Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting - Less Wrong

When it comes to procrastinating, the obvious, salient, commensurate-seeming tradeoff, is between the (assumed) pleasure of reading a random Internet article now, versus the (assumed) pain of doing the work now.  But this, as I said above, is not where I think the real tradeoff is; events that are five minutes away are too distant to dominate the thought process of a hyperbolic discounter like a human.  Instead our thought processes are dominated by the prospective immediate pain of a thought, a cost that isn't even salient as something to be traded off.  "Working" is an obvious, salient event, and "reading random articles" seems like an event.  But "paying a small twinge of pain to make the decision to stop procrastinating now, exerting a bit of frontal override, and not getting to read the next paragraph of this random article" is so map-level that we don't even focus on it as a manipulable territory, a cost to be traded off; it is a transparent thought.

This is brilliant stuff, but phrased in a very geeky way. that does appear to fit the target audience -- I found this article through Hacker News -- but as one HN commenter pointed out, this is not just a problem for programmers; it's true of virtually any kind of creative undertaking or 'knowledge worker' task. How could this be stated in a more approachable way?