You know you should be panicking but can't seem to muster the motivation.

It's a day before deadline and everything seems more interesting than that whopper report you're supposed to be finishing. The yawning kitten video on YouTube. The Get Rich on the Internet online sales pitches. Folding laundry.

What is it that drives some of us to wait until the last possible nanosecond to get started on big writing tasks? Or perhaps never even attempt them at all? One possibility is the fear of how enormous we perceive the task to be -- that we'll never get it done. So we illogically, but predictably avoid working on it until it becomes a crisis. Or a lost opportunity.

If this pattern of procrastination sounds at all familiar, this article is for you. Here we're going to look at some simple steps to turn the above scenario completely around. In fact, if you can follow these easy directions, in no time at all you'll be plowing through big writing projects like an M1 Abrams tank through a circus tent.

First, the simplified view from 30,000 feet:

1) Make a plan that divides your project into manageable chunks
2) Execute the plan

Now for a few down-in-the-trenches specifics...

A Simple Plan

For instance, if I'm working on a lengthy piece, like a white paper or eBook, I write the Table of Contents first. Ignore what your 5th-grade English Composition teacher may have force-fed you about mandatory outlines, Roman numerals and all that jazz. In the real world, your "TOC" is the only roadmap you need.

Start by listing the chapters. Each chapter should address your topic's key points or questions, which you can easily come up with as offshoots of your main theme. (You do have one of those, don't you?)

Then in the table of contents, break each chapter into sub-topics. In the body text, these sub-topics will each get their own heading and perhaps sub-headings.

(Then) It's All In the Execution

From there, you're ready to begin writing. But rather than think you have to crank through the entire thing at once, just aim to do a little bit at each sitting. I find it goes very quickly if I think of each sub-heading as writing a short article. For me, on most days, a 500-word article is a relatively quick and straightforward widget to bang out. In the discipline of project management, they might call this a "work package" -- one unit of effort that measurably moves the project forward.

If 500 words still seems like a lot for you (as it does for me sometimes, when those yawning kitten videos are beckoning on the front page of YouTube), remember that the process described here is fractal. In other words, you can just zoom in and repeat the chunking-down process until you find a unit of work that's manageable for you to do in one sitting. Maybe it's just a couple paragraphs, but at least it moves you forward.

Take a break. Repeat.

You've no doubt heard this said many ways: "Rome wasn't built in a day," "How do you eat an elephant? (one bite at a time)," etc. These cliches exist because they underscore a fundamental truth -- you can accomplish epic works by just making small but consistent contributions. Try it out, early, next time you get slapped with a big assignment. Watch how the final product and your own sanity improve as a result!