The best motivator for me is meeting other people's expectations, or trying to impress them.
Anecdote 1: A few summers ago, my friend paid me $100 to make a website for his babysitting business. I started working on it at his house and he saw me and realized it was going to take significantly more than the 8 hours I predicted. So every day he would come over to my house to watch me work on the site. It went at a steady pace and I finished after 25 hours of work. Meanwhile I had another, more important programming project that I was being unproductive at.
Anecdote 2: At work, when I'm feeling unmotivated, I think "What's the quickest way I can show my boss a demo of something to prove I've been working?"
Anecdote 3: If I work out at the gym by myself, I never do the exercises that feel awkward unless someone is watching, and I don't make quite the impossible effort to strain my muscle more after it already feels dead.
Side note: When I'm at work, I always think "This is so tedious. I'm looking forward to getting on with my workout later." Then when I'm working out, I think "This is so damn painful. I'm looking forward to just sitting at work and writing code."
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
provensupported 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: