Whether we're doing cognitive work or exercising, doing anything comes with a feeling of straining — a sense of effort. The greater that sense of effort, the less we want to do the work or the workout.
In exercise science there's a concept called 
rating of perceived exertion (RPE). A high RPE means you feel more strongly that you're exerting yourself. In plain terms: it feels brutal. The higher your perceived exertion, the sooner you give up. I want to stretch this into the slightly more general idea of a sense of effort.
When it comes to work, the less effort it feels like, the better. If it feels easy, it's easy to start and you keep at it longer. You don't burn out, either. Of course, there are cases that need a certain amount of friction, like deliberate practice.1 But purely in terms of sustainability, less is better. People rarely quit something because it was so easy it got boring. Most quit because it was too hard.
If reducing the sense of effort is a good thing, how do we reduce it? The first thing to try is thinking only in the near-short term. "Near-short term" (現短期, hyeondangi) is a word I made up.2 It means the window three to five minutes out from now — not the present, but a short stretch pressed right up against it. You think about what you'd like to have gotten done by the end of those 3–5 minutes.
With writing, for instance, you concern yourself only with the bit you could finish exactly three minutes from now. You don't think about the whole piece. Maybe it's similar to the Freewriting technique. You focus only on the part you can finish in a moment and get that done first, whatever it takes.
I picked this method up while exercising. On a run, when there's still a long way to go in time or distance, thinking about the destination actually drains you. The sense of effort goes up.3 At moments like that, telling yourself to just cover the 200–300 m you can see ahead is what gets you there. In other words, thinking only in the near-short term means working by focusing solely on small tasks you can finish within a few minutes.
Focusing on the present, mindfulness-style, is actually poison here. Focusing only on the present makes you feel the pain more. Mindfulness makes heavy use of the body scan, but running a body scan in the middle of a long work session or a hard workout only makes you feel more pain. That's why you think about the near-short term — neither the present nor the distant future.
This also connects to GTD. GTD says that anything you can finish in under two minutes, you should do right away. A two-minute task carries little burden, and putting it off is more of a hassle than just doing it. In the same way, if you break work into pieces that take 3–5 minutes and concern yourself only with the piece at hand, it feels like you're only ever doing easy things, and the sense of effort drops.
Footnotes
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Another example where friction is needed: LLM Wikis and Germane Load. ↩
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It's not Yeongdangi, the test-prep brand, and it isn't the most intuitive word, but there was nothing else to call it. ↩
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Anyone who has done CrossFit will know. Say the WOD calls for 100 burpees. Thinking of it as 100 drains you before you've started. But thinking of it as 10 sets of 10 makes it at least feel doable. Because you're only counting to 10, you get to 10 quickly. If you think this is just a shell game, I invite you to try CrossFit. ↩