The source of some of the negative mood is not merely that a task sucks, but that we don’t know where to start. The task is ill-defined or amorphous, and because we have no point of entry we feel a certain sense of dread. Better to do something to alleviate that dread than to merely keep feeling it, so let me alphabetize the spice rack. I try and remind myself in moments of that peculiar helplessness to try and define just one next-step. So instead of “start project” it’s “open a browser, read three serious articles about one aspect of the project, summarize those articles”. The concreteness means that I’m doing the “easy” work of following an algorithm, not the hard work of figuring out what to do.
Personally I hate most business lingo, but I do really like the SMART criteria for tasks. I sometimes use that to break my Big Things up into little ones, because each of the five criteria makes a task smaller and more attainable. Still though I procrastinate even when I know exactly what to do next because I'm scared or anxious or whatever. It's another, separate way of tasks being hard to do I think.