Not getting things done...

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Does anyone else find that they have trouble getting everyday things done in the sense that they keep getting distracted by other things instead?

For example I keep meaning to get some house work sorted out but I seem to keep getting distracted by one of my hobbies or the internet or even my own thoughts instead. The result is that the tasks get forgotten about. By the time I get around to thinking about having a go at them there is so much to do that I end up not knowing where to start with it. So I stand there, stare at it, faff about it for a while, get fed up and then get distracted again or give up.

Sometimes I just end up going for a nap (I always seem to be sleepy to one degree or another).

I can improve things by using routine but unfortunately that won't always work as I can get so into things that I lose track of time and forget to do the routines anyway sometimes (depends if its routine or a sameness...they are different things to me. A routine always translates to my brain as boring chore and sameness is something I like the same over and over and over again. I most certainly do not consider my samenesses to be boring chores!).

Is that a me thing? A depression thing? an general human thing? Anyone else have the same problem? Anyone relate?

Yes, I can relate.

I have always had an extreme aversion to certain kinds of bring task. Certain things seem like an insult to life.
Unfortunately, I am good at evading them, even when they are things that have to be done.

Yes that is me and it is getting worse due to lack of routine and more distractions these days. It is a executive function disorder a trait of autism.

I make sure that I do household things that I have to do like cleaning.

When I don't do it, it's because I am verry merry berry busy, but when I clear the things that I am busy with, I make sure to do household things that I didn't do before.

There is one task that I actively avoid, which is washing my car myself, but rain is the forecast for Monday, and if it doesn't materialize, a trip through the drive thru carwash is fun.

As for what kind of thing it is, probably general human thing, and people have to develop habits to do boring chores.

I wonder if this is the adult version of the problems I have read about parents having with their Aspie children doing homework and chores.

I tend to wake up and know everything that needs to be done and at what time it all needs to be completed but no matter what i always scramble at the last minutes to get things done becasue as i go throughout the day i will do little senseless things but they become very important to me... such as i went into my garage to smoke last night and i have sum sticks in there i use for fire wood and i seen some sand paper and i decided to start sanding this stick and then i thought to myself well why dont i try to get this stick as smooth as possible and it turned into a 2.5 hour long episode of sanding and smoking cigarettes needless to say i had thought 30 or so minutes had passed at most...

I have this issue. I was told that it's because of ADD.

I have the same thing. I have been meaning to hoover my bedroom in my accommodation at work for the past couple of weeks and I wake up every day meaning to do it and then get distracted.

That happens to me. What I do now is clean up little things before it gets bad. For example, the bathroom sink used to always be wet and would mold because my stupid landlord refused to put caulking around the faucet. I keep a rag in there to wipe it every time I go to the bathroom. The result is I have to clean a lot less. I do similar tasks with the shower, toilet, floors, and kitchen. If there is a mess, I wipe it up and spray a cleaner on it before it gets horrible. What also helps me is hanging up a chart and making a list of, at maximum, 3 things a day to do. I set a time to do these chores. I find it hard to just randomly get up and start doing chores unless it's planned out. It also helps with being overwhelmed.

It's normal to some degree, I suppose;

it happens to me, too. I have the tendency to either not do things, or completely overdo them.
I don't clean for months, then suddenly everything needs to look perfect.
I don't put makeup on and hardly brush my hair for weeks - then I style myself perfectly for a few days.
I remember having to write a 15 page term paper about two years back;
It was about astrophysics, and within that direction a complicated topic I knew nothing about.
We had 6 month to do the research & the writing and formating; I did it all in 24 hours, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't get myself to do ANYTHING earlier. I'd rather sit there and stare at the wall for hours while a topic related book lay right in front of me. I borrowed books and didn't read them, I wrote to-to lists but didn't do anything.
The result was one of the most horrible days +night of my life, with neverending panic attacks, unable to calm down because I had a damn good reason to panic.
It was the same with pretty much every test I've written over the past 5 year, except I often couldn't even study for those last minute, so I went completely unprepared.

The way I live, I look, I think - everything is affected by this.
You're definitly not alone, which doesn't really make this suck less, unfortunately.

Certainly sounds familiar. I can generally keep personal hygiene under control (though I am rather scruffy and unshaven, I'm at least clean with clean clothes), but my apartment looks like an unmitigated disaster. I keep putting off simple things like clothes shopping. (It still makes me very uncomfortable that garments aren't eternal... not the only inanimate objects I get so attached to either)

This operating by free association or in long chains that some people describe in the thread is what I'm like, to be sure. While it can get me way off the rails in any given context, it sometimes seems to work in my favour on the job. I need to set up system X? Let's see what's involved... oh, it needs component Y, best read up on that... Y won't work without Z... etc.

For things that aren't structured like that, though, it just tends to lead to me goofing off unintentionally, which can be very hard to resist.

It's called executive dysfunction and a very common autism trait.
I have it bad.
I'm trying to beat it, however, and I've sort of invented a few ways that work well.
Try making a timetable from scratch and print it out. Color or label the time slots that are already occupied. The remaining are your so called free time...the time slots you can utilize to do stuff. Don't make plans just yet...observe very carefully how you use all this time ands. write them down in the blanks.
At the end of the day, ask yourself if you finished your to-do list. If not, how far did you go?Grade yourself from 1%-100% using a objective rubric, like five points for this time slot and ten for the other etc...this makes the entire thing fun and challenging. THEN make a preliminary plan for tomorrow. Observe how well you follow the plan and try to improve a little every day. You can mark your progress with the grades.
At the very end(I'm not there yet) the goal is to be able to set your schedule and follow it every single day without procrastination.
For kicks, maybe toss some other random things into the mix like writing down what you ate for each meal and how much you spent
In short, routine. Hard core routine. Slice your time into 15 minute slots if needed.

Hope this helped. It did for me.