Let's have some examples to help those like me get what you're talking about.
I'll bite.
"Get (back) in shape" is one of my big specific goals. If I can significantly improve (and then maintain!) my physical condition this year there is a good chance I will have the opportunity to perform in an off-Broadway show. Which would be a significant-to-me artistic achievement - and there's a looming deadline. One difficulty there is forcing myself to exercise as much as is appropriate to the situation.
"Create and publish my first iPhone application" is another goal. That one really tends to gets off track since it involves using a computer, which means it's easy to get sidetracked by email or reddit or stackoverflow or lesswrong. I know once I get "in the zone" on that sort of task it's hard to stop, but I'm not there yet - I'm at the early, frustrating stage of the project.
Also: keeping up and/or improving various artistic skills that might or might not culminate in future public performance... reading technical texts to keep up in my field...that's probably enough for a start.
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: