Unblocking motivation is only enough on its own if the motivation is so strong that you feel “hungry” to do something. Long term this kind of hunger is, in my experience, unreliable, so it’s not enough just to unblock your ability to do things.
You also have to set up the conditions for your motivation to express itself, e.g. through daily rituals as you suggest. For example, a big problem people I talk to had to deal with when shelter-in-place orders hit was that they lost their daily rituals and had to establish new ones. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to work or do other things they normally do, it was that they lost the normal context in which they did them, and had to establish new contexts in which they expected to find themselves doing the intended activity.
Trying to force yourself to do things is like setting up the conditions without unblocked motivation.
So I think both things are required, but only one thing is the bottleneck at a time, thus lots of people need advice on one part and not the other at any given moment, creating evidence though that can look like all you need to do is fix one thing and everything else will follow.
Unblocking motivation is only enough on its own if the motivation is so strong that you feel “hungry” to do something. Long term this kind of hunger is, in my experience, unreliable, so it’s not enough just to unblock your ability to do things.
You also have to set up the conditions for your motivation to express itself, e.g. through daily rituals as you suggest. For example, a big problem people I talk to had to deal with when shelter-in-place orders hit was that they lost their daily rituals and had to establish new ones. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to work or do other things they normally do, it was that they lost the normal context in which they did them, and had to establish new contexts in which they expected to find themselves doing the intended activity.
Trying to force yourself to do things is like setting up the conditions without unblocked motivation.
So I think both things are required, but only one thing is the bottleneck at a time, thus lots of people need advice on one part and not the other at any given moment, creating evidence though that can look like all you need to do is fix one thing and everything else will follow.