Protracted negotiations with brain.

Kinda like:

• okay, you want to do this new exciting stuff

🧠 :yes-hahaha-yes-l:

-but remember we did this other exciting stuff, we even learnt something useful for this new exciting stuff

🧠 :sicko-no:

• okay, let’s say we do this stuff for a half an hour, and then we can go hog wild. Kinda like eating veggies.

🧠 I guess

The point, for me at least, is spent some minuscule time (even 15 minutes) on something other. if I get bored, I have more measured approach to new shiny thing, if I don’t get bored, I have spent some time doing something else, and be less burnouty with new thing.

So while this is writing advice, it can work for any project. From "The Elements of Academic Style"

Writing every day is difficult because everyone has any number of other things to do, most of which frighten them much less than writing. The key is to carve out a very small period of time for writing each day, putting it in both your physical and mental calendars, and convincing yourself that having that time is a way of taking care of yourself. Once that is done, you need to protect your writing time vigorously, both from others and from yourself. This means definitively scheduling this time and not moving it around or interrupting it, even when it seems perfectly reasonable to do so. Doctors, plumbers, teachers, friends, students, and even your family and children will all live, and live happily, if you consistently refuse to be available from, say, 9 to 10 every morning. Or even 9 to 9:30

Part of building this habit involves speaking about it others. Narrating your process (I do X for Y minutes a day; I do X for Z minutes during breaks; then I start again) by sharing it with friends helps externalize it, and makes it something that exists outside your own drive and desire. A pattern’s external existence makes it easier for you to feel responsible to it, rather than treating it as an easily modifiable expression of your current mood or state of affairs. In other words, it makes it a habit

Make small goals and meet them. Whether you choose to write for a time or to a word count, you will sometimes not reach your goal for the day. One of the most important things my advisor Jane Gallop taught me was that unmet goals don’t create habits. For this reason you absolutely need to focus on giving yourself small, easily achievable goals. Don’t plan to write four pages a day; don’t try to write eight hours a day (or two hours a day when you’re teaching). Focus on the slow and steady. Your job is to making meeting goals a regular part of your life, to become a goal-meeting person.

Above all, don’t add today’s “gap” to tomorrow’s task. If you only wrote one page today, that does not mean you have to write three pages tomorrow. Sitting down to write three pages is harder than sitting down to write two, which makes your habit-creating pattern that much harder to begin. Those extra pages have a way of spiraling out of control, leading to a day when, faced with the idea that you have to “catch up” by ten pages or so, you simply give up and eat a bag of Doritos instead. (I have done this, by the way. The chips were delicious.)

Now, obviously this is for "writing," but I think a lot of it applies to any self-motivated task of creation. Basically, the tl;dr:

1. Set a reasonable amount of time daily (you can take weekends off) to work on your task.
2. Give yourself a goal for each day, and hit that goal (for instance, I'm going to write for 30 minutes straight)
3. Don't put yourself in "debt" when you don't meet a goal, but reward yourself when you do.

I have a full PDF but would need to know how to wipe all identifying data before sharing to comrades - don't want to inadvertently dox myself.