected with the experience of what you're doing. You tend to ask "is this a good experience?", which is a way of reflecting on your own feelings about the thing you're doing, and telling you whether you should actually keep doing it. This is also important to avoid getting stuck in doing something you actually don't want to do, but seemed like a good idea at the time.

Unfortunately, sometimes you want to do something that is unpleasant or mundane. That doesn't mean you've made some kind of terrible mistake, just that, in the service of something you do want, this particular step is not terribly enjoyable. However, that feeling is essentially generated by reflection. Washing a dish or renaming a bunch of files by hand is not unpleasant as dictated by the laws of the universe, but unpleasant as dictated by your judgement of it.

The trick, then, is to get those unpleasant tasks to a point where they require no decisions and no judgement at all. If you completely specify what you need to do, to the point where the non-reflective, automatic part of yourself is doing all the work, then your reflective mind can just take a break, or think about something else. It doesn't need to be engaged in what you're doing, and that takes away the unpleasantness.

So I suggest maintaining a relationship between enjoyableness and specficity. If you're doing something you really like, leave it unspecified so you can enjoy the feeling of exploring it and thinking about how you're doing it. If the opposite, just specify everything in as much detail as you need to switch off.