>>4358
You're right about motivation being unreliable, it really is, and I wouldn't be surprised if it has already faded away for you. But this is irrelevant, because for your productivity plan, motivation will be a mere supplement. The majority of the work will be done by willpower and habits.
>How can I be sure to keep up these habits once my motivation leaves me?
Fully developed habits are independent of motivation and willpower, it's almost instinctual. It doesn't matter if you feel like absolute shit, if it's a habit, and the necessary trigger is there, you will study.
>How can I force myself to develop good study habits?
First I'll briefly explain how a full developed habit works. Look at pic related. The cue is something you hear or see that gives you a craving for the reward. Which in turn makes you do the routine that you associated with the cue and reward. When you are first setting up a habit, initially a lot of this is done consciously, and there is a lot of brain activity from start to finish. But the more you do it, the less and less brain activity there is. Until eventually, the cue is enough to send you into autopilot and complete your routine in hopes of getting the reward.
So from this you have probably grasped that you need a cue and you need a reward. The reward has to make you feel good. It can be physical(like a sweet) or it can be mental(like you saying to yourself that you did really well followed by you imagining the success you will get from doing this habit), the point is that it has to make you feel good. The cue can be anything, it can be an alarm clock, it can be the look of your room or it can be an existing habit. For instance, if your routine was push ups and your cue is you going to the toilet, with the reward being you saying "I'm awesome" while putting your hands up in the air like a faggot, everytime you'd take a piss you'd do pushups.
So how would you form your study habits?
Find your cue, find your reward and for your routine, start small, really small. Your routine has to be so easy that you could do it now. So for example lets just say 20 minutes. So on day 1 you'd do 20 minutes, you'd reward yourself and that's it for the day. On day two you do 20 again, you reward yourself etc. On day 3 though, you increase by 10 minutes. So day 3 and 4 is 30 minutes a day. Day 5 and day 6 is 40 minutes a day etc etc. So basically you are starting small and gradually increasing the difficulty. After a few weeks to a month it will be a full on habit and eventually you will be doing ridiculous hours of study with ease.
The above is an example. Gradually increase at a pace that is comfortable with you, so if a 10 minute increase is too much for every 3rd day, do it on every 4th day. Vary the increase and the starting point to what suits you best. But keep something in mind here, do not be liberal with your times. Don't start with too much at once. This is a rookie mistake that will end up with you burning out and giving up. Instead you will start at a very very easy point and gradually increase. This is a much more successful strategy than starting with 3 hours at once and just winging it.
>How can I increase my willpower?
Meditation(pic related)
And practicing "I will" and "I won'ts". Either doing something you don't want to do, or not doing something you'd usually do. Nothing drastic like suddenly waking up really early, but small stuff. Like opening doors with your non dominants hand. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Stuff like that. There's much more to it.
Here are some resources I highly and I mean highly recommend you read. My above explanation is garbage in comparison to the real thing.
>Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg
http://pdfbooksinfo.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-power-of-habit-pdf-book-free.html
>Willpower Instinct
http://72.38.146.125/jim/stopsmoking/resources/the_willpower_instinct_how_self_control_works_why_.pdf
Both are must reads. Willpower Instinct is more practical and will probably be very useful to you. Make sure you read Power of Habits too, as it explains things so much better than I do. It's knowledge that you need to know.
Btw, for your study, I'd check out the pomodoro technique and see how you can tie it with gradually increasing study time.