Writers seem to spend more time describing their tricks for avoiding procrastination than any other profession.
I think writers probably spend more time thinking about tricks for avoiding procrastination than, say, binmen. If you're a binman there isn't much procrastination you can do - you get up in the morning, drive your lorry, pick up the bins and take them back to wherever it is binmen take bins to. If you don't, you get fired. For a writer, the schedule of a days work is much less well-defined and, probably more importantly, the deadlines tend to be much longer. Whether writers spend more time thinking about procrastination than, say, freelance web-designers i...
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: