There’s a good current issue of Scientific American Mind with some insights into procrastination, but its main points have already been covered by previous posts to this thread.
Wow!
What are the odds I would catch my week-old thread right at the top of GQ?
Thanks for everyone’s responses, I have read them all. I am still not totally sure what’s going on when I procrastinate, but some good insight has been shared here. Thanks again.
I find this to be hilarious. Couldn’t get around to checking on your thread, eh? 
Master procrastinator here. I find it’s worst for me when a task a) has no clear path to completion - say there are many different ways to proceed, none of which are obviously sensible or correct, or it’s b) arbitrarily necessary - ie, you have to do it because someone says so, not because anyone needs it to be done.
A responsible person has to turn hi/r bullshit detector down a ways to get by in life. Mine is, if anything, overly sensitive.
It’s because the prospect is overwhelming. I’ll put off filing stuff even though I hate the clutter on my desk. After a couple of days, I’ll start breaking it out into little pieces…printing out all the A,B, and C reports, stapling those together, and filing those. It really doesn’t take me that long…maybe half an hour, but it’s the tediousness of it that makes me shove it off to the side.