This is an English translation of a post I originally wrote in Persian: read the original.
If you love mountaineering like I do, you know that walking towards a summit, and doing it for a whole day, can be hard work. I can picture the scene: some time after the climb has started, with every one of my muscles worn out, reaching the destination starts to feel so far away in my head that it can bring me to a stop. At moments like that I can no longer think about the summit. In fact, thinking about the summit is the most destructive thought that can occur to me.
In that state, only one trick lets me keep going, and it is setting a much, much smaller goal: something like getting to the top of the next hill, or reaching a rock I can see right now. It has always felt like a game to me, and when I get to my small destination I feel as if my energy has come back, so I pick the next one, the next hill or the next rock in front of me, and move on. I keep doing this until I reach the summit.
The same thing repeats itself in the projects and the work I have done so far. Thinking about the whole project can leave me stuck for days, but the moment I notice which trap I am falling into, I remember the lesson the mountain taught me. I break the work into small pieces straight away and pick one very small task that I can do and finish within a single day. At the end of that day, I celebrate having done it. Just like mountaineering, there really is no other way to reach the destination than to divide the work into smaller items and set a time for the next one.