I need to book plane tickets for EAGx Prague before they get prohibitively expensive, but I’ve never done this before and haven’t been able to get myself to actually go through the process for some reason. Any advice for what to do when you get “stuck” on something that you know will be pretty easy once you actually do it?
Sounds like an ugh field. Spencer Greenberg also had a podcast episode on motivation recently, including backchaining to your ultimate motivations through a series of "why" questions in order to access more motivating feelings.
My random advice would be to book a friend or maybe some EA whose done it before to walk you through the process and provide their flight-booking wisdom (a pretense or useful or both) like "you have to pay for a checked bag both ways so maybe it's better to upgrade to the seat with a free checked bag".
Some people I know have found that committing to a friend that they'd donate $X to an ineffective charity to be a sufficient motivator. I've had mixed results myself.
Thinking about what I’d do if I was a grantmaker that others wouldn’t do (inspired by https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AvwgADnkdxynknYRR/issues-with-centralised-grantmaking). One course of action I’d strongly consider is to reach out to my non-EA friends—most of whom are fairly poor, are artists/game developers whose ideas/philosophies I consider high value, and who live around the world—and fund them to do independent research/work on EA cause areas instead of the minimum-wage day jobs many of them currently have. I’d expect some of them to be interested (though some would decline), and they’d likely be coming from a very different angle than most people in this space. This may not be the most efficient use of money, but making use of my peculiar/unique network of friends is something only I can do, and may be of value.