The biggest thing you’ve ever written.

• Set word goals. Figure out how much you need to write each day. At the beginning, that will be less, as most of your time will be spent researching. Toward the end, it will be more, as most of your research will be done. Details will vary, according to the size and nature of your project, and so guidelines are general. Don’t think that conflicting advice means they are all wrong, realize that it means there is more than one way to succeed and you have wiggle room. Plan to have one or two days a week completely off. This allows you wiggle room if you get behind, and means that you can dip back into research to fill in any gaps you may have missed.
• Celebrate milestones. This can mean rewarding yourself with a cup of tea every few hours (or whatever your thing is.) Not everything needs to be big, but let yourself feel the joy of forward movement. If you’re working on something like a dissertation though, you'll need to up the ante. This means schedule a massage after your lit review is done. Have a meal with friends to celebrate the approval of your methods, that sort of thing. Also, when you know you are going to get major feedback, schedule something you enjoy after. Even the best advice can be hard to hear, a run or coffee with a friend can help you move past the whiny reactive phase.
• Learn to delegate. Sometimes you can’t do it. Life goes on. Call the reference department to look for a source or sources, remember to be polite! Hire a writer or an editor to finish a section that you can’t stand to think of anymore. You hire people to fix your car, it doesn’t make it not yours, and it doesn’t mean that you don’t know how to drive anymore. If need be, hire a researcher, editor, or writer, to take over some or all of the work is another way of meeting your responsibilities. Sometimes, hiring someone to write half or three quarters of a larger project is a way to make things more manageable and keep the anxiety from taking over.
• Stop putting feelings before tasks. Speaking of anxiety! Clinical levels of mental illness are not what are being referred to here. I’m talking about the habit of starting major projects with a series of unpleasant thoughts and imbuing the process with unnecessary complications until it resembles a commercial for Grey’s Anatomy. If you have a problem, find ways to address it, even if you can’t completely fix it. If you’re making a problem, just stop.