I concur. If you schedule in advance, it's much easier to break through the initial emotional barrier of starting the thing you're anxious about.

I used to hate scheduling, now I swear by it. The change was entirely in my understanding what "scheduling" means. I used to treat this as iron-strong commitments. Those made me dislike scheduling because I felt I'm losing autonomy over my own life. Now, I treat scheduling in advance as my best-effort plan for efficiently doing what I want, subject to revision at any point I deem necessary. I found allowing myself to shuffle the schedule around as I need made it feel liberating, and my worries about losing autonomy pretty much disappeared.

You may want to try SkedPal. The Fuzzy Planning behind it works exactly as you described. http://www.skedpal.net/help/skedpal-basic-scheduling-concept...

Depends on what makes you happy, though. If you focus on the satisfaction of crossing a dreaded task off the list after you've been avoiding it for a few days, that can make the task an attractive choice.