I read somewhere that procrastination is just a defense mechanism for us to deal with our fear of the unknown. Unknown here could mean two things: potential failure, or an unclear idea of where we need to start or finish.
The first one is solved by repeatedly exposing ourselves to opportunities to fail. We can take the teeth out of failure by putting ourselves into scenarios where failure is likely. Not necessarily huge, catastrophic failures. But still failure of some kind. A good comic learns what material works by learning what material doesn’t work. A person afraid of public speaking improves by practicing public speaking, even when they’re miserable at it.
The second type of “unknown” – not knowing where to start or finish, has everything to do with planning and organization. Most of the time we are delaying on a big project or task because we don’t have a clear idea of what success looks like. Or we don’t know the best place to start. We’ve got to devote a serious chunk of time to just scoping out the project before we get started. Because every moment we spend properly planning the work is insurance against starting and working in the wrong direction. We’re paying with our time now instead of time spent backtracking later.