How to Get Yourself to Do Things

What seems like a tangled cloud of open-ended old to-dos is actually a series of independent happenings, which are best treated individually.

Once you’re treating each obligation as separate from the whole bundle of “stuff to-do”, you can see that they each have a very predictable life cycle and it brings in the realm of the concrete.

The moment you start acting on something, you are at the beginning of the end of the anxiety associated with that thing.

Many procrastinators are pessimists and overestimate the difficulty of the task they are avoiding. They think doing it is the hard part. But not doing it is much harder.

The moment you start avoiding action again, due to fear or aversion, you are re-entering a nonproductive phase.

Physical action ceases, and pointless overthinking begins.

It comes from a misapprehension of what it will actually be like to do the work.

This anxiety is made of abstract, big-picture emotional concerns, about reputation, legacy, anxiety for the future, self-esteem, comparisons to others — worries about who you are, rather than what you’re doing.

You finish a thing by starting it until it’s done.

Finishing is only a matter of starting from where you are, as many times as you have to until it’s done.