I won't repeat most of the common advice - sleep, diet, drugs, etc. But let's go into willpower.<p>Willpower is like a muscle. There are 3 types: will (trying to do something, like exercise), won't (avoiding something like 9GAG), and want (being driven by a higher purpose).<p>Dopamine fuels want. Dopamine makes you do things, no matter how painful. It starts you off with arousal and excitement, and then forces you to finish, using anxiety. But if you don't want anything badly enough, it grasps nearby things - memes, porn, emptying your inbox.<p>One cure is to spend a little time, maybe 10 minutes a day (or before bed) thinking about what you really want. Keep aligning that. Watch motivational videos. You'll be high on dopamine when you start procrastinating, and if you can master redirecting it towards something you actually want, that makes you very productive.<p>The other treatment is to bolster up your will/won't power enough to keep you off Reddit and start working. Willpower is like a muscle. Exercise strengthens it. Overtraining kills it. I find what works is tiny reps. Find the smallest thing to train your will and won't power. What worked for me was trying to walk faster and putting cookies on my desk and trying not to eat them. This trains your brain not to give in.<p>One big, completely unintuitive thing you can do is to not feel bad about yourself. Feeling bad saps your willpower. Which makes you indulge. Which makes you feel worse.<p>A hack around that is to simply track how many times you've indulged. Just observe. And don't try to reduce it. Forcing yourself to reduce it leads to a willpower trap, where you'll keep failing week by week, try to make up for it, making the gap from reality bigger and making you feel worse. What worked for me is try to maintain the number... it naturally went from 11/week to 2/week to 1 the next week. If you tell yourself you'll watch Reddit 4 hours a day, it starts to feel less appealing.<p>In the short term, you can also try to hold off on an impulse. We are wired to give in to instant gratification. Give yourself 10 minutes before indulging, and after that 10 minutes do it if you still want to. Even if you fail, it trains up your willpower. This is a big part of how Pomodoro works.<p>A lot of this is taken from the book Maximum Willpower, by Dr. K. McGonigal. A lot of advice on the Internet and books is incomplete and conflicting, based on anecdotes on what's worked for someone. It's good to reward yourself, but also bad. You can slog through it, but there's a limit and a cost to it. Hacks like dopamine suppression works, but overdo it and you'll lose interest in everything. The book covers most of the scenarios, and generally it's good to look to psychologists on advice on how to hack your brain.