I wonder how many Akrasia or other self-help techniques could benefit from a little prediction and data gathering on the part of the participants. I imagine it would be productive for someone to say 'well... I tried Getting Things Done back in August for three weeks, and by September I wasn't remembering to enter anything in my GTD log, so for whatever reason it didn't mesh with the way of doing things I'd already had.' More productive, at least, than trying GTD for three weeks every year because 'i recall it sort of worked out last time. For a while.'

It seems that some self-help methods never ask their adherents to test the goals of the framework against the results, and I wonder if some ingrained fear of permanent records of failure is behind this. Regardless of the cause, I'd be interested to see how keeping logs of key goals correlated with the effectiveness of self-help techniques in general.