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 imagine this is a pretty well-known trick, I think I took it from an essay by Paul Halmos, but might be mistaken. It was originally suggested in the context of writing a mathematics paper, but would probably apply a lot more generally as well.
The trick is: always stop writing for the day in the middle of a sentence; preferably an important one.
For many people, the hardest part of writing is starting to write - if you've stopped in the middle of a sentence, you have an obvious starting point, and you can find it relatively easy to get into the rhythm.
Writers seem to spend more time describing their tricks for avoiding procrastination than any other profession.