The next way that you can apply positive constraint is by building in incentives and consequences.

All this means is make yourself socially accountable.

Having someone else to hold your feet to the fire and keep you accountable for whatever goal you've set for yourself.

That could be a check in via phone.

It could be a bet so a financial component which is very effective.

And I think in part not because of the money you will win but the money you will lose.

People work a lot harder to counteract loss aversion it turns out.

The beauty of human nature is that lots of things motivate us and sense of accomplishment and achievement.

Our title, our connection to work. Our connection to people at work.

Competing with other people. All of those things motivate us.

When we write a motivation equation we would write motivation equals yes, money is important but so is achievement, sense of progress, competition, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And the question is how do we use all of them.

How do we use all of them to create motivation.

Why are some people so much better at maintaining their focus and not reacting and not getting distracted by all these things.

It's because ahead of time they've envisioned what they expect to see.

They've envisioned what they expect to occur.

So on the subway when they're riding to work they think about what is this day going to be like.

I know that I'm going to this meeting. What do I expect to occur at that meeting.

And so when they walk in and they're boss asks them some unexpected question their brain almost subconsciously says I didn't expect that question to occur.

This isn't matching the picture in my brain of what I anticipated so I need to put that question off.

I need to say can we take that offline and I'll answer that later.

Or they have a picture in their brain of what it's going to be like to deal with the kids and to make dinner.

There's some type of expectation and so as a result when their pocket buzzes and an email comes in they can say I can't handle this right now.

I need to give myself five minutes and I'll deal with this later.

Remove negative impacts in your environment and that's one of the things that's so good about actual things is that if you change them they stay changed.

There's no fighting back.

But do some deep self-reflection and consider getting into some counseling to look at those things and get the tools to turn them around.

So those are a few things that you could utilize and I'll give you one kind of wacky one that is from Mike Birbiglia whose one of the most successful comedians on the planet.

When he was procrastinating working on his screenplay, his latest screenplay, he noticed that when he was accountable to someone else, he had a meeting, he was never late.

He was always early.

But when he had a commitment to himself to write he might put it off for hours.

So he took a post it and he put it next to his bed – and this sounds ludicrous, but it said Mike – and I think it was three exclamation points.

You have a meeting with yourself at 7:00 a.m. at Café whatever it was where he tended to work.

And that actually for whatever weird quirk of human psychology got him to stay on track for his meeting with himself to write his screenplay.

So that's another Jedi mind trick that you might try on yourself.

There are many tools in the toolkit but keep it small, keep it defined, rig it so you can win and when in doubt

figure out a way to create a loss or shame if you don't actually tackle your task and achieve some type of measurable goal by a specific point in time.