People have been encouraging me to share my anti-akrasia tricks, but it feels inappropriate to dedicate a top-level post solely to unproven techniques that work for some person and may not work for others, so:
Go ahead and share your anti-akrasia tricks!
Let's make it an open thread where we just share what works and what doesn't, without worrying (yet) about having to explain tricks with deep theories, or designing proper experiments to verify them. However, if you happen to have a theory or a proposed experiment in mind, please share.
Bragging is fine, but please share the failures of your techniques as well – they are just as valuable, if not more.
Note to readers – before you read the comments and try the tricks, keep in mind that the techniques below are not yet proven supported or explained by proper experiments, and are not yet backed by theory. They may work for their authors, but are not guaranteed to work for you, so try them at your own risk. It would be even better to read the following posts before rushing to try the tricks:
Having someone watch me. Works four out of five times. From talking to other people it has a much higher success rate, but I'm still trying to figure out what's akrasia and what's an executive functioning deficit resulting from minor frontal lobe damage.
I have a friend who hires people to sit across from her at work. Pays for itself with the extra work she can get done.
Stepping back and watching the meat-I-am start to do stuff helps too, but not nearly as often, and I only learned that trick a few weeks ago -- from this site.
I wonder if sticking a poster of a person looking at you to a nearby wall would help to trick the mind into believing that it's being watched.
I vaguely remember reading an article (or a book chapter? Freakonomics?) about a bagel experiment like this one, where putting a picture of a face on the bagel box has reduced the theft rate.