We’ve all done it: drag ass on a project, putting it off time and again, only to throw yourself at it in a frenzy of rabid activity at the last minute. It’s not fun, it often leads to sub-par work, and it is a way of doing work that can be overcome with a few simple strategies.

One is to just start the damn thing:

Action precedes motivation. That means you have to start something before you can really get motivated to get into it. You’ve experienced this. You start to clean out a drawer because you couldn’t find something. Before you know it, every drawer around is tidy.

Scott Halford covers five tips for overcoming procrastination in this Entrepreneur.com column.