Akrasia is the tendency to act against your own long-term interests, and is a problem doubtless only too familiar to us all. In his book "Breakdown of Will", psychologist George C Ainslie sets out a theory of how akrasia arises and why we do the things we do to fight it. His extraordinary proposal takes insights given us by economics into how conflict is resolved and extends them to conflicts of different agencies within a single person, an approach he terms "picoeconomics". The foundation is a curious discovery from experiments on animals and people: the phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting.
We all instinctively assign a lower weight to a reward further in the future than one close at hand; this is "discounting the future". We don't just account for a slightly lower probability of recieving a more distant award, we value it at inherently less for being further away. It's been an active debate on overcomingbias.com whether such discounting can be rational at all. However, even if we allow that discounting can be rational, the way that we and other animals do it has a structure which is inherently irrational: the weighting we give to a future event is, roughly, inversely proportional to how far away it is. This is hyperbolic discounting, and it is an empirically very well confirmed result.
I say "inherently irrational" because it is inconsistent over time: the relative cost of a day's wait is considered differently whether that day's wait is near or far. Looking at a day a month from now, I'd sooner feel awake and alive in the morning than stay up all night reading comments on lesswrong.com. But when that evening comes, it's likely my preferences will reverse; the distance to the morning will be relatively greater, and so my happiness then will be discounted more strongly compared to my present enjoyment, and another groggy morning will await me. To my horror, my future self has different interests to my present self, as surely as if I knew the day a murder pill would be forced upon me.
If I knew that a murder pill really would be forced upon me on a certain date, after which I would want nothing more than to kill as many people as possible as gruesomly as possible, I could not sit idly by waiting for that day to come; I would want to do something now to prevent future carnage, because it is not what the me of today desires. I might attempt to frame myself for a crime, hoping that in prison my ability to go on a killing spree would be contained. And this is exactly the behavour we see in people fighting akrasia: consider the alcoholic who moves to a town in which alcohol is not sold, anticipating a change in desires and deliberately constraining their own future self. Ainslie describes this as "a relationship of limited warfare among successive selves".
And it is this warfare which Ainslie analyses with the tools of behavioural economics. His analysis accounts for the importance of making resolutions in defeating akrasia, and the reasons why a resolution is easier to keep when it represents a "bright clear line" that we cannot fool ourselves into thinking we haven't crossed when we have. It also discusses the dangers of willpower, and the ways in which our intertemporal bargaining can leave us acting against both our short-term and our long-term interests.
I can't really do more than scratch the surface on how this analysis works in this short article; you can read more about the analysis and the book on Ainslie's website, picoeconomics.org. I have the impression that defeating akrasia is the number one priority for many lesswrong.com readers, and this work is the first I've read that really sets out a mechanism that underlies the strange battles that go on between our shorter and longer term interests.
You've actually missed a key distinction here: the negative emotion of the incomplete assignment is almost certainly what makes you procrastinate... and you're mistakenly interpreting that negative emotion as being about the writing.
What happens is this: since you feel the unfinished item pressure every time you think about doing the task, you literally condition yourself to feel bad about doing the task. It becomes a cached thought (actually a cached somatic marker) tagging the task with the same unpleasantness as the unpleasantness of it "hanging over you".
So, it's not that the process of writing really bothers you, it's the unfinishedness of the task that's bothering you. However, your logical brain assumes that it means you don't want to write (because it doesn't have any built-in grasp of how emotional conditioning works), and so it looks for logical explanations why the writing would be hard.
When you're busy writing, however, you're not thinking about that unfinishedness, so it doesn't come up -- the somatic marker isn't being triggered. That's not at all the same thing as "shifting the balance".
The actual way to fix this is to make it so you don't feel any pressure to finish the assignment... at which point you'll be able to freely choose to work on it, or not work on it, and won't find yourself looking for ways to avoid the conditioned negative response to the assignment.
Likewise, all the stuff you said about arms races is pure baloney: just a crazy story your logical mind is making up to explain your problems, like anosognosia of the will.
So here's what you do: establish a test for the somatic marker, by thinking about the task, and observing what happens to your body: does your head slump? Your gut clench? Fists tighten? What specific body changes take place, whenever you think about it? If you have trouble, clear your mind, shake out your body, and think about it again, so you can watch the physical state transition as it happens.
Once you've established the test, you can use it as a basis to check the effectiveness of different motivational or belief-change techniques: if a technique actually works, you will no longer respond with the same somatic marker to the original thought... and you will find that your inclinations to the task have also changed.
This is something I do in my work, and I only teach those few techniques (out of the many thousands in self-help books) that I have been able to successfully change somatic markers with. (Not that I've tested ALL of them yet, not by a long shot. And I only bother testing new ones when they have potential to be faster to use or easier to teach or cover a different kind of problem than the ones in my current toolbox.)
Happy self-experimentation. ;-)
Thank you for your thoughtful response. As it happens, I disagree with your premise that the negative emotion of the incomplete assignment is almost certainly what makes me procrastinate. Yes, that's a potential factor, but only one of many. For example, there's the difference between anticipated and actual difficulty of performing a procrastinated task progress.
But in the the spirit of rationality, I will give your suggestions a fair trial. You are absolutely correct that the most effective way to figure out what works is to use the scientific approach - design an experiment to test the hypothesis, test, assess the results, and go from there.