One of my favorite Peter Gabriel songs is "Kiss that Frog"  and today I want to urge you all to start each day by kissing that frog ... although I pretty sure my advice is a little different than Peters.
The dreaded Task List
You know all the things on your to-do list that never seem to get done?   The stuff you push off every day because something more important gets in the way, or at least that's what you keep telling yourself and your co-workers, clients or employers.

These are the frogs I want you to kiss.

In our company, we have an accountability sheet We call it the "WWW" sheet.  WWW stands for who, what and when and it is the way we monitor tasks that need to be done to move our company forward.   Most of the tasks relate to the 6 core functions in our business.    By assigning a "who" and a "when" to each "what" we make someone accountable to the task and we have assigned a deadline to it.

The problem is some of those who, what , whens never seem to get done.

They get discussed each week during our huddle and the due date gets pushed out further and further but they don't get done.

Since this is happening in the senior leadership team, the creme de la creme in our company,   I'm sure it's happening in team meetings throughout the company and that sucks.  Wasted time and agreed upon priorities not getting done.

These hard to accomplish tasks, whether they are personal like getting a haircut, or an oil change for your car,  or business things like giving a performance review, or calling a client to tell them you are sorry for a mistake you made.   These are the things I call frogs.  I call them frogs because they are things we don't even want to touch.  We move away from them and try to avoid them at all costs.
Kiss that Frog
Imagine for a minute that you really had to kiss a frog,  imagine it was on your WWW list.    You had to give it a big wet 3-second kiss.

You'd probably put it off as long as humanly possible, schedule it out for a year in the future.     If you had a year to do it you would probably do it on day 365, the very last day of the year.    It's human nature we put off what we don't want to do till the last possible moment.

Think about it,  when you finally forced yourself to kiss that frog, you'd pucker up and give it a big long wet kiss right on the slimy skin of his back.
What would happen?
You'd probably freak out a bit, spit and complain LOUDLY, but it would be over in a minute, well really 3 seconds TOPS!  3 seconds that you spent 364 days agonizing over,   A year of stress for something that took less than a minute.

When it comes to things we don't want to do, agonizing over it is almost always worse than actually doing it.  Once you kiss that frog, you're a little freer, you have less weight on your shoulders and you are free to move on to the next thing without the burden of kissing that frog hanging over you.
 Better get a new notebook!
I can help you fix this problem but you better get a new notebook because I bet if you're like me you have hundreds of frogs to kiss.

You see the way these things work is that we constantly procrastinate on all of lives burdens and they build up in our minds.  We carry them around like heavy luggage every day.

I know you don't think you have 100 open items on your internal to-do list but I bet you do!  I might even venture to bet you have twice that and that's a lot of weight to carry around.   These little things add up and bring you down.