"The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on that first one." -- Mark Twain (

"The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on that first one." -- Mark Twain (according to wikiquote) At the beginning, if the problem is vague, I open a text editor and start writing all of my thoughts about it. I try to keep the file as free-form as possible (I assume no one else will ever read it) and get down concerns about the problem, design decisions, observations, and anything else that comes to mind. I also write down exactly what the first step(s) will be. I think this technique works for a number of reasons, but especially because putting the project in front of my eyes on the computer screen -- even if it's just in the form of a quick brain-dump in a text editor -- gives me a massive motivation boost and a feeling of momentum. Staying motivated after a concrete task list has precipitated is a different problem, which I also try to solve with record-keeping. I obsessively maintain a hierarchy of the tasks I plan to complete, and then check them off as I go. When I can become a machine that just walks the hierarchy and performs the tasks, I find that it sidesteps the emotional mechanism that otherwise makes me procrastinate. I used to store the hierarchy as a text file, but this year I've been writing a tool that provides a) native support for this type of data, and b) a keyboard-driven interface that doesn't make me switch away from the program where I'm actually working. In case anyone would like to try it out, it's at http://projecthedgehog.com http://projecthedgehog.com (runs on mac and windows).