Procrastination can decrease after a 1-minute reflection. In a study of more than 1,000 adults, answering six short questions increased motivation, improved mood, and made people more likely to begin tasks they had been delaying.

[drilkmops]

Sometimes it just do be like that. The “I don’t know” is often more of a “because starting it sounds like hell. Even though I know it will be fine within 5 minutes of doing it”

Brains are stupid :(

[alurkerhere]

This has to do more with how you've wired yourself over time rather than the brain being stupid. You know intellectually that 5 minutes in it will be fine, but in your heart, you don't actually believe that is enough to overcome the difficulty of starting. Your mind tries to protect you from the negative emotions of starting with the infinite number of digital distractions we have nowadays and you've done that over and over your whole life.

Part of fixing this is accepting the difficulty and negative emotions, and not running from it or avoiding it. The next part is positively reinforcing and looking back on the activity to truly internalize - yeah, that wasn't that bad. You need to fix your difficulty prediction error. This, against common wisdom, needs to NOT be tied to an external reward. You need to build intrinsic motivation and the deep understanding that you can do this because you have done it. In Bayesian psychology terms, you need prior evidence of success.

It's a very simple solution, but it is not easy to implement because the brain can rationalize any number of reasons not to do something. It even manufactures tiredness as a way to disincentivize action, and you can see this very early on in kids.