Luke, I want to thank you for writing the articles on procrastination and happines. Somehow you managed to write a text that appears both scientific and legible. And short enough. And actionable. This weekend I am going to make a short translated version in a more "to do"-like form, which I will print and periodically read to remind myself.
For me so far the best tool to overcome acrasia is the Beeminder. Most other strategies I have tried before failed after a week or sooner (the biggest exception was the exercise plan 5BX that I used for three months). Also some lessons from P.J.Eby that I found online helped me a lot. One important idea I found in his lessons is that our attention to external things is more persistent than our attention to things in our heads; so if there is an important idea, it helps to place it into the environment by writing it on paper. I guess it also helps that my Beeminder data exist somewhere outside my head, even outside my own computer.
Beeminder is very useful because it measures and records progress. Too bad I use it only since December 2011, so I don't have historical data to compare. I am ashamed to admit that my goals are very humble nowadays -- a small daily exercise, running once a week, writing one blog article per week, sleeping before midnight -- but even these goals were hardly attainable for me months ago, when my laziness fully exploded. And by the way reading LW helped me to set realistic goals. When setting a goal, I try to use outside view and ask myself what is the probability that I will actually do it, and what evidence exists. If I feel the probability is less than 80-90%, I don't set the goal, because I prefer smaller goals with higher probability than greater goals with less probability; I want reliable progress, not random success. (I can still try to reach more ambitious goals without writing them to Beeminder.)
So these days I am very certain that LW helps me to overcome my procrastination. (Without LW I wouldn't have found Beeminder nor P.J.Eby, so I include this to LW's value too.) And the only cost is time, which I would have spent on other web sites anyway. I am starting from almost level zero, so even if my progress means much to me, it is probably not impressive to anyone else (unless they are in a similar situation like I was half year ago). My point is -- Beeminder is useful not only to overcome acrasia, but also to measure your progress.
So if anyone wants to be sure that their "becoming stronger" is not just a placebo effect, here is a tool. It is not good for everything; it can measure how many articles I write on my blog, but not their quality, so optimizing too much could result in writing a lot of rubbish; also it can be used only on repeated activities... but it's better than nothing.
Viliam, thanks so much! What's surprising to me is that you're getting that much motivational power out of Beeminder even without pledging money to stay on your yellow brick roads. Theoretically, that's where the real motivational power comes from -- setting up a commitment device.
If you agree that hyperbolic discounting is at the heart of akrasia then you should, I believe, agree that commitment devices are fundamental to the solution. But tracking and visualizing your progress on a graph of course goes a long way by itself.
I'd like to share my specific motivation for writing Can the Chain Still Hold You?
I agree with Yvain that akrasia is probably a major reason that rationality alone doesn't create superheroes. You might be much better than average at making good decisions based on an accurate model of reality, but that doesn't mean you can follow through with them.
Many people report that their thinking is clearer and better as a result of Less Wrong. But despite our many, many attempts to hack away at the problem of akrasia (more: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), I haven't heard of many LWers conquering akrasia.
But I still have hope that this is possible. In 2006, we finally got a decent psychological theory of procrastination, much better than the old decisional-avoidant-arousal theory. On the timescale of progress in psychology, 2006 is basically yesterday. The first book on how to apply this new theory to daily life was published in late 2010. There is no community of people systematically practicing these techniques and reporting their results.
So it seems to me there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to be scooped up in the field of procrastination research. If we try and test enough things, and especially if our tests our theory-guided, we may be able to learn new things and flip a few causal factors such that the chain of akrasia no longer holds us — at least, not as tightly as before.