> In my case I have a "fear of getting started".

There's a book by the guy who ported R-Type (an old arcade game) to the ZX Spectrum (an ancient 8-bit computer). It doesn't look like much today, but at the time the port was a huge technical accomplishment (the arcade game had special hardware for sprites, tiles and scrolling, while the Spectrum was underpowered even by the standards of its era). I like this quote from the book:

> I'd been working on the game for about two and a half months and I knew I could handle everything to come, I didn't know how I would but it was that psychological boost at work again saying "oh you'll work that out when you come to it, don't worry" - so I didn't. If you're not careful you can spend more time worrying if you're capable of doing something rather than trying it and finding out for sure, something I've unfortunately seen happen to other game coders and the half completed programs they've left behind as self-doubt overrode everything else.

Part of it is detangling the emotional aspect from the operational aspect.

If you're procrastinating because of your fear of failure or because you think you'll look bad in front of your boss then no amount of planning is going to help you stop procrastinating unless that planning is helping you convince yourself that you won't fail.

In the same way, if you're lost and don't know what to do motivating yourself emotionally isn't going to help unstick you unless it results in your figuring out how to tackle the problem.

Watch your mind, figure out what it's running away from and tackle it at _that_ level, 9/10 times it's not the work as we can plainly see by the fact that once we start we can usually finish and get good results.

The other thing is that as crotchety as this sounds, put down the phone and other things that yank your attention around during the day. Re-learning how to focus on something past the first sign of uncomfortableness is a crucial skill for all of this.

I really like James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. While it doesn’t specifically discuss procrastination in detail it does have some incredibly well thought out ideas for building good habits and breaking bad ones.

I have a similar attitude of procrastination and overplanning. My solution is to go really aggressively overboard with the planning, I create big outlines of all the necessary steps, in a fractal way, until I arrive at all these small things that can be assembled later. Then I start with the ones that promise some fun, and fill in the rest.

Having said that, a lot of that doesn't get completed still. Procrastination isn't always bad, it can also tell you that something isn't actually necessary or promising. So if that sets in after the first steps, I'll happily abandon the project.

Usually projects that include external feedback or motivation won't get abandoned that easily, obviously.

That's tough, I've been there for sure. Personally I migrated and molded my career to better fit my psychology. This pretty much ended procrastination as a work issue, though every once in a while there's a real tough setup.

I also built a productivity system around the concept of modular leverage as opposed to using the same tools every time.

But it turns out there are whole careers and things that can be done at/for work that are a better/worse fit for just about everybody. The worse-fit items are natural to procrastinate, no matter how many productivity methods you have. So at some point it's important to be able to set a boundary and loudly proclaim, "this isn't working."

(Also I got kind of upset about the word procrastination itself. There are often other words which fit better and help to understand and solve the problem faster.)

See my comment about Neil Fiore's book above, I strongly suggest you read the book.

Secondly - I think the unschedule would help a lot. Having a 10 minute ping that says "Hey! Feel bad and stop being lazy!" sounds incredibly harsh to me.

Same here.

I fight it by doing something - anything - that will help me when I'm ready to start. I'll clean my workspace, gather the tools, start the IDE, write down the phone number, etc. I often end up tackling the whole task this way.

In the long run, it also pays to make projects easy to pick up again. It's harder to cook when the kitchen is dirty, to read when you lost your page, or to code when starting the project involves 20 different commands.

I sometimes start by cleaning up the worst of the code around the spot where I'm going to work, then once my brain has gotten used to that piece of code I am supposed to fix.

Works for me but the sequence of fixing formatting and small stuff first and bugs second might drive some coworkers mad :-]

One thing that worked for me was to have a friend hold me accountable if I didn't work a certain number of hours per day. My punishment for not working enough was that I'd owe him money.

Ideally you want to get to a point where you're able to hold yourself accountable, but I'm not entirely convinced most people are able to do that reliably, sustained indefinitely.

>I read every one of these articles, and some help a little, but most don't. I know it's me, not them.

I have every one of these articles opened as Tabs........ which I will read about how to not procrastinate some day.....