There’s a lot I iden­tify with in this arti­cle of Joel Spolsky’s where he talks of using the Fire and Motion strat­egy to cope with work­place pro­cras­ti­na­tion.

There have been times in my career as a devel­oper when I went for weeks at a time with­out being able to get any­thing done. As they say, I’m not in flow. I’m not in the zone. I’m not anywhere. […]

Once you get into flow it’s not too hard to keep going. Many of my days go like this: (1) get into work (2) check email, read the web, etc. (3) decide that I might as well have lunch before get­ting to work (4) get back from lunch (5) check email, read the web, etc. (6) finally decide that I’ve got to get started (7) check email, read the web, etc. (8) decide again that I really have to get started (9) launch the damn edi­tor and (10) write code non­stop until I don’t real­ize that it’s already 7:30 pm.

Some­where between step 8 and step 9 there seems to be a bug, because I can’t always make it across that chasm. For me, just get­ting started is the only hard thing. An object at rest tends to remain at rest. There’s some­thing incred­i­ble heavy in my brain that is extremely hard to get up to speed, but once it’s rolling at full speed, it takes no effort to keep it going. […]

Maybe this is the key to pro­duc­tiv­ity: just get­ting started. Maybe when pair pro­gram­ming works it works because when you sched­ule a pair pro­gram­ming ses­sion with your buddy, you force each other to get started.

I feel that the text in bold is key.

via Less Wrong