Sometimes there's a good reason for procrastination

Actually, I regard it as more of an art

Often the hardest thing is getting started. You're faced with a vast, complex, tedious, and frustration-filled project. It needs to be done, but the thought if it is so unpleasant that you'd rather do almost anything else. So you put it off and you put it off until the consequences of further delay are so threatening that you establish what the first doable task is, sit down, and dive in.

And you find out that in fact...it is just as awful and miserable as you thought, except that it takes much longer, because you spend hours making mistakes and then trying to recover from them, trying to figure out why numbers don't match, or changes mysteriously appear in places you could have sworn were immune from accidental change.

Because sometimes you've put something off for good reason. In its little stories of humble success, the procrastination kind of slides over these fairly frequent circumstances.

Today I did not one, but two things I was putting off. One involved money, and involved finding a bunch of long-lost documentation, calculating a very large spreadsheet, and chasing someone else down to contribute something. It was miserable, and lost me hours, but I had to do it, and the only way was to essentially put off necessary work.

Then, all evening, I did some of that necessary work, with an unintuitive web interface I don't use very often. Nothing displayed properly, files vanished into mysterious URLs, what displayed wouldn't change when I changed the text, because what displayed was a duplicate in another location.

Now I'm done with both projects, and don't really feel at all satisfied. Maybe later I will but...really, did it need to be that hard?

I was totally right to evade these projects. The only sad thing is that I couldn't evade them forever.

What projects have you recently gotten to that you kind of wish you hadn't?

Or is there one you want me to tell you not to start?