commitment - обязательство
Reward - награда
bundled -в комплекте
Leveraging - Используя
Overcome -преодолеть
crisp - хрустящий
anticipate - предвидеть
temptation - искушение
boosting - стимулирование


Four Willpower Challenges:

It's useful to consider 4 different ways our willpower can be challenged

1. Do Power: Performing a one time action (e.g., doing your taxes, getting your car registration taken care of)
2. Don’t Power: Resisting a one-time temptation (e.g., resisting the advances of a master seducer in a faraway city -- assuming you have a reason to resist :)).
3. Will Power: Following a course of action repeatedly (e.g, exercising every day)
4. Won’t Power: Resisting a temptation repeatedly (e.g., trying to quit smoking)

There are some judgment calls here regarding which category to put a particular challenge into. For instance, while taxes are, strictly speaking, a repeated action, the amount of time between instances makes it more like a one-time action.  

With that said most challenges will be pretty easy to sort into one of these 4 categories. (If you want to go crazy making finer distinctions BJ Fogg's Behavior Grid has 15 different categories)

Four Main Willpower Strategies:

There are also many good willpower-boosting strategies to choose from -- many of which are backed by research.  I find it useful to lump these strategies into four categories as well:

1. Modify your environment
2. Modify your brain
3. Modify your motivation
4. Modify your plan

Let’s look at each of these main strategies, and their specific sub-strategies.

Modify Your Environment:

• Make the task easier: for example, if you want to go for a run every morning, at night you can put your workout clothes at the foot of your bed so they’re ready right when you wake up.
• Get temptations out of view: for instance, go through your house, gather up all the snack food, and give it away or throw it away.

Modify Your Brain

• Glucose Management: Roy Baumeister's research shows that a steady source of brain fuel will make it more likely that you will stick to your plan.
• Better Brain Hygiene: Kelly McGonigal also has some research-backed suggestions for preparing your brain for action, including meditation, slow breathing, outdoor exercise and plenty of sleep.

Modify Your Motivation

• Precommitment: This is what Odysseus did when he had his crew members tie him to the mast before listening to the sirens. This is what Cortez did when he burned his ships -- his men had no choice but to carry out the plan at that point.  Jon Elster’s book Ulysses Unbound  investigates precommitment strategies for boosting willpower. And the sitestickK.com is dedicated to helping people use precommitment strategies.
• Reward Bundling: If you want to work out, you could put a book on tape on a special mp3 player that you only use while working out. That way you get a reward that’s bundled with the less pleasant activity. Here’s some research on this method: Temptation Bundling and other Health Interventions: ADDC April 2013
• Leveraging Control: Chrisoula Andreou (The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination) made the following rule for herself: "If I don't work out 5 times this week, I can't go out for dinner on Friday nights." And she found that this worked. Now one might wonder how this can work. If you had low self-control with respect to exercising, why would you suddenly have high self-control when it comes time to enforce the penalty? In fact self-control doesn't work like that. It's not "all or nothing".  We actually have strong self-control in some areas, and low self-control in others.  Andreou's suggestion is that we can indirectly use areas of high-control to give us leverage over areas of low control.
• Preparing Your Mind to Overcome Obstacles: Gabriele Oettingen developed a technique called Mental Contrasting, which consists of imagining your wished-for goal, fantasizing about the positive outcome of achieving your goal, and imagining the obstacles inside yourself which make it challenging to achieve your goal. Research suggests this technique strengthens the association between our current situation and future goals --at a nonconscious level-- in a way that helps us recognize current choices as obstacles or enablers of our goal.  Mental Contrasting also bypasses the trap of fantasizing about the future without considering goals, which evidence suggests significantly undermines the likelihood of achieving a goal.

Modify Your Plan:

• Resolutions: When you make a resolution, the way it’s structured can make a big difference.  You’ll be more successful if your rules are very crisp, forming what George Ainslie (Breakdown of Will) calls “bright lines”. And you’ll be more successful if you can anticipate cases where temptation will be especially strong and create sensible exceptions ahead of time for those cases.  For more on this, consider my Quora blog post here:Willpower and Game Theory by Jim Stone on The Philosophy of Productivity
• Implementation Intentions: Peter Gollwitzer (a pioneer of this technique) and Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) are the main forces promoting implementation intentions these days. Implementation intentions are just “if/then” rules that specify a trigger and an action. It’s best if the trigger contains “when” and “where” information. For instance, “If it’s time to eat and I’m in my kitchen, then I will start by making a salad.”
• Breaking your plan down further: as David Allen teaches us, knowing the “next action” can work wonders for getting us moving.

Which Strategies for Which Challenges?

So there are 4 kinds of strategies for boosting willpower, with many sub-strategies in each kind. Which specific strategies work best for each kind of willpower challenge?

Do Power (e.g. getting yourself to do the taxes): Try using implementation intentions, modifying your environment to make it easier, and breaking the plan down further so you know your next action.

Don’t Power (e.g. resisting the seducer): Remove yourself from the environment if possible. Do some slow breathing or meditation.

Will Power (e.g. daily exercise): Know which days will be especially hard, and plan around those. Make it easier by prepping your environment. Create implementation intentions that support the activity. Make sure your resolution has the right structure.

Won’t Power (e.g., quitting smoking): change your environment to remove as many cues as possible. Create alternative activities that satisfy a similar need. Create implementation intentions that support your substitution plan. Anticipate when it will be especially difficult and plan around those times. Consider resolution structures that have bright lines.  Cold turkey is the brightest line.  If you want to take baby steps make sure the baby steps involve bright lines.