OK, a serious one now.
If you're looking to motivate yourself towards certain activities, use fictional characters as imaginary rivals.
For example, Stephen Amell is a ridiculously buff dude who plays the titular character in the TV show Arrow). He spends a non-negligible amount of screen-time prancing around with his shirt off. While this does not contribute to my hedonic appreciation of the show, I find myself a lot more motivated to get up and do some exercise after watching it.
I suspect this is my brain alerting me to the presence of a ridiculously buff rival who spends time prancing around with his shirt off, which results in some mechanism motivating me to compete along that axis. I also suspect this would work along different axes of rivalry. Watching lots of fictional smart people achieve lots of awesome fictionally smart things may be a good motivator for academic activities.
Somewhat relatedly, I sometimes find using fictional characters (or stereotypes) as anti-inspiration. For example, I may ask myself "what would Sheldon Cooper do?" and then make sure not to do that.
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.