| I have tried lots of things. Some lasted more than others, but most tricks eventually fizzled out. Only four deliver consistently for me: * Prolonged periods of extreme boredom (doing nothing, as in sitting down and not even thinking about much) to reset the dopamine baseline. Stumbled onto this accidentally after a 5-day flu when I was in a heavy brain fog and could not even watch sitcoms. Came out of it into a prolonged productive and happy streak. * Actively watching for and limiting over-stimulating activities (this includes not day-dreaming too much) as these cause the subsequent drop in the dopamine baseline. I have learned to notice that jittery brain-high and to associate negatively with it (easier to stop when you relate negatively to the feeling). * Most recent, but powerful addition: not expecting to want to do the tasks or for work to feel good. When your brain craves dopamine, and when it's so readily available in the world of endless feeds, your to-do list has a tough time competing. Instead I take a deep breath or two, bring myself into a melancholic and gloomy-weather like mood and tell myself I have a few hours of difficult stuff ahead of me. I learned to enjoy it in a dark way like one enjoys powering through a hard workout. Much more reliable than bringing myself to become excited about whatever I dread doing. * Cliche, but breaking tasks down into the tiniest bits. And I mean the tiniest. Any coding task usually starts with "create a git branch". It takes almost as much time to write this phrase down as to create the branch, but my brain does not fight the planning phase as it does the doing phase. But once I have my task planned out, the first step is so ridiculously easy, I just fall into it. |