Well, the difficult emotion is often some form of fear. Fear of failing, of making a mistake, in some cases, of making the problem worse. All of these fears are in a fundamental sense legitimate, but the direct solution is, insofar as it is possible, to prepare and practice.
The alternative is to tackle something even harder that includes the thing you want to make as a special case. This is a recent discovery of mine. The pressure of accomplishing the bigger, harder thing can often drive you to simply knock out the smaller thing to get it out of the way, and that's often good enough.
There's an apocryphal story in rabbinical lore about a farmer who's frustrated that his home is so noisy that he can't sleep. The Rabbi sympathizes and tells the farmer to invite another animal into his home night after night. The farmer gets more frantic, angry even that this "solution" isn't working. Then the rabbi tells the farmer to remove all the animals, and the farmer, now in peace and quiet, could fall soundly asleep. The solution above is the same: you don't eliminate the fear, you replace it with a greater fear such that the original fear doesn't seem to matter!
Procrastination for me has nothing to do with fear of failing or making a mistake and is almost entirely about avoiding mental effort. It's akin to avoiding physical exercise.
After reading that article a while back, I started making longer to-do lists. I found that it's hard for me to do a task on a three item to-do list. But if my list has 20 items, it's somehow easier to pick an item from the middle of the list and bang it out.
Amazing that after a distinguished career as a respected philosopy professor at Stanford, Perry's greatest contribution to humanity may be that humorous article on procrastiantion.
> The pressure of accomplishing the bigger, harder thing can often drive you to simply knock out the smaller thing to get it out of the way, and that's often good enough.
That's a really interesting observation, and I recently experienced it I think.
I am installing a new ECU in my car in order to tune it myself, something I'm really looking forward to but is honestly quite daunting and possibly expensive to fail at. The entire time the tuning has been on my mind, I've been learning and doing dozens of little things while installing the ECU. Things I'd normally be a bit worried about. Soldering, wiring, drilling and tapping. I've learned a bunch of new things along the way, none of them tuning. Now I'm at the point where I need to do the tuning and I'm so invigorated by the process of getting here that I feel much more prepared to do it.
Ha, I know that story from the Julia Donaldson kids book (and song) "A Squash and a Squeeze" [1]. So true too. We don't appreciate how good things are, or how much we are capable of, until they get a lot worse.
The alternative is to tackle something even harder that includes the thing you want to make as a special case. This is a recent discovery of mine. The pressure of accomplishing the bigger, harder thing can often drive you to simply knock out the smaller thing to get it out of the way, and that's often good enough.
There's an apocryphal story in rabbinical lore about a farmer who's frustrated that his home is so noisy that he can't sleep. The Rabbi sympathizes and tells the farmer to invite another animal into his home night after night. The farmer gets more frantic, angry even that this "solution" isn't working. Then the rabbi tells the farmer to remove all the animals, and the farmer, now in peace and quiet, could fall soundly asleep. The solution above is the same: you don't eliminate the fear, you replace it with a greater fear such that the original fear doesn't seem to matter!