posted about 10 months ago
I have been in your exact situation for a while and only recently have I started to get myself out of it.
I have so much to do that the very thought of it puts me off, I think to myself that there's no way I will get it done in the time I have today so it can wait until another day.
However, I recently spent a few days breaking down absolutely everything I have to do into smaller tasks, instead of thinking I have the data of 100 surveys to input into SPSS I wrote down "input 1-10", "input 11-21" etc and thinking of doing 10 at a time is a lot less scary than thinking of doing 100 and I have actually managed to get the whole data set input in less than a week by doing it this way. The main reason for this is because in my head I have had 10 to do and it has got me to actually sit down and focus and I ended up doing more. Plus on the day that I did only do 10, I still achieved what I had set out to when I sat down so I didn't walk away from my desk feeling like I had let myself down by not doing the whole lot.
pm133 and Tudor_Queen have both mentioned breaking down your to do list into smaller chunks and trust me, it honestly does work.