It seems to me that one needs to place a large amount of trust in one's future self to implement such a strategy. It also requires that you be able to predict your future self's utility function. If you have a difficult time predicting what you will want and how you will feel, it becomes difficult to calculate the utility of any given precomittment. For example, I would be unconvinced that deciding to eat a donut now means that I will eat a donut every day and that not eating a donut now means I will not eat a donut every day. Knowing that I want a donut now and will be satisfied with that seems like an immediate win, while I do not know that I will be fat later. To me this seems like trading a definite win for a definite loss + potential bigger win. Also, it is not clear that there wouldn't be other effects. Not eating the donut now might make me dissatisfied and want to eat twice as much later in the day to compensate. If I knew exactly what the effects of action EAT DONUT vs NOT EAT DONUT were (including mental duress, alternative pitfalls to avoid, etc), then I would be better able to pick a strategy. The more predictable you are, the more you can plan a strategy that makes sense in the long term. In the absence of this information, most of just 'wing it' and do what seems best at the given moment. It would seem that deciding to be a TDT agent is deciding to always be predictable in certain ways. But that also requires trusting that future you will want to stick to that decision.