[dboreham]

There are some powerful resources on YouTube for this. Essentially what you need to do is to re-program your brain firmware. Consider the brain as a maxima-seeking engine. Evolved to: find food then stay where there's food; identify predators then move away from them and stay as far away as possible. And so on. Your brain is mostly operating on a bunch of these kinds of slope, with some signal representing a good or bad thing, and a mechanism designed to change your behavior to either maximize or minimize the signal. Procrastination occurs when you are presented with a task that elicits both positive and negative signals: you want to perform the task to receive praise, feeling of achievement, not get fired. But you also fear the task because you may not perform it perfectly, leading to criticism. Your brain is not able to effectively navigate these dual slopes and so becomes locked in a local maxima: doing nothing. It neither wants to proceed up the reward slope by performing the task, nor proceed down the avoid slope by abandoning the task altogether.

Add to this that these reward/pain mechanisms in the brain are driven by dopamine. Dopamine is interesting in that the brain synthesizes it, and only a limited amount can be stored. This leads to some time-axis effects that may not be obvious. For example if you perform a reward activity (browsing social media) while procrastinating, now you've burned up your supply of dopamine and have no juice left to perform the main task.

All the solutions are based on the same underlying idea, which is to invoke the brain's "executive functions" to override the lower level lizard brain mechanisms. Meditation for example is (imho) about invoking the brain's garbage collector, such that you train it to act more like G1GC than mark/sweep -- now you have shorter GC pauses throughout the day. CBT/DBT and the like are about training the executive system to maintain more effective control over the limbic system. Clearly Buddhists figured most of this out centuries ago.

I recommend searching for videos by Dr. Tracey Marks and "How to ADHD" then the algorithm will show you other relevant channels/videos.

Edit: forgot to also mention that since this is all run on meat, it is possible there are useful biohacks. Magnesium deficiency for example comes up, as do MCTs and MCFAs, and of course: sugar.