Over-planning, overthinking, not happy about it

There are lot of things on my to-do list, and I've started to notice that I get wound up and anxious when progress isn't lining up with my (self-imposed) expectations.

Maybe there's a good reason for not doing something. Maybe I was at work all day and couldn't weed the garden because it started raining. Maybe all the materials for a project are used up and I have to go buy more. Even in situations where I couldn't have done something that day, the pressure creeps up on me and the undone task dominates my thoughts until it gets done.

I also spend much too much time getting ready for doing something. It can be 10 a.m. and I'm at the office, but planning in great detail the sequence of what has to happen when I get home in the afternoon. My brain goes into a loop, going through the plan over and over again. It's like stepping into the starting blocks for a 100 metre dash -- but hours or days before the actual race.

The worst part is when I'm feeling anxious about some difficult part of a task, and start procrastinating rather than doing a tiny part of it. When a deadline looms I usually do get moving and finish on time, but it would be nice to get things done sooner.

What is this? Perfectionism, fear of failure, something else?

I go through something similar. For me, it seems to be a combination of reasons. There is my perfectionism driven by the fear of failure or being judged. Along with it, is the way I think I need to motivate myself. I mentally punish myself with self-criticism and self-judgement when I feel I am not meeting expectations. I think I do that because I believe it will make me more motivated, but I am learning it actually causes me to feel anxious which makes me want to ignore the task (put the anxiety out of my mind) until it reaches the deadline.

I don't think there are a lot of self-criticizing thoughts going on in my particular case. What I do get, though, is a tangible physical reaction with a heavy, tight feeling in my gut. It usually stays with me till I've made a bit of progress on something. It doesn't even have to be the specific work I had planned for that day; it just has to be one of the things that had been on my mind.

I've heard it said that willpower is a limited resource, and even if I have a lot of free time in the evening, I may not have the energy to use that time effectively. Sometimes in the evening I just want to play puzzle-type video games (Spider solitaire and Sudoku are two of my favourites), because there's a high probability of winning and also the challenge of figuring out how to win the game. There's a clue in here somewhere...