I was once watching Elon Musk talk about this, he said something kind of curious, which I'll paraphrase here because I forget his exact words. He said he does not feel motivated every hour of the day, occasionally running into snags, ick factor, brain fog but he also doesn't not view handling those as options. He just literally does not think of 'dealing with it', which sounds like the opposite of most self help book advice It is not so much thinking, as the lack of it that gives him an exceptional personal executive command to coordinate.

Either that or he's got a secret supply of NZT.

It does speak to several things I've read about the brain though. The higher brain functions are 'new' and rudimentary. It fits in with Moravec's Thesis about AI. I don't see many animals procrastinating or stressing out unless there is an obvious physical stimulus that explains why they're behaving like that. Many of the psychological phenomena humans experience must be related to higher brain function and it being evolutionarily unrefined. In the human species itself there is a wide spread of behavior, where a lot of intellectual people are neurotic as hell (kvetching being quite noticeable) but the obviously less intellectual apparently don't suffer quite as much. It cannot be a coincidence that meditation has the goal for absence of thoughts and so many geeks practice it.