I tend to think of my procrastination not as avoiding important work, but work that is of unknown difficulty. If I don&#x27;t know how hard something is to do, then I can&#x27;t predict how long it would take. I could budget 15 minutes for it and it could end up taking 4 hours.<p>That so very rarely ever actually happens, but that is the feeling I get when I stare at my TODO list. The solution is often to create a task just for analyzing the complexity of another task, to be able to break it up into sub tasks.<p>For example: &quot;do taxes&quot; might be broken into &quot;find receipts&quot;, &quot;print forms&quot;, &quot;fill out form 1 worksheet&quot;, &quot;complete form 1&quot;, &quot;mail form 1&quot;, etc. The more detailed I can get it, the more space it takes in the TODO list, the more it blocks out other things, and the more it keeps the TODO list from stagnating--which is an important component of motivation for me.