Why does procrastination occur?

First is simply a desire to avoid the activity. This can be due to it really being unpleasant, your simply assuming it will be unpleasant or daunting, or not knowing and being afraid it will be unpleasant. This can be related to your fear that even if the task itself is not unpleasant, you fear that the results will not be pleasant. Knowing it will be judged by someone you believe will be critical or unappreciative will make you avoid the task.

Another reason is a lack of motivation. Not fear of unpleasantness, but simply not caring about the task. For this, it helps to use positive mental imaging or Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Basically, this is simply imagining yourself doing the task, enjoying it, and having a positive outcome. Given that these imagined results are often completely prevented by your simply convincing yourself things will go bad, eliminating or reducing that belief will go a long way to helping out.

Lots of people advise against ToDo Lists. I understand why. But when you have a list of individual items, and the list seems rather long and daunting, the fact that you can cross items off the list -- no matter how trivial -- gives you a feeling of accomplishment. It may not be completely rational, but it works. Humans are weird that way :-) .

Another thing to do is to break your work up into 15-40 minute chunks with a 5-10 minute break. For some reason, most people learn and produce most effectively in chunks of that size.

One approach, and one that was touted by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is to set a rigid time limit. He claims he did this for workouts. He'd reach his limit of, I believe, an hour, and simply stop and go home. (I sort of doubt this limit, since many folks have said that his workouts were legendary and long, but he may be talking about early on when he started lifting.) He said that if he didn't complete all of his sets and had to stop, he'd be frustrated and angry with himself and then would look at his next workout as a "privilege". Whether he actually did this or not, I've found that if I have an appointment and go to my workout with just enough time to complete it without being late, I get very anxious to work harder to fit it in. Maybe I'm compulsive of neurotic and maybe other folks couldn't use this approach, but I say try it with your ToDo List. Set a number of tasks to get done in a certain time limit. You'll find that instead of looking at the activity as a chore, you'll look at it as something you REALLY want to do and something you're anxious to complete. This sort of weird Pavlovian-like reaction to stimuli is another aspect of human psychology you can wield to make yourself more productive. But beware -- you can conceivably get too neurotic. Especially with physical activity like weightlifting and such and get sloppy rush through it to make your deadline.

One or more of these approaches might work for you. Try them out. Also read a bunch of the self-help books around. Many of them repeat these same and other suggestions to "trick" your brain into getting a real kick out getting boring and otherwise-unpleasant stuff done and finding what would be drudgery an actual fun time.