In my experience, all large-scale akratic dilemmas can be reduced to small-scale problems. Large-scale akrasia in not writing your novel is small-scale akrasia of not writing a chapter this week. Large-scale akrasia of losing weight is small-scale akrasia of not bothering to eat well today. Akrasia is the reduction of its parts, not the sum.
Then you're either very lucky, or you've misinterpeted your experience. People can be perfectly capable of writing one chapter this week, and then giving up on the whole thing the next week. The apparent reduction in this case is an illusion, because you can do a thing once and yet not be able to do it, in general.
It seems like you should be able to simply repeat the experience the following week, but it doesn't actually work that way in practice for most people who have problems with procrastination.
The thing that PCT added to my repertoire in this area was an explanation of why this phenomenon occurs. Specifically, perceptual variables are measured over differing time periods, with "higher" (i.e. controlling) levels being averaged over longer periods. So, for example, if you have a valued variable like "spending time with my kids" or "having time to myself" that's perceptually averaged over a multiweek period, the first week you work on your novel probably won't make much of a dent in that measurement.
By the second week, though, the measured error is going to start putting you into conflict and "reorganization", during which you will suddenly realize that gosh, that novel isn't really all that important and you could work on it tomorrow...
In some respects, this model is even simpler than Ainslie's appetites-and-hyperbolic discounting model of competing "interests". The interests are still there in PCT, but the activation of an interest is based on its degree of error - i.e., generating the "appetite" for more time for yourself or whatever. Thus, an interest can thereby seem to build up strength over time, and displace another interest that was previously ascendant.
Once your behavior changes, the error falls off on that interest, but the perceived average of your original interest (writing the novel) begins to fall out of its desired range. Soon, you're determined to write again... and the loop begins again.
That, of course, is the mild version. It's likely that you also fight back harder, by raising your determination (i.e., the reference level for completing the novel), leading to a greater sense of error, sooner, and active conflict between controllers (aka ego depletion), as the countering interest also goes into greater error.
In effect, the harder you try, the harder you fail, as the systems in conflict push back at you.
Whew. Can you tell I've had some experience with this sort of thing? ;-) Anyway, long story short: akrasic reduction is an illusion, because akrasia can result from conflicts between perceptual variables measured over different time frames. Thus, you can be capable of doing something at one time scale without conflict, but not at another, without inducing ego depletion.
This creates the all-too-common experience of discovering anti-akrasia hack #57, and having it work great for a little while, before it mysteriously stops working, or you simply stop using it. It's not meta-akrasia; it's just predictive akrasia. (I.e., if you know it's going to work, and your "real" goal at the moment is to lose, then you will find a way not to do it.)
PCT?
There is a flipside to the trivial inconvenience: the trivial impetus. This is the objectively inconsequential factor that gets you off your rear and doing something you probably would have left undone. It doesn't have to be a major, crippling akrasia issue. I'm not talking so much about finishing your dissertation or remodeling your house, although a trivial impetus could probably get you to make some progress on either. I'm talking about little things that make your life a little better, like trying a new food or permitting a friend to drag you along to a gathering of people and pizza.
An illustrative anecdote: the first time I tried guacamole, I was out with my family at a restaurant and my parents decided to order some. The waiter came out with a little cart with decorative little bowls full of ingredients and a couple of avocados, and proceeded to make guacamole right there with all the finesse of one of those chefs at a hibachi restaurant. He then presented us with the dish of guacamole and a basket of chips.
If my prior reasons for avoiding guacamole had been related to concerns about its freshness or possible arsenic content, this would have been a non-trivial reason to try the new food, but they weren't - I was just twelve, and it was green goop. But on that day, it was green goop that someone had made right in front of me like performance art! I simply had to have some! It was delicious. I have enjoyed guacamole ever since. I would almost certainly have taken years longer to try it, if ever I did, had it not been for that restaurant's habit of making each batch of guacamole fresh in front of the customer.
Not all trivial impetuses have to be so random and fortuitous. Just as you can arrange trivial inconveniences to stand between you and things you should not be doing, you can often arrange trivial impetuses to push you towards things you should be doing. For instance, I often get my friends to instruct me to do things when I'm having trouble getting moving: sometimes all it takes to get me to stop dithering and start making the pasta salad I agreed to bring to a party is someone agreeing when I say, "I should make pasta salad now". Or "I should go to bed now", or "I should probably pay that bill now".
Does anyone have any other ideas for trivial impetuses that could be helpful in fighting small-scale akrasia (or large-scale)?