Confidence is helpful, but comes after starting. To the procrastinator, a task feels dangerous - it’s when he could be exposed as a fraud. So before starting, he looks for more assurance that things will go well. This leads to more planning, more thinking, more delaying.

The longer and dustier your to-do list gets, the more it seems like a hopeless tangle.

But it’s a mirage, created when you try to map out everything in your head without actually doing anything. The whole list looks different the moment you knock off one tough thing.