How to manipulate future self into being productive?

You're framing the problem wrong -within these conditions, there are no good solution. There are 3 shortcuts out:

First, realize, that you're inherently time-locked: the current self is the only one on which you have some amount of control (you might put yourself in a situation, where your only way out is to "work hard" -eg. make a bet with a friend to pass that exam, etc- but I found these to be less effective, than the other two).

Second, reframe the problem. Some sample questions you might ask:

• In what ways might I get the most gratification out of this work?
• In what ways might I get the most XP out of this experience?
• In what ways might I learn the most of myself during this excercise?
• In what ways might I use this as a way to self-improve? You get the idea -reframing is key.

Third, "working" for most classes of work, is fundamentally muscles: as you do more, and more, try different ways out, your leverage, and ability to "get stuff done" will improve. So: start with baby steps, then use the positive feedback, and gained experience to improve, and apply it to other aspects of the task.

Hope this helps.

I posted something on the open thread about exactly this:

The part of my brain that loses to akrasia seems incredibly stupid, whereas my long-term planning modules are relatively smart. I've been trying to take advantage of this by a campaign of active /warfare/ against the akrasia-prone part of me. For instance, I have deleted all the utilities on my laptop needed for networking. I can no longer browse the internet without borrowing someone else's computer, as I am doing now. I also can't get those networking utilities back because for that I need internet. I also destroyed both Ubuntu live-CDs I had, because I can get to the internet through those. Thus far, my willpower has thrice failed me, and each time I have tried to get internet back, and each time I have failed. I count this as a win. The principle is more general, of course: only buy healthy food, literally throw away your television, delete all your computer games, etc.. The first few days without some usual sort of distraction are always painful; I feel depressed and bored of life. But that soon clears up, and my expected-pleasurable-distraction setpoint seems to lower. This is like a way of converting fleeting motivation into long-term motivation.

If you don't think this will give you said "immediate gratification", try narrowing your definition of "current". Are you viscerally compelled to buy a pack of cookies? No, you're just viscerally compelled to eat them. People seem to extrapolate that visceral compulsion so they feel viscerally compelled to buy the pack of cookies, and you don't have to extrapolate like that.

I've also been experimenting a lot the past year with deliberate self-delusion as a way of increasing willpower and it seems to be working. I know some here have argued that deliberate self-delusion is a bad idea, but I'm entirely unconvinced. Rationality is what wins.

To clarify, I want these things for each specified self:

What you want is suboptimal. You should want different things.

Work's results compound over time. This is most obviously true for money, but it's also true for other things - your position in the workplace, and (most importantly) your acquired knowledge and skills.

You should want for your past selves to have worked very hard - achieving things that will compound over a great deal of time. Assuming you're relatively young, you should want for your current self to still work pretty hard - compounding still matters - but you can spend a little more time having fun. In comparison to your past, you can enjoy an unprecedented level of goofing off, while spending only a little more time in absolute terms (and time is the ultimate currency). And so on, into the future.

What you want is going to be stamped out over and over into the future, so it should produce a desirable result. "I want immediate gratification now, and maybe I'll work hard later" is going to result in endless goofing off, since you're always trying to get your future self to do the work, then when you become that future self, you punt it further along. "I want to have worked hard in the past, pretty hard now, and slightly less hard in the future" is stable, with the right attitude - if you start slacking off or wasting time, you're not sticking to the curve.

Using myself as an example: when I was younger, I worked super hard to learn C++ (it is not the easiest language in the world to learn, that's for sure). Now I am way more powerful than before, and acquiring further power gets easier and easier (in C++ and related areas like OpenGL - it's easier to learn new things with a solid foundation). If I had goofed off in college more than I did (and I spent a lot of time posting on forums and playing video games) instead of teaching myself the language, I wouldn't have gotten my current job, and I'd be bored out of my skull in grad school somewhere, doing who knows what and living like a monk on an income to match. Ugh. Now, this wasn't an explicit plan of mine (I did it because I thought it was awesome, and it was more interesting than my classes), but it's become The Plan and I'm going to stick with it.

Here is a similar old comment of mine.

You could read about hyperbolic time discounting realize it makes no sense, and learn to avoid it. If you're lucky, this process will take long enough that it will be future you doing the work.

What time scale are you looking for? When does it switch from current from future, and from future to far future?

Psych yourself up with Courage Wolf.