On the akrasia level, I find that the harder the task seems, the more frequent "reward" hits I need for working on it. For me, these hits mainly consist of getting to cross an item off my to-do list. So if I'm really struggling with a paragraph, my to-do list can contain such fine-grained items as "Think about the structure of [paragraph x]", and "Write a sentence explaining how RelevantAuthor (2012) is relevant here". Even a poor effort at doing these things gets the item crossed off (though if it still needs re-doing or more work, it will of course get put on again).