> In other words, we procrastinate on tasks because they’re not our highest motivation.

I think we need to draw a distinction à la economics’ “revealed preference” here, because there’s the famous divide between importance and urgency and “motivation” compacts the two.

My version of this is agnostic to the reason why, it's the maxim, “Never top priority, never happens.” If you find yourself never cleaning up tech debt, then as a matter of “revealed priority” I can assert that it was never your top priority, but I can't say exactly why, that's for you to find out. Makes it really easy to solve some of those problems, “we have 13 weeks in the quarter, that will be allocated as 5 two-week sprints and 3 “refactor weeks,” hey, now it will be top priority at some point!

> The reward for writing, on the other hand, is distant at the beginning of the semester.

The Goldratt book Critical Chain talks about this in the context of one-off projects like software has to deal with, calling it “Student Syndrome,” the idea that we actually build a lot of safety buffer into our project deadlines and then we immediately waste it all because the urgency becomes so low. I have an experiment called Hot Potato Agile that would in theory fix this, I wrote it up in a Google Doc somewhere, if you have a team struggling with deadlines and looking for a better way, let me know and I can share it.

> And so, you’re faced with a decision between what you want and what the monkey wants, between immediate gratification and long-term success.

There's a bit of research showing this to be kind of a naive take, coming from the obesity side where the willpower is viewed as being used to eat healthy things and the impulse is to eat crappy snack food. And the core finding is just that it is an environment that you sign yourself up for. So if you go to the grocery store and say “I’m not going to bring those junky foods into my house,” then that is very easy for your willpower to do at the time, assuming you don't go there hungry. And these are the so-called high-willpower people. But they didn't have more willpower overall, they just shifted it left. The people who struggle with willpower are the people who don't use the little bit earlier and instead fill their houses with junk food and then when they need to grab a bite between tasks, that's the natural thing to choose.

So for example my shell scripts often involve the OSX “Say” command, so that if I'm waiting on a long running process and I give myself permission to start browsing Hacker News or whatever, I don't leave it on my own recognizance to check back in on the work. The work comes and tells me that it's done, interrupts my flow elsewhere. Stuff like that. Stop victim blaming, recognize that you are part of these larger attention networks, redesign the flow through those networks accordingly. The monkey is on your side!

> It means we should watch our diet and eat as healthy as we can.

This is actually probably the best advice, in the whole article. The constant ensugarification of a tired person trying to stay engaged, the amount that the body needs to work to streamline all of the blood sugar variability, it literally exhausts your mitochondria, you literally have less energy. If you can radically cut down the sugar intake and up the sleep and exercise—no diet here, diets can crash your metabolism, just swap out the sugars for starches—you can give them a chance to heal and that will help with everything.