"When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it."

--Lois McMaster Bujold

I really like this post; I think it highlights an important problem. I just want to add one step to this: quite often it is very difficult to notice that you aren't thinking about something. I've started trying to overcome this by noticing problems that I am not DOING anything about, and asking myself why I am not doing anything about them. If the answer is "I'm lazy" (to the question of "why aren't I doing the laundry?", e.g.) I don't worry about it, but if the answer is "because I don't know how to solve it" I start paying more attention. The problems which you "don't know how" to solve are quite often the ones with learned blankness... the answer is more correctly quite often "because I haven't thought about it." But, as in most things, noticing an absence is more difficult than noticing a presence.