For instance often in the morning I'll often take a while to get working despite the fact my willpower reserves should be near full.
If you do a lot of work during the day you may end up getting exhausted and having little willpower left. But that in itself doesn't mean that you start off with a full tank in the morning and it gets slowly depleted as time goes on or as you do more work.
I suspect that you probably start off with a bit less willpower in the morning, and that it can go up and down in range throughout the day in response to what happens. For example, if you have a lot of frustration, that may make it go down, whereas if you have some wins that might make it go up. I'm not denying that eventually the work will start draining your willpower, though.
I also think that getting things done is less a matter of having sufficient willpower, and more one of structuring tasks so as to remove, as much as possible, the need for willpower.
I think that our bodies/brains are designed to take on smaller, more concrete tasks that are familiar to us, and of a sort that work towards the sorts of goals our brains are wired (by evolution) to work towards. The more a task (or our perception of a task, actually) grates with this, the more willpower is required to undertake it.
So the trick is to structure things so that they're more like what our brains are suited to.
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: