I don’t understand myself
Writing a paper and cleaning one’s room are two very different sorts of task: you would therefore think that a person would approach then very differently. Everyone has a different way of cleaning their room and a different way of writing a paper; at the very least, though, you can safely assume that cleaning one’s room is the easier and less daunting of the two tasks. Cleaning one’s room therefore ought to be anticipated by less, if any, of the anxiety, procrastination, etc., that often leads up to writing a paper.—Well, as it turns out, if we replace the abstract “one” with the concrete “Alan”, then the above conjecture no longer holds. It seems that, for him, the intent to clean his room provokes at least as much anxiety and use of various avoidance strategies (among which outright procrastination is actually only a last resort!), as does writing any of even the longest and thorniest papers of his undergraduate degree. Again the mystery of Why Does Alan Do Things rears its head.
(Between ourselves, I think the problem in both cases is that I didn’t know where to start or how to feel like I’m making progress. And didn’t really want to do the thinking—planning, imagining—that would have answered these questions. Which thinking turned out to be not hard and to trivially solve my problem! I feel kind of silly about that, but what can you do.)