P. J. Eby nailed it: anything worth doing, is worth doing better. All the activities you mention in your first post qualify as examples, as does any other activity. If you've pledged your life towards curing AIDS, then you should strive to do ever better at that until the menace of the syndrome is utterly rid from this world. Or you mention having the curiosity to read books. But it is not enough simply that one reads books. We want to read more books, and the right books in the right order! A human life is so ridiculously short compared to the possibilities existence has to offer. I say it is a horrible tragedy that a person should die without finishing that sudoku solver, or getting all the stars in Super Mario Galaxy---if that's what she would have truly cared about on reflection. And if it isn't, then it's a horrible tragedy that she had spent time on the sudoku solver or the video game instead of working on what she would have cared most desperately about on reflection.
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: