Life hack request: I want to want to work.

Interest follows focus. You're obsessing about your lack of productivity, and so your interest shifts to productivity, and away from the material.

Focus on the material, even if you do nothing. Especially if you do nothing. Refuse to do anything. Ponder. Think. Analyze. Make plans. Try experiments. Piddle around. See what happens.

Do only and whatever interests you about the material. Refuse to work toward the goal. See how that works out. Forget about success or failure, and do what you want. Pay attention.

Go with your interest in the material, and quash thoughts of success/failure or improving productivity. Failure/success will take care of themselves.

It strikes me that this tribe, myself included, is meta compulsive, and habitually switches into meta analysis mode. Most people think too little. We think too much, spiraling off into meta levels. Do. Do not try. Just focus on the material. That will likely bring interest, as it brings questions and possible solutions.

I've been working on my car lately. I find myself compulsively wanting to work on it more. How do I fix this? How do I fix that? What could I do there? I'm trying to remind myself to spend time more productively.

The problem is, whatever we do, we could be doing something else more productive. Gotta put those meta thoughts aside if you ever want to get anything done. I think the Getting Things Done guy has a good plan in that regard - write a note, and review it at a schedule time. Don't get sidetracked now, handle that thought later.

I can't say I've got a magic trick, but I do find work is more enjoyable if you get into flow, and flow (or at least the start of flow) is utterly interrupted by free access to the Internet. So the usual anti-Reddit devices might be helpful as an enjoyment hack as well as an akrasia hack.

I also find that my flow is very bad if the task at hand is something that requires my intervention every two minutes. If it requires constant concentration I'm fine; if I can look in on it every twenty or thirty minutes I'm fine because then I can manage to task-switch; but in between those is a sour spot where I can either sit and stare at the screen for a while long enough to be boring, or else go off and do something useless for what always turns out to be ten or fifteen minutes instead of the required two. And even then it's hard to get started again. So, if it's at all possible to design your workflow beforehand, you might try to avoid those check-in-two-minutes tasks, or set up three or four of them at the same time so you can context-switch effectively. I don't know if this is relevant to your project, though.

Another trick with which I've had modest success is to buy some barbells, and when I get into the two-minute-wait thing I pick them up and do some lifts instead of tabbing to the internets. That way I've got something to do while I wait, but it's not a Skinner-box thing that will suck me in for twenty minutes or more - I actually want to stop. This does require the activation energy of remembering to pick them up instead of doing the Alt-Tab which is much more engrained in my muscle memory. Of course you could just as easily do situps or pushups or something, but having a physical object is a useful reminder, or so I conjecture. At any rate I do more lifts than I did pushups when I didn't have the barbells. YMMV.

See lukeprog's How to Beat Procrastination and Algorithm for Beating Procrastination. In particular, try to identify which term(s) in the equation in the latter are problematic for you, then use goal shaping to slowly modify them. (Of course, you could also realize you may not want to do this master's thesis and switch to a different problem.)

Goal shaping means rewarding yourself for successively more proximate actions to the desired goal (writing your thesis) in behavior-space. For example, rather than beating yourself up over not getting anything done today, you can practice simply opening and closing LaTeX or MatLab (or whatever you need to be doing your research), and do this for ten or twenty minutes. You then eat something you like or pump your fist in the air shouting "YES!" Once you can do this consistently, you can set a goal of writing one line of code or reading half a page. At this point, you can start exploiting the peak-end rule: start rewarding yourself for these tasks at the end rather than trying to enjoy them during the process. Soon your brain will start associating the entire experience with the reward and you will be happy to do them. YMMV.

Have you tried using the LessWrong Study Hall? They do pomodoros (25 minutes of work with 5 minutes break or 50 minutes work with 10 minutes break). YMMV, but I found that it helped motivate me, when I would otherwise be unmotivated. The five or ten minutes between pomodoros is fun, and while in a pomodoro, you are working with other people, so you have that sense of solidarity.

Inspired by Nick Winter's The Motivation Hacker, what has been effective for me is sending an e-mail to three friends from separate social circles with a listing of the amount of time I worked each day, broken down by task (I clock in and clock out of each item on my todo list). I also Beemind my work hours and include a link to my Beeminder in each of the daily emails. My friends think it's fun, and even though it seems initially like it wouldn't actually make work easier, since you are relying on avoiding future feelings of guilt to motivate you, it actually does make starting work emotionally much easier. It's also fun to write a note each day to them (couple sentences, takes like 30 seconds). I also block my Internet. The key insight from The Motivation Hacker was to use overlapping commitment mechanisms to make work much easier, and I use three (Beeminder, the e-mails, and Internet blocking). Since I started this I have worked far far more hours per day, and much more emotionally easy, than I had before.

By the way, when you first contemplate writing an e-mail to your friends committing to send them a daily e-mail with your work log, you will be very scared. The reason you are scared is because you know that this will work and you'll have to keep your commitment (if telling your friends you didn't achieve a goal doesn't bother you, maybe this commitment mechanism won't work for you). This is a feature, not a bug.

Have you considered abandoning the project? No, really. It seems like a bad sign that you didn't say "I want to work." Why is this project important enough that you're willing to force yourself to enjoy it even if you currently don't?

(When I have trouble working, it usually takes the form "I have trouble starting to work without using something like Beeminder + Pomodoros, but once I start working I have no problem continuing." But it sounds like your problem may be worse than that, and if it is, I'm not convinced tricking yourself into enjoying it more is the best solution.)

Two things work for me:

1) Cut superstimulus, which probably includes much of the internet, video games if you play them, etc. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work to just manage these things, because the issue isn't the time you spend on them, but the pleasure they produce. For me at least, this includes LW.

2) Talk about your work, both with people who understand the field, and those that don't. Explaining your work in terms laypeople can understand often involves explaining why it's interesting or important, and it's good to go over these reasons.

I would write down your beliefs about working, and then analyze them. The goal should be to identify false and unhelpful beliefs and then find things that you can replace them with. Your basic beliefs about how the working world works will be a much better psychology base for other skills like beating procrastination or improving willpower. Read books or listen to things that will replace your old beliefs.

One thing that is an important part of procrastination is anxiety that is often related to feeling like your work is part of your self-worth, and so by not working you feel bad.

If you aren't getting anywhere, then you may want to allow yourself to read some procrastination/self help books. For me back when I was depressed at one point I thought "hey, if I'm not going to do anything but sit in my room and watch videos, I guess I'll watch these positive psychology videos". That was a pretty awesome choice. Summaries that other's have posted are good for references, but I get much more out of reading books, where I have more time to make connections and figure out how something would fit into my life.

Also, pay a visit to a counselor, or get a free consultation (E.Y's partner Erin does productivity related counseling). Since you are in school this is probably cheap, and a good counselor is worth quite a bit.

(1) Identify some reward, like a type of candy, that merely thinking about consuming triggers the pleasure centers of your brain. (2) Set a 25 minute or so timer. Setting the timer will be your cue. (3) When the timer is on just work on your project. (4) If you succeed in just doing the project when the timer is on take your reward immediately after the timer goes off. (5) At various times during the day think about how your cue eventually results in the reward.

Well what precisely do you dislike about what you're working on? If it is something external like the thought of failure, that might be solvable by some of the techniques others have mentioned here.

But a contrarian viewpoint: has it occurred to you that this project may be something that you thought you wanted to do, but never in fact actually wanted to do? Maybe you liked the thought of having done it, or maybe it was ok when you started it but now you don't like the meat of it.

And if is true that if you do not want to do this, that you will hate working in this field... perhaps you should reconsider fields. Usually attempts to change what you want are not successful.

If it's a question of short term motivation to finish grinding through a project, the answer is: "Use stimulants".

If it's a question of long term motivation...you might want to re-evaluate whether you actually prefer doing this, or are getting hung up on the notion that you aught to prefer this.

I only recently started using this one but it's worked well for me. I adapted it from Feeling Good which seems to be well-regarded around here. The idea is to mentally note, or better yet write down, how you expect to feel after doing a task, or obeying a time-wasting compulsion. You will begin to notice patterns, such as the following: you expect some task to be exceedingly painful and boring, make a note of that expectation, finally get around to doing it, and note how you actually felt about it. For myself, I usually find that I get a lot more satisfaction out of even menial tasks than I expect to a priori.

Conversely, note before indulging in a compulsion (for me, checking Facebook or lesswrong on my phone) how much enjoyment you expect to get out of it, and note how much enjoyment you actually got out of it. This surprisingly simple technique has significantly curtailed my dicking-around-on-the-Internet time because I am able to viscerally understand that I won't a actually get anything out of it, that I won't enjoy it any more than I would enjoy practically anything else.

I have a master's project I'm having trouble working on. It's something I've wanted to do

What has changed since?

Somebody told you enjoyment was a big part of your life. Did you believe them? Go visit people with profound physical or mental problems and tell them about your hard time enjoying what they would give anything to do even in utter agony. If that doesn't work, try remembering you are dying. Perspective and mortality are my life hacks.