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When you finish the dull task, give yourself something you actually like. A reward you do not really want does no work at all.
Choose it before you start and make it specific: the good coffee rather than whatever is in the cupboard, half an hour of the thing you keep deferring, a walk you enjoy. The point is that something good arrives close to the finish, because the task's own payoff is usually weeks away or invisible. If you notice yourself picking something joyless because it feels more deserving, that is the bit worth changing.
Qur’an and Sunnah
To whoever, male or female, does good deeds and has faith, We shall give a good life (Quran 16:97). Some of what is promised is for later and some of it is meant for now, which is fair reason to let a finished task feel good today.
مَنۡ عَمِلَ صَٰلِحࣰ ا مِّن ذَكَرٍ أَوۡ أُنثَىٰ وَهُوَ مُؤۡمِنࣱ فَلَنُحۡيِيَنَّهُۥ حَيَوٰةࣰ طَيِّبَةࣰۖ وَلَنَجۡزِيَنَّهُمۡ أَجۡرَهُم بِأَحۡسَنِ مَا كَانُواْ يَعۡمَلُونَ
To whoever, male or female, does good deeds and has faith, We shall give a good life and reward them according to the best of their actions
Qur’an 16:97read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of children and adolescents with ADHD found a measurable preference for the immediate reward over the larger delayed one, and it was distinct from acting without thinking. So the trouble is not that you do not want the outcome, it is that the outcome sits too far away to pull you. Placing something small and real near the finish works with that rather than against it. The pooled studies were in young people, so take it as a description of the pattern rather than a tested technique.
Patros CH, Alderson RM, Kasper LJ, Tarle SJ, Lea SE, Hudec KL. (2016). Choice-impulsivity in children and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): A meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A reward that arrives soon after the effort is the one your brain actually counts.
When not to
If the reward is one you would regret afterwards, in money or food or lost sleep, pick a different one rather than dropping the idea.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.