Great post!

That said, I've found that cultivating a gut-level feeling that what you're doing must be done, and must be done quickly, is an extraordinarily good motivator. It's such a strong motivator that I seldom explicitly acknowledge it. I don't need to mentally invoke "we have to study or the world ends".

This reminds me of the fact that, like many others, on many tasks I tend to work best right before the deadline, while doing essentially nothing in the before that deadline. Of course, for some tasks this is actually the rational way of approaching things (if they can be accomplished sufficiently well in that time just before the deadline). But then there are also tasks for which it would be very useful if I could temporarily turn on a belief saying that this is urgent.

Interestingly, there are also tasks that I can only accomplish well if there isn't any major time pressure, and a looming deadline prevents me from getting anything done. For those cases, it would be useful if I could just turn off the belief saying that I don't have much time left.