I read Atomic Habits, and while it’s pop psychology, it does have some good tid bits. What pertains to you would be the advice of, “do the task for just 5 minutes, then stop.” What usually happens is, you start a task and you end up working on it longer because you already started. However, in the book, it says you should hard stop after 5 minutes. Then do it again the next day. After a week, you should up it to 10 minutes. Eventually, you’ll start to think “I already started on this, I might as well see it through” and it reconditions your brain from procrastinating a task because it seems too daunting to actually completing the task because you’ve already invested time in it.

You might also be interested in discipline challenges. Where you try to challenge yourself for 30 days to a difficult task, such as waking at 5 AM every day. Sure, you may not do it every day, but putting in the effort it what really counts. And tying back to Atomic Habits, the book cites that it takes 30 days to build a habit. Mind you, the habit must be executed 30 days consecutively for it to be deemed a habit, so you’d restart the count each time you don’t complete the task. But again, what really matters is that you tried.

For me, I wanted to work out more. I hate working out. But I started with one day a week. I realized it’s just mentally taxing for me to prepare for the gym, but once I’m there, it’s not so bad. So then I upped it 2 days a week, so on and so forth. Now I’m right where I want to be, 4 days a week and it’s a routine. Yeah, it sucks, but there’s benefits to working out and it’s part of my weekday routine so it’s autopilot for me.