My preferred way to solve problems is to know exactly what you're doing, and why, and thus find it extremely easy to do the things.

This is, perhaps, the silver-tongued dream of philosophy. Ah, well.

Anyway, I highly recommend this method when you can get it. It really is remarkable. It's remarkable how easy it is to do things in this state. Going back to philosophy for a moment, I think it's due to the motivating force of reasons. All philosophers, more or less, agree that reasons for action are motivating. And, by achieving a very pure reason (that is, a direct understanding fueling a reason, and not just "well, I think I have to do X because Y told me it increases the chances of Z"), you can observe a very pure motivation as a result.

I feel like everyone's gotten at least one of these instances before. But, if you haven't, uh, I highly recommend it, I suppose.

Anyway, obviously, I should now enumerate some reasons (pun intended) that reasons can fail.

• "Akrasia", a weakness of the will. There are many possibly understandings of the term akrasia, and thus many possible analyses of this phenomenon. As I take it, a literal weakness of the will, there actually is no possible akrasia in a situation of perfect understanding. To ever-so-slightly paraphrase a reddit post I once read, "would you rather have sex with a model and win the lottery or shoot yourself in the dick with a machine gun and go to jail?" It actually doesn't take any willpower to choose the former than the latter. Why? Because one is obviously better than the other. If you understood all things, all choices would be this easy. I realize that assertion makes me kind of Socratic. That's fine. I am kind of Socratic. I mean, also, who hasn't been?

• Weakness of the imagination. Sometimes — a lot of the time, for me — you probably aren't motivated by reasons correctly because you don't understand the consequences or components, which often (but not always) can be fixed by imagining them. Envisioning them. Figuring them out. Either you don't know how pleasurable/painful a result is going to be, or a step. Sometimes I put something off because I think it's going to be hard, and then when I figure it out, figure out that there are actually only a couple small steps in it, I do it immediately (unfortunately I actually usually have a good idea that it will take half and hour and be unpleasant, 🇫)

• Weakness of the flesh. For whatever reason, you can run out of "energy" and then find various tasks insurmountable even if the whole sequence of tasks is a good idea on the whole. ———— I guess that's not so surprising, given that any plan which has "lift a 1000-pound weight" as a step could be a great plan on the whole except for its insurmountable step. And when you have the anime training weights of sleepiness on, many things are like a 1000-pound weight.

• Weakness of the understanding. You can lack information you need to know exactly what you're doing. You can also just be too stupid to figure it out, or hold an entire plan in your mind, or in big enough chunks.

• Weakness of morals. I think one of the main "weaknesses of the will", in practice, is when people know they morally should do something, but don't feel like doing it. This is actually not an important special case, imo.

• Weakness of goals. Sometimes your goals (or plans) are bad, and that's why you don't want to do them. Not really an interesting special case, logically, but it is surprising. Also: if you don't want to do your plan enough, that means it is a bad plan, by that fact alone. Try using ingenuity instead.

• Mysterious causes. The real core difficulty here, of akrasia, in a different sense, is that people don't know why they aren't following their plans. ———— after all, I suppose, if they knew why, then they would simply easily do the right thing, as discussed at the top of the post. Anyway, I think it's usually weakness of flesh and weakness of understanding.

These categories aren't, like, mutually exclusive or exhaustive, probably — they aren't "clean-cleaving".

One great tip: if you think about a circumstance or plan for 5 minutes, or sometimes 5 seconds, or something in between, (or, sometimes, 5 hours) often you'll figure out everything about it, and gain resolve. (Note: you cannot distract yourself while you do this, probably. I mean, maybe it works for you that way. And sometimes it works for me that way. But mainly, I find the distractions simply prevent you from proceeding. A "defensive mechanism" of the mind (I hate that term — it's actually more like a "I'd rather be doing something else" mechanism of the mind).)

Another caveat is that understanding what you're doing is often an luxury that time does not afford.

One final tip: if you don't like doing something, figure out how to avoid it. Don't like doing your taxes? Pay someone else to do them. Pay them too much money to do it. It's fine. (Assuming you have enough money to do that responsibly.)