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What else is there except reward or punishment?Nothing in terms of categories, but many people have "non-standard" coefficients in those mechanisms. Like:
> doing something with something extrinsic (nice food, money, new toy)
Those things are pleasurable and nice, but they don't work for me as a reward unless I can get them in under half an hour or so. My brain won't make the motivational connection between a task and a reward if the delay is larger.
The fundamental reward/motivation mechanism is the same, but it feels like (and I understand it actually is like) the "time discounting" has the exponential factor so large that it effectively becomes a step function - rewards become either "approximately now" or "approximately never".
Yes, this means that most of the things expected of adults are, for me, entirely unrewarding and thus nearly impossible to motivate to do. No, this is not a hyperbole. This is why several people in this thread are swearing to the motivational value of ticking a check box, and why I'm joining them in this - for a lot of mundane, daily tasks, ticking off a box is the only reward our brains can process.
(Sometimes the check box may work as a crutch, allowing enough successes in a row on an activity to let the brain pick up on a slightly more distant reward, and/or just habituate. This is, kid you not, how I had to re-habituate brushing my teeth a couple times in my life. Ain't ADHD great.)