Related To:  Incremental Progress and the Valley, Silver Chairs, Paternalism, and Akrasia, How a pathological procrastinator can lose weight

Akrasia can strike anywhere, but one place it doesn't seem to strike too often or too severely, assuming you are employed, is in the work place.  You may not want to do something, and it might take considerable willpower to perform a task, but unless you want to get fired you can't always play Solitaire.  The reason is clear to most working folks:  you have to do your job to keep it, and not keeping your job is often worse than performing an undesirable task, so you suck it up and find the willpower to make it through the day.  So one question we might ask is, how can we take this motivational method and put it to our own use?

First, let's look at the mechanics of the method.  You have to perform a task and some exterior entity will pay you unless you fail utterly to perform the task.  Notice that this is quite different from working for prizes, where you receive pay in exchange for performing a particular task.  Financially they may appear the same, but from the inside of the human mind they are quite different.  In the former case you are motivated by a potential loss, whereas in the later you are motivated by a potential gain.  Since losses carry more weight than gains, in general the former model will provide more motivation than the latter, keeping in mind that loss aversion is a statistical property of human thought and there may be exceptions.