Other examples include checking for Facebook notifications, new e-mails, replies to your Less Wrong comments, or highlights/interesting discussions on IRC.

Those four combined have caused serious damage to my productivity, to the point where I'm forced to use things like LeechBlock and limiting myself to a slow Internet connection to stop myself from checking them all the time. And even those measures frequently fail.

I've arranged my workspace so that updates come to me without checking: MoR updates appear in my email, email in general has an icon on my taskbar, my RSS aggregator is on my taskbar, etc. The reward is thus entirely causally decoupled from behavior; I can never explicitly check at all, and still get the updates.

There are about four websites that I haven't been able to get RSS-based updates for (including my LW inbox), and I consider the need to manually check these a moderate inconvenience.