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In Praise of Procrastination
Ponca City writes "Every year, millions of Americans pay needless penalties because they don't file their taxes on time, forgo huge amounts of money in matching 401(k) contributions because they never get around to signing up for a retirement plan, and risk blindness from glaucoma because they don't use their eyedrops regularly. James Surowiecki writes that procrastination is a basic human impulse, a peculiar irrationality stemming from our relationship to time — in particular, from a tendency that economists call 'hyperbolic discounting,' the ability to make rational choices when they're thinking about the future, but, as a future event gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. Game theorist Thomas Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves a collection of competing selves, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control, where one represents your short-term interests (having fun, putting off work, and so on), while another represents your long-term goals. Philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: 'Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.'"
I'm not convinced that the "live in the moment" attitude really works for getting large projects done, though. At least not for me. You're right that breaking down a project into its component tasks is helpful for avoiding that "crushing weight" feeling that scares me off from working on a large project, but doing what excites me right now tends to lead to me doing fun stuff instead of getting work done.
The problem, I think, arises when none of those little sub-tasks has any specific reward associated with it. So, you know that you can easily do part 1 of a 27-part project, but you also know that when you finish part 1, you won't really feel any closer to being done than you did with 0 parts done. With no reward - not even a sense of accomplishment - for these individual tasks, the call of fun non-work-related activities grows more seductive.
The key for me has always been to put myself in a situation where the fun non-work-related activities are unavailable. That doesn't work out well for getting stuff done around the house, since all my fun stuff is there, but it works a lot better for my job.
that's a good short-term graph. Long term, over decades, my procrastination curve is climbing upward as a second order polynomial, because I realize more and more of the modern rat-race "obligations" are arbitrary made-up bullshit.