Doing it in dashes or butterfly strokes

When you browse around in all the different blogs regarding GTD and personal effectivity, you'll sometime find suggestions that have a common core. One I have found recently is methods to overcome procrastination.

• In 43Folders Merlin Mann suggests The Dash, a short burst of focused activity during which you force yourself to do nothing but work on the procrastinated item for a very short period of time.
• D. Keith Robinson suggests in his To-Done blog something he calls Butterfly Stroke Productivity. He reserves 60-120 minutes while he does nothing but his most important task. Same thing as The Dash only his time frame is longer so he will be able to get into the Flow.
• Mark Foster has a different twist, he suggest that you do 10 minutes of concentrated work on your most important task first thing in the morning.
  

All three suggests concentrated work within a given timeframe. Keith R. and Mark F. also says that you first have to decide what your most important task/project is. Mark F. also suggest that we do it first thing in the morning, before phones, e-mails or IMs has ruined our concentration.
None of three suggests that we complete the task, just that we start and at least move it a step on the way. This is taking the granularity of GTD one step further, doing the Next Action incrementally.

In summary: Doing something is better then doing nothing at all. Giving yourself a fixed timeframe makes it easier to start the work since you know there is an end. Try to do that work during a undisturbed time of day. And finally, when you at last manage to get that heavy train of thoughts rolling, you may find that it's hard to stop.