Your mind can easily generate significant barriers to what your heart is not excited to do. You can effortlessly avoid nearly anything through the sophisticated power of your brain to justify after the fact what you decided from a purely emotional position.
You can reverse the polarity of your brainpower from procrastination to productivity by tricking your body to get moving into a task without initially inviting your brain. Though this technique sounds strange, it’s no different from how you get duped into many time-wasting or downright harmful things: you get your body physically involved in something before you give your mind the chance to consider it, preventing it from throwing up barriers until momentum makes it difficult to stop.
In order to get the greatest impact out of your limited time, you need to cultivate the ability to get started on demand. The best way to get into an important task is to turn off your brain and get your body as close as possible to the action.
For example, get your body into the room you need to be in to do the appointed task. Trick yourself by only agreeing to go into the room. Once you are there, it will be an order of magnitude easier to do whatever comes next. If you need to do something on the computer, simply turning it on and opening the relevant program will take you most of the way.
In a similar vein, you can use physical context switches such as locations, movements, or even clothing to subconsciously enter into the mental state you need to be in to accomplish a task at hand. These physical routines help make the tasks associated with them more automatic. For example, maybe you do all your writing at one particular desk, you only answer emails from your phone, and you always have meetings in a conference room. Abstaining from work while in your bed at home will help you get more sleep, having a particular place where you watch TV will make it less likely that you watch when you have better things to do, and so on.
Your physical disposition has a significant impact on your productivity. Research shows that the slight boost of positive brain chemicals from a short round of physical movement significantly increases cognitive performance. Try it next time you have an important meeting, a test, or you are simply feeling tired.
Variations on this technique abound. Use it generously.