Story time! A couple years ago, I found myself with pretty severe ADHD and no way to get treatment for it. (There may have been a global healthcare cataclysm involved...)

I wanted to make some progress on a personal project, but I had a history of abandoning things, without external accountability. I had a guy for that the previous year, which worked great, but our interests diverged, so I had to find a way to do it on my own.

I realized that I couldn't force it. I had to find a way to make it work without having sufficient dopamine. Without relying on willpower at all.

So I stumbled into environmental design from first principles. I simply designed around all the failure modes.

1. I noticed that if I skipped a day of working on my project, the chance of completely losing momentum would rise enormously. So I decided I have to work every day, but to make it sustainable it only needs to be an hour.

2. I noticed that if I put work off until later in the day, the chance of skipping a day would rise enormously. So I decided that I had to start working as soon as I woke up. (But only for an hour. I could keep going but I didn't have to.)

3. And finally I noticed that, if I started playing with my phone or surfing the internet, the day was basically over. So I made a rule that I had to keep them both off for the first hour of the day. (And I turned them off the night before for good measure. That way I am waking up into the correct state by default.)

And what do you know. I didn't miss a day for 3 months. Even my dopamine starved brain was able to persist on this project every day without fail for several months straight, because I simply made these small changes to my environment!

The project suddenly became the most fun and interesting thing I could be doing. I actually looked forward to working on it the next day, when I went to sleep at night!