The number one reason for procrastinating is perhaps the task at hand is too hard to accomplish, and the mind would prefer more manageable tasks.
As is mentioned in my previous post, the key to get things done involves one crucial step: planning. Planning doesn’t solve problems itself, but it lays out a clear picture of what you want to achieve through work, the necessary resources that you will need and when you are going to do it. The important thing here is to break things done into small tasks and assign each the exact time that you will need to tackle them. This may sound easy enough, but you won’t bother to do it unless planning has become second nature to you.
The book getting things done introduced two notions that will help you with planning and build your system to manage things at hand.
“Vertical focus” is sort of a top-down approach, where you start to think about what you want to achieve in your project, what resource/people you need and what specific steps you need to do to make it. This overview planning requires a chunk of time to do whenever you start a project on your own, and it would be a great idea to walk through this with your colleagues and advisors. The end form of this would be two things: a project proposal, including descriptions, motivations, and steps; a calendar marked with tasks with deadlines on every single job. It would also be a great idea to review this top-down plan now and then and see if you are still on track with what you set out to do in the first place. But then again, even those reviews need to get down on paper or system calendar instead of just thinking about doing them in the future.
Horizontal focus” is essentially the day-to-day task assignment. For example, you might get a message on Slack from your advisor, saying “hey, can you send me a quick summary stats about the price data ?” Or an email on the deadline for submitting your paper to a conference in July. Instead of stockpiling them onto an existing to-do list and forget about them until the deadline is coming up. The tasks need to be put into the system under different projects and assign the time, priorities, and its linkages to other jobs.
I use a free software called freedcamp and below is a picture of one week on my calendar: tasks are divided into different projects, highlighted by priorities and deadlines. The weekly overview gives a clear view of every single step that you need to do every day, and you can start off your day without wondering about what to do today.