Organize your backlog
Most people have a backlog, if not a catalog of sorts for gaming and all that, myself included.
I also have an extremely hard time setting out to play games to begin with. On the verge of ridiculousness, I'm someone who gets nasty choice paralysis when I choose to play a game, too.
I've managed to make it much easier, however, by organizing my catalog. I've broadly divided the games I own into the following categories:
- Playing
- To Play
- To Play Later
- Multiplayer: In Rotation
- Multiplayer: Out of Rotation
- Shelved
- Retired
Fairly self-explanatory, but retired is a bit of a different one because it's just "Done playing X game with no end point", for example, a party game. It's called that to line up with the categories on Backloggd, which is another way of doing the same thing I've done within Steam.
Especially great is "playing", which I've found had a fairly quick and positive impact on my mindset and ability to play; by narrowing it down to just that category, I've made the decision much smaller, and so it's become much easier.
It bugs me that this is just a choice matrix on a slightly larger scale, and that I could've totally made the connection sooner, but there's no real sense trying to rationalize it, it's really not a big deal. It's actually pretty nice that we're pattern-brained in that way, since that means it works — at the end of the day, that's what counts, I suppose.