OK, even I am getting buzzed at how these blatant self-advertisment-wrapped-in-a-cutesy-blog don't even take the time to write a proper blog post with at least 1 nugget of interesting information.

Frank note to author: This is not the way to grow your startup. Hacker news visits are fun for getting a few comments, but they are useless in growing your startup. Even more frank note to author: the startup idea isn't quite appealing or even original.

I have a similar issue with reading and writing (instead of doing more pertinent things). My current self assessment is that I'm adept at these things and they give me quick psychological rewards for delivering some kind of result/output. The tasks that are really important, require learning, or have a lot of ambiguity have long, big reward cycles, which I think make us averse to them by nature.

I feel your pain, that is me too most of the time. That said I'm the only technical person around to fix these things, so I often can't step back and spend time sorting out the big things, or even figuring out how to prioritize things in the most efficient way. I think a big part of the problem, for me, is that it's hard to switch between the focus of coding and other things like people management and creative thinking about marketing. Personally, my solution is to get a good project manager involved. Someone who has technical aptitude so they understand the issues, but also able to gauge and manage the priorities of the people and everything else that matter. That way it simplifies your time management around coding and that type of problem solving.

Its after 2PM here and I was just saying to my lab-mate that I might as well head home since I haven't done anything useful yet today, but instead I opened up HN and found this!

I get that too. I think another reason is that I've been programming for so long that I have that defined as work in my head. I am good at it and I can make visible progress when programming. Taking meetings, doing marketing and similar tasks are much harder to quantify and thus I can do an entire day of that kind of work and still feel guilty about not having done anything.

At least coding is improving the product. There's plenty of advice on what the critical path to success is - that isn't.