Great article, especially appreciated the graphs. The idea of "keep adding novelty" is probably what separated my successful long term projects from the unsuccessful ones. I previously attributed that to having lots of variety and freedom, but the consequence of those factors was indeed novelty. I want to mention Neil Fiore's excellent book The Now Habit, which is a practical manual on overcoming procrastination. The…
Interesting to effectively see Jean Paul Sartre being brought up here. As verbose as he was, though, I do agree with the framing. Putting aside the fundamental physical paradoxes and incoherence of free will, at the level of subjective experience, every action ever taken is a choice, possibly between extremely shitty options, but a choice nonetheless, and owning that is the only way I've ever found to stay sane about…
You're right that long-term goals such as these don't thrive on novelty at all. I suppose they fall in a different category, more of a commitment than a one-off project to be procrastinated about.
For me personally, I have similar goals, and I'm not struggling with procrastinating my fitness-related tasks at all. It's an interesting insight, now that I think about it. Would that be because I have a long-term goal in mind? Because I know it's important to my health?