The best is to never use it and swim with the current. However, some people appear to like cramming their schedules with willpower-testing events, which is never a smart idea. Success in challenging will tasks may offer satisfaction but also psychological wear and tear.
Building an iron will starts with moderation. Instead of carrying weights all day, we should focus on gravity-based activities. Also called intelligence.
With inertia, willpower is less needed. Physics defines inertia as an object's movement when all its forces are zero. Imagine a ball rolling on a frictionless surface: it would never stop or be hard to stop.
Because of habit, humans are inactive. One habit we all have is getting up. Keeping a regular bedtime will reduce the willpower needed to wake up. It involves disciplining our behaviour such that the final result depends less on will and more on inertia that favours us.
Motivation, however, boosts willpower. This is little understood in libraries. Returning books a few days late will result in penalties. Borrowing will be unavailable for a few days. The user's major motive for going to the library is to borrow books, but this sanction eliminates that desire once the loan expires.
The user perceives the cost of not being able to borrow books in two, three, or four days as considerably cheaper than coming to the library and not being able to borrow books immediately. Thus, some users postpone the task until they pass by the library and don't go there on purpose beyond the expiration date.
Another perspective on motivation exists. When we select a medium or long-term goal, attaining intermediate goals will ease the willpower weight of our least favourite tasks. Imagine that you want to lose 10 kilos by watching your diet and exercising more. Well, if you think your efforts to accomplish this goal are succeeding, you may have to work less to sustain them.
How we define our goals affects willpower. The will benefits from precise, divisible, evaluable, steady, well-defined goals over which we almost always have control. Since uncertainty removes part of our will's surface, it can harm it most.
Willpower also depends on self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the belief that we can succeed. This is the genuine account of a male athlete who lately said he was only gathering injuries and had to miss multiple training sessions for two months.
He claims that the hardest workouts used to cost him a lot, but now it costs him mentally. His belief that he won't finish them drove him to cancel some before starting.
Willpower can also benefit from social support. Sharing that we are quitting smoking can motivate people to aid us in our hardest times. We must add our common motivation to be consistent in our words and actions to this goal.