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.)