I have struggled with this problem for all of my academic and professional career. It was only until this year until I finally started addressing it. After a lot of thought and reading, I've found that I procrastinate for the following reasons:
1) The task is mundane or repetitive.
2) I think the task is trivial. "Oh, thats something I can bang out in a few hours, and I've got all week to work on it"
3) There is a tricky problem within the task that I haven't figured out yet.
The key to it all was realizing I'm not as smart as I think I am. I needed to make a plan. This is hard, I've never kept an appointment book, I don't make to do lists, those are for dumb people. Not me, I can reason out any problem and keep track of it in my head! Bullshit.
Sit down with a pencil and a stack of paper. Draw your problem out. Make a list of all the gotchas. Make a list of all the 'easy' things. Quickly you start to realize that even with trivial problems, there is a lot of stuff to do. Yeah, you are smart, so most of those things will only take 2 minutes, but when you see them all laid out on paper, they add up. Oh shit, no time for you tube. I've actually thought about the problem, I've got skin in the game now, I've got some motivation.
When you started this trivial task of making a plan, you thought it would take 5 minutes because you are so damn smart. Two hours later you are still pushing papers around your kitchen table. Revising, looking for the common connections, refactoring, making a better list, making better software.
1) The task is mundane or repetitive.
2) I think the task is trivial. "Oh, thats something I can bang out in a few hours, and I've got all week to work on it"
3) There is a tricky problem within the task that I haven't figured out yet.
The key to it all was realizing I'm not as smart as I think I am. I needed to make a plan. This is hard, I've never kept an appointment book, I don't make to do lists, those are for dumb people. Not me, I can reason out any problem and keep track of it in my head! Bullshit.
Sit down with a pencil and a stack of paper. Draw your problem out. Make a list of all the gotchas. Make a list of all the 'easy' things. Quickly you start to realize that even with trivial problems, there is a lot of stuff to do. Yeah, you are smart, so most of those things will only take 2 minutes, but when you see them all laid out on paper, they add up. Oh shit, no time for you tube. I've actually thought about the problem, I've got skin in the game now, I've got some motivation.
When you started this trivial task of making a plan, you thought it would take 5 minutes because you are so damn smart. Two hours later you are still pushing papers around your kitchen table. Revising, looking for the common connections, refactoring, making a better list, making better software.