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:
You've just committed the Mind Projection Fallacy with respect to the notion of "important". What is important to you and important to other people may be different, as reality does not contain any XML tags marking one goal "important", and another one "trivial".
My post didn't come out quite how I intended. It reads like an angry rhetorical question, when it's supposed to be a sincere request for context. I'm baffled by the depth that people go into probing self-help ideas, talking in abstract vaguenesses of "getting things done" without revealing and explaining the personal goals that the techniques are supposed to help them achieve.
Given your profession and obsessive interest in the field PJ, perhaps you can give some examples of the sorts of objectives people need Akrasia-fighting techniques to accomp... (read more)