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 is a different question.
I certainly spend much more time procrastinating now that I'm trying to write a PhD than I did as an undergraduate when I had exercises to hand in each week - currently my only 'deadline' is to finish in about 3 years, which seems much too far away to worry about. Probably the fact that writing is a profession in which procrastination is an option combines with jimrandomh's point to produce the effect you're talking about.
Yeah PhD/academia is the absolute worst, because the timespan is quite long, and many of the deadlines are soft. Miss a paper deadline? Just submit to the next one, with a slightly greater chance of being scooped. Not done your thesis on time? Just ask for an extension, and waste more months/years of your life. Grad school is truly the snooze button on the alarm clock of life.
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: