Here are the two most effective "quick trick" tactics. I say "quick trick" because they tackled the symptoms not the root cause (albeit effectively) via brute force, leading me to eventually burn out and abandon them:
Boss as a Service: The most extreme tactic I've tried. You pay someone each month to be your "boss", meaning you send them your goals for each day/week and then you report back to them at the end of the day/week on how you did. Was very effective, but was too draining so I stopped using it.
Focusmate: Lets you do 50-minute work sessions with your camera on with a stranger. You each say your goals in the beginning of the session and then work the rest. It increased the probability that I would actually work on my goals but wasn't foolproof. Since the sessions required a taxing amount of focus, I eventually stopped scheduling them.
Meditating and exercising daily as well as the Pomodoro method didn't seem to have much of an effect on staying focused on goals. Also, taking the meds with food seemed to make me less bouncy and more likely to actually work on my goals.
Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like that. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea. But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself.
This seems like sunk cost fallacy. If your goal is to maximize your happiness in life, then you shouldn't base your decision off of the abilities you have now if utilizing them won't make you happier. This seems like an easy path for the stereotypical Gifted Kid to fall prey to: having succeeded by unhappily working themselves extremely hard through high school and/or college, and then feeling like they need to continue performing at that level since they've already built up so much knowledge, accolades, job connections, etc.
I also have this problem and the same experience with ADHD meds. I tried a bunch of tactics that I can go into if you want but they all had varying degrees of success. Annoyed of trying quick tricks, I tried going for the root cause.
I thought the root cause was related to low willpower, so I tried multiple things that have been shown to improve willpower in studies (meditation, exercise, squeezing a hand grip) but I didn't see much benefit after at least a month of doing these actions daily so I stopped.
I then thought that maybe it's not so much low willpower but rather low conscientiousness (one of the Big Five personality traits). They seemed similar but studies distinguished between them so I tried to peruse the research on ways to improve conscientiousness. Unfortunately, the studies I read all seemed to be tied to some unique therapy that was only broadly described and I wasn't sure how to find someone who specializes in those techniques. There was one 2021 study that used an app to successfully improve this, but the app isn't released it.
If you find a solution to this problem, please let me know.
Are you sure about the Harris-Benedict formula? It seems like Mifflin-St Jeor is the most reliable. Nonetheless, I'm curious if you have any recommended articles/books on diet and mental health?
These are nice, for the friends recommendation one just be cautious of offering unsolicited advice and other-optimizing
What dose do you use when you do it that early? At the end of section 3 in the post you linked that recommends taking it that early, it seems like the conclusion around the proper dose for this case is murky.
I'm not very familiar with academia, but have you considered sending this to the authors of the paper to a) see if there are any mistakes you made and b) help them avoid similar errors in the future?
But I acknowledge that this could lead to a long email exchange that you may not want.
Was "Rest Days vs Zombie Days" removed from LessWrong, or at the very least available online anywhere else? I can't find it either via Google search or LessWrong's site search. All I see is "Rest Days vs. Recovery Days" by Unreal from 2019.