When I'm procrastinating hard on something, my best solution so far is to divide it to lots of tiny action items (~10 minutes each) and commit to doing at least one item every day.
Sometimes that's enough to get me in the mood and I can satisfyingly cross out a dozen items in one go; other times I'm not in the mood, and after just a few minutes I can check the box for the day and move on. The knowledge that in the worst case I'm just literally 10 minutes away from feeling good takes the edge off a lot of causes for procrastination.
Scroll HN for 30 minutes while agonizing on whether to commit to 3 hours of feverish debugging or just have a nice evening? No thanks, I'll just spend a few minutes setting up the debug environment in the most convenient manner possible, or find out just one tricky detail, and deal with the rest in the future.
Of course, not all tasks can be split up like that, YMMV etc.
Edit: if the task is big and just writing the todo list is too daunting, that too can be split up.
Also, despite the simplicity, obviously some days will be missed, and that's perfectly fine. In my mind it's not even "at least one item a day" anymore as much as just making the smallest unit of work less painful than the baseline suffering rate of procrastinating on something.
Sometimes that's enough to get me in the mood and I can satisfyingly cross out a dozen items in one go; other times I'm not in the mood, and after just a few minutes I can check the box for the day and move on. The knowledge that in the worst case I'm just literally 10 minutes away from feeling good takes the edge off a lot of causes for procrastination.
Scroll HN for 30 minutes while agonizing on whether to commit to 3 hours of feverish debugging or just have a nice evening? No thanks, I'll just spend a few minutes setting up the debug environment in the most convenient manner possible, or find out just one tricky detail, and deal with the rest in the future.
Of course, not all tasks can be split up like that, YMMV etc.
Edit: if the task is big and just writing the todo list is too daunting, that too can be split up.
Also, despite the simplicity, obviously some days will be missed, and that's perfectly fine. In my mind it's not even "at least one item a day" anymore as much as just making the smallest unit of work less painful than the baseline suffering rate of procrastinating on something.