I agree - I’m actually a big fan of goals of the form “start a 30-min timer for X” or “start doing activity X.” They’re great because 1) there’s much less resistance to starting something than there is to doing it, and 2) once I start, it’s easy to continue.
The problem here was that I not only had the start time too late in the day, but I had multiple goals all due at that time, leading to the failure where I couldn’t start them all that late.
So I’m thinking about staggering deadlines earlier in the day so there’s only one goal due at a time. That way I can make the goal “start X” without running into that problem.
I may also want two goals, one little one for “start X early in the day” and a big one for “finish X by the end of the day.” @phi discussed something similar: