[vidarh]

If you only have two big things you need to get done, that is probably part of your problem. In that case, one of your todo's should probably be to subdivide one or both of them into smaller tasks.

One of my most effective ways of overcoming procrastination in particular is that when I don't want to do something, I force myself to at least spend two minutes splitting at least one task on my todo list into a few smaller tasks. Sooner or later I have enough really small, trivial tasks that it is easy to push through at least some of them.

Sometimes that ends up with stupid levels of details. But often it ends up revealing that part of the reason for procrastinating was that I didn't really know, but maybe had a nagging suspicion of, the level of complexity in a task...

[xjtian]

Sometimes it's not so straightforward to split up large into many small tasks. A lot of the time these steps will depend on other unpredictable factors, which leads to a lot of backtracking and adjusting my to-do list down the road when I should be working.

I'm a fan of iteratively processing my projects, deciding just the next one or two steps every time I process my tasks. I find that if I let my to-do lists balloon in size, I have less motivation to actually clear it out. But that's just me. In the end it's all about making the right decision based on how you know your brain works.