When I’m willpower constrained, what helps is: incentives, valuable work relevant to my endorsed long term goals, being paid, being threatened, adrenaline, narratives about Needing To Get This Done, framings that emphasise how much I really need to work hard, making my Virtue conditional on whether I do the task.

“If I finish this in the next hour, I can go get ice cream and walk along the pier” makes me more likely to finish it. Remembering that my work is highly valued and that people are excited to see the results helps. “I get paid a lot of money to do this” and “this will be helpful to people” and “I promised someone I’d get this done today” are all motivating. Narratives about “just buckle down and get the job done” help. Thinking to myself “sure, you don’t wanna. I don’t care. This has to happen, and we’re the person to do it” makes the task more likely to get done. Reframings are really powerful: “I have an hour to get these done” is a lot more effective than “I have to work on this for the next hour”.

When I’m executive function constrained, what helps is: calming down and being less scared of the tasks, trying not to have opinions about the quality of my work, small constrained tasks, avoiding thinking about the consequences of doing the task or not doing it, stimulants, supervision by others, reminders, food, affirmation of my ability to do the task, affirmation of my value regardless of whether I do the task.

“If you get this done you can have ice cream and a walk” results in staring sadly at my computer screen thinking about the nice walk I’m missing out on. Believing my work is important and valued is actively unhelpful: it makes me go ‘ugh, all those people are expecting stuff to happen, but stuff is failing to happen, I‘m terrible.’ Telling my brain it has a very small, very constrained task is helpful: “I will try this for five minutes and then I’ll give up if I want to”. Having someone literally look over my shoulder to check whether I’m doing the task or something else is helpful. Caffeine helps. Food helps. Reasonably often it is the case that nothing helps, and I should give my brain a break. This is hard to do, because sometimes the thing really needs to happen. It’s hard to internalize “if I’m not going to get the thing done either way, it’s better to not get it done and rest my brain and not be miserable than to not get it done, further dig my brain into debt, and be miserable”.

When I’m passion constrained, what helps is:

• Telling myself about how exciting and interesting the task is; of course I want to revise for my psychology exam, psychology is fascinating, remember that one study about mirror neurons that was so cool? Don’t you want to study more of the cool fun facts?
• Finding a more exciting or engaging way to complete the same task, like dictating a piece rather than writing it, or doing the task in a group with people who loudly enjoy it, or looking at colourful pictures and videos rather than text.
• Multitasking or starting new tasks, for novelty value
• Relating the task to something I find engaging, like taking a boring history essay and making it interesting by adding numerous references to diachronic linguistics and old languages.
• Gamifying: this isn’t a boring bus trip to get groceries, this is a QUEST to see how many POINTS I can accumulate by correctly predicting the bus stops and then do a SPEEDRUN to get my fastest ever shopping list completion!
• Reframing tasks so they’re more relevant to my interests; I’m not tidying, I’m doing a psychology experiment on the effects of ordered spaces on my happiness / designing a philosophically interesting physically instantiated ontology of thingspace / making my room cosplay a hufflepuff dorm.
• Jumping up and down and infodumping about my love for the task, which makes me remember what I like about it.
• Doing a familiar repetitive task in a new way I haven’t tried before.
• Getting someone who really likes the task/project/topic to tell me all about why they love it and what’s interesting about it, then get infected with their passion
• Make it into longer chunks, so that once my interest is kindled / I get into flow / I find something I like about it, I can run with it and dig deep into it and not have to rekindle my interest every time I return to a small chunk
• Stop doing easy tasks and do more complicated, challenging tasks
• Do the task faster, louder, more energetically, in front of an audience, while enthusiastically performing how great the task is
• Not getting rewarded, and instead focusing on my intrinsic motivation and enjoyment
• Appealing to one of my basic intrinsic motivations; in the same way that it’s easier to finish a book if it’s about a character I love and need to know what happens to, and it’s easier to finish a meal if you add some sugar to give me a dopamine hit, I will find it easier to research a topic if it appeals to my instinctive love of making well-ordered categories, or the curiosity I’ve always had about colour theory. Adapting the task to involve those things is great

What helps is “hey, wait a second, this job shouldn’t be hateful. Why are we being avoidant about it? Can we find something about it to fall in love with? What if I didn’t need to buckle down because it was fun?”