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Psychohistorian comments on Fighting Akrasia: Incentivising Action - Less Wrong
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There's one thing that really fights akrasia, and that's being both observed and painfully accountable.
Akrasia typically acts via future discounting. Sure, it's worth doing, but it's not worth doing now; it can be done later. Having a boss who will yell at you (or fire you) if you miss a deadline or a supervisor who will chew you out for playing minesweeper takes away the future discounting problem, because the bad event is something that happens with high probability right now. There's nothing special about employment in this context; anything that makes the pain of procrastination immediate will fight akrasia effectively.
I'm just pointing out that taking employment as your example is overly narrow. There's a very clear mechanism (present infliction) by which employment fights akrasia, and it's how to use that mechanism that really deserves attention, in my opinion.
I agree that discounting plays a huge role in akrasia. There are immediate costs, but longer term gains. This implies that the solution to akrasia is to lower your discount rate. Problem solved.
...now, how does one go about doing that?
Move the reward closer perceptually . i.e., imagine already having the rewards you will get, viewing them as imminent and certain.
This is not a panacea, of course; there are dozens of things that can interfere with you actually doing it, as I mentioned in my video on this. And one I didn't mention is that if there is anything you perceive as bad about reaching your goal, then that is also going to be magnified by bringing it perceptually closer to you.
That is, changing your discount rate for an item applies to the bad as well as the good. (So if you have a "fear of success", this may actually enhance it.)
"discount rate" only applies to exponential discounting. Hyperbolic discounting is parameterized by k, which is the reciprocal of how far away the reward have to be for its perceived value to be halved. The fix isn't to try to reduce k, which is obviously not directly possible, but to try to ensure the intertemporal bargaining is more often won by your longer-term interests.
Why is this obvious?
And could indirect measures do it?
That's interesting. This leads to a known method of setting up intermediate deadlines. Maybe a clever scheme that absorbs the risks of not meeting a few of the intermediate deadlines, but still threatens with big penalties can be effective.