> All these achievements involved organisation and planning – including breaking things down into lists of tasks – but I bet very few of them involved people fretting about how to redesign their lists to be more 'motivating'.
Are you sure that is the case? The origins of the term Akrasia date to biblical times; it's clear many people struggled with motivation for certain type of work back then.
> The modern notion that we can derive enduring motivation from the design of a list-making methodology, if only we could find the winning formula, is insane. Motivation comes from beholding the intended achievement itself.
Unfortunately, specialization of labor works directly against that. Few people assemble the final pieces to behold the achievement; everyone else is toiling at things that go into things to support people making things that go into other things, etc.
> If you don't want to carry out a task, either the task is not in service of a worthwhile goal, or it is but you are failing to notice that.
Indeed, but "failing to notice that" isn't something trivial, and for great many people, the failure to notice (or rather, the failure to feel, because noticing at the intellectual level is by itself not motivation) has a biological cause.
Are you sure that is the case? The origins of the term Akrasia date to biblical times; it's clear many people struggled with motivation for certain type of work back then.
> The modern notion that we can derive enduring motivation from the design of a list-making methodology, if only we could find the winning formula, is insane. Motivation comes from beholding the intended achievement itself.
Unfortunately, specialization of labor works directly against that. Few people assemble the final pieces to behold the achievement; everyone else is toiling at things that go into things to support people making things that go into other things, etc.
> If you don't want to carry out a task, either the task is not in service of a worthwhile goal, or it is but you are failing to notice that.
Indeed, but "failing to notice that" isn't something trivial, and for great many people, the failure to notice (or rather, the failure to feel, because noticing at the intellectual level is by itself not motivation) has a biological cause.