"If you don't want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you'll end up doing the whole thing."
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/the-5-minute-hack-insta...
For example, if I'm sitting in a chair and I need to do something, I only need to try standing up. I can always sit back down if I don't have the energy to start walking. Most of the time, I keep going. The times I don't, well, I know I tried.
If you can define what trying looks like, then you know when you've tried your hardest and failed through no fault of your own. (For most people, it's a lot more than just five minutes!) Accepting failure makes moving forward in another direction a lot easier. Guilt isn't a good emotion to dwell on.
The important thing with this advice is to remember you probably don't know your limit. Most people keep more energy in reserve than they realize and they can afford to spend that occasionally. This means the advice to push beyond your limit is really good advice for most people. But for many people dealing with chronic health issues, we already tend to push beyond our limits and hurt ourselves. Thus we need the opposite advice. :)
Edit: I should clarify, by "dealing with depression", I mean trying to be productive when you are depressed.
In my case "deal with it" doesn't mean "make me not depressed": I'm still depressed but it does help me turn some some of my bad, hard-to-do-anything days into ok or even occasionally productive ones. And having something useful come out of a day I thought I would be useless is also helpful in fighting depressive thought loops about being a useless/lazy/bad person generally speaking.
Sincerely,
a depressed person
The advice is to break the goal down into the smallest possible pieces and start there. For getting out of bed, I'd probably start with rolling onto my side.
It's not a cure. It's not guaranteed to work. It's a strategy for expending as little energy as possible to get started. If you can focus on one small, actionable item, it can help reduce how overwhelming the entire task feels.
If you don't have the capacity to do something, there is no advice that will make that thing possible and no one should be expecting you to do it.
Procrastinating on filing taxes. Next step is to log in to tax preparation app.
Procrastinating on cleaning office. Next step is to pick up a piece of paper off the desk and throw it away.
Whatever it might be, once I get to something absolutely concrete and absolutely doable... I can usually get started and make some progress.
It's much easier (for me) to procrastinate on "do your taxes" than "log in to tax prep app." Once it's that clear it's like... ok, why procrastinate on that?
I've tried setting timers too, and those help, but I also sometimes turn them off because I'm more focused on something else, and I don't understand what the timer is supposed to mean.
I find a lot of this advice is well intentioned, but it does not solve mental illness.