I look at whether I need a quick prototype or a long term solution. I find it is much quicker to hack a web based prototype in NodeJS as compared to Java. Also, what kind of UI do we need, most of the times it's a web/javascript based UI then the choice is NodeJS because of seamless data transfer using JSON, other times the backend doesn't necessarily have to talk a lot with UI like Batch jobs and I prefer Java. If I am going to need a lot of CPU intensive jobs where manually spawning multiple threads can be beneficial I would go for Java, NodeJS will not be very beneficial in that case. Other than that it comes to features each language provides, like rich and robust concurrent and collections library of Java. Similarly if a lot of data analysis is required python is a clear choice of many, again because of the rich data analysis libraries.
Agree with you, one of the first thing for me to beat procrastination was to stop wasting time on useless things like checking facebook/twitter every 5 mins and getting rid of the FOMO completely, this is easier said that done, but feels great once achieved. i removed facebook and twitter from my phone, put your phone to Do not disturb and suddenly i have all the time in the world. I use this time to think/plan and create efficient habits/methodologies to beat procrastination.
I totally agree with most of the points Laurie made, specially I hate the new trend of asking people for an online coding test before even talking to a person. I have worked on a ton of complex problems in life and in real world you never have to write 4 complex tree traversal algorithms using the best possible approach in under 60 minutes, never!
my experience is that I am mostly happy where I am, and I am not in market when I am Happy, but when I am not happy, I want to get out asap and wait times as high as a month is a real turn off