[ksikka]

Constrain the time you have to do something.

Work often fills the time you give it. If you try to achieve something in a short amount of time, you'll be forced to work at 100% with full focus to get it done ASAP. I'm always amazed at how sometimes a dreadful task takes 10-20 minutes when I'm forced to do it in that timespan, but if I have an hour to do it, it'll take an hour.

To make the constraint feel real, put yourself in a situation where you only have a short period of time before something else must happen, like a meeting. Then you can trick yourself to get started and see how far you can get in 20 minutes.

[tren]

When I had a kid, this definitely happened to me. While he's awake, there's a lot of time spent watching/minding him, however, while you're not actively doing anything it gives you time to plan. When I next get some free time, I find myself working at 100% without having to put much mental effort into it.

[icc97]

This does seem like a sensible way to invoke the panic monster - but for me it's often undermined by the fact that it's just me that tried to put the artificial deadline there and my brain happily ignores it moving onto the next deadline.

There was something similar laid out in this blog [1].

  [1]: http://www.raptitude.com/2015/03/how-to-get-yourself-to-do-things/

[ksikka]

Thanks for sharing that blog post! I really liked this aspect of it:

"You finish a thing by starting it until it’s done."

I read another blog post whose thesis was "To avoid procrastinating, think about starting instead of finishing". That helped me a lot too. Once you start, work isn't as bad as it seemed.

[antisthenes]

This may work for some things, but fails spectacularly for creative and learning tasks.