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:
I don't know if I'm facing the same problem as most people. I'm usually working, but I spread my effort out among so many tasks that most go unfinished. I read so many books that I forget 99% of what I read before I ever get a chance to use it. It's ludicrous; when I have an hour to read, I find it difficult to take less than 4 books with me even though I know I can read only 1 of them. I keep buying more books even though I have literally hundreds of books in my stack of books-waiting-to-be-read.
I think my problem is too much curiousity, and too much ambition, and too much trying to do everything myself instead of hiring or allying with other people to get things done.
I tried hiring a guy to do some of my programming for me, but he could never give a firm answer as to whether he would get around to doing something today / this week / next week / never.