One of the common conversations with friends lately is: how do you use LLMs? In the latest round, I mentioned that I use LLMs to motivate myself — and people were surprised.

In turn, I was surprised they were surprised, because when comparing notes with other peers at work, many shared LLMs were useful for getting started. It’s something Anthropic’s engineers also reported:

(…) that the reduced “activation energy” of using Claude enabled them to defeat procrastination more easily, “dramatically decreasing the energy required for me to want to start tackling a problem, and therefore I’m willing to tackle so many additional things.”

The science behind motivation

This “activation energy” is linked to how motivation works, which scientists divide into two processes:

• what’s the cost-benefit ratio?
• is it worth starting?

When we deem the cost of an action higher than the benefit, our motivation to perform it is low, and vice versa.

However, even in situations where we understand the benefits are high, we sometimes decide not to act. The 2nd process is preventing us from even start the task.

A few days ago, some researches published a paper testing how monkeys make these decisions, focused on that second process. They claim to have found the physical brain circuit that acts as the brake, and some biochemicals that inhibit or release the activation. They call it the “motivation brake”. The idea is that the activation circuit will not fire if the task triggers some stress. The stress may come in many forms: physical pain, negative feelings related to the task such as self-doubt, pressure from schedules, self-imposed perfectionism, lack of tolerance to frustration, fear of failure, etc.

I’d argue that stress can also be situational: try doing anything after a copious lunch, dealing with something difficult at the end of the day, working when you have a cold, or coming up with sharp thoughts when you have sleep deprivation.

The takeaway is that, depending on which circuit is involved in your lack of action, you need to do different things:

• if it’s the cost-benefit ratio: increase the reward
• if it’s the activation trigger: reduce the stress related to the task

Which is in line with some known tricks to deal with procrastination.

Using LLMs

LLMs affect motivation in two ways. On the one hand, they reduce the cost of performing some tasks, impacting the cost-benefit ratio. On the other, they can be used to reduce the stress related to the task.

On the second point, one of the typical ways to reframe the negative emotions about a task is time-boxing it: “I’d give it just 15 minutes”. It’s easy to start if you focus on the process and lower the expectations about tte output. Another trick is asking yourself: “what’s the minimal thing I can do now?”.

It turns out engaging LLMs for this is useful as well. This is what I do, for example, when I need to review a pull request but I have brain fog. Instead of reading the code myself or even glancing at the long thread of comments, I ask Claude Code to read it all, and summarize it for me in less than 50 words. Then, I keep asking small questions until I get past the activation energy and I’m engaged with the task.

We often think about LLMs as tools for solving problems, but I find them just as valuable for helping us get started on solving them ourselves. The hardest part of any task is often just beginning — and having a tool that lowers that barrier makes it more enjoyable.