To beat procrastination, 90% percent of the battle is tricking yourself into starting.
One of my favorite techniques is to "half until you laugh," which means breaking the size of your "initial commitment" to a project in half, and then half again, and so on until at some point your initial commitment seems laughably small. For example, I find myself procrastinating on something as tiny putting up dishes. So, the mental game begins . . . Can I put up half the dishes? Okay, half of half the dishes? . . . The lowest my "laugh point" gets is four. How on earth can I not put up four dishes? Over 75% of the time, I then up end up putting up all the dishes right after doing the four, but even if not, at least the project is started.
From the Getting Things Done (GTD) community, there is the notion of "next actions" (here is a longer explanation on a forum thread).
If I'm really dragging my feet on a project, I'll hack my to-do list by first putting the smallest step I can think of. I'm talking "open box" or "turn on computer," things that small. That lets me cross one thing off my list. Yay! Then, I put on the list some other absurdly small slice of the task. I get to cross that off quickly, too. Yay! After that point, I can nearly always have something broader on a list, like "work half an hour."
I find you only need to baby yourself at the very start. After that, you're rolling.
