My brain clearly has different procedures for dealing with vague responsibilities it can weasel out of, and serious responsibilities it can't, and the oath served to stick studying on the "serious" side of the line.
I doubt it's the oath or the rituals. The key piece (in my experience) that makes this work, is the part where you considered conflicts and consequences. You made explicit under which specific conditions you would do it, and which ones you wouldn't.
To translate this back into Ainslie's model, the success of bargaining at any point in time is dependent on the degree of activation of "interests". If at the time you decide to do something, you envision only the default case, then the interest is only mentally linked to the default, not the situation where "something else comes up".
However, if you explicitly contemplate all the things that might come up, and decide what you'll do in each case, then you are mentally linking your "interest" to those contexts, along with a preferred behavior... thus reducing the willpower load required to make those decisions when the time comes, and giving that "interest" a larger say in the bargaining that occurs at that point in time.
I mentioned this briefly in my New Years' Resolutions video this year, but I've been teaching this concept for some time now. A key variable is how well you can mentally put yourself into the conflict situations that will occur, so that you can actually make realistic tradeoffs in "near" thinking, rather than using over-idealistic "far" thinking.
Related is Martha Beck's concept of "four day wins", which emphasizes the idea that as long as you make changes to behavior in small enough steps that no unmanageable conflicts arise, you can make that behavior "normal" within four days.
For example, the 4-day win approach to studying 2 hours a day would first be to set a time at which you will simply take out your books and look at them for say, 1 minute, without actually opening them, and to do that for four days. Then, for four days, do that and actually open them to what you're supposed to be studying, but don't do any of it. From there on, setting timers for small intervals where you have to stop as soon as the timer goes off.
In either case, whether you do it by exhaustive imagination in advance (as you did), or the 4-day wins method, you are doing the same thing: establishing a conditioned link between the "interest" (in Ainslie's terminology) and the context where you would like that interest to be active, so as to prevent other interests from dominating the negotiation in that context.
My suggestion for your next experiment would be for you to see how much less ritual you can get away with, as long as you satisfy the criterion of linking your preferred decision and the feeling of your "interest" to as many explicit, specific contexts where other interests might be in conflict.
with the knowledge that if I succeeded I would have a great method of self-improvement and if I failed I would be dooming myself to a life of laziness forever (Ainslie's theories suggest that exaggeration is good in this case).
So do Tony Robbins's theories, as described in his 1991 book, "Awaken the Giant Within". However, this is an area where I disagree with both Robbins and Ainslie!
For certain personality types, creating this sort of bargain is dangerous and damaging if you fail, for reasons that are actually brought up in Ainslie's book. And those personality types are very likely to fail, for the simple reason that they will not actually do the critical task of considering all the ways in which they might fail.
For example, how many Republican senators and Baptist ministers would you guess have sworn mighty oaths to never have gay sex?
If the subject of your oath is an ideal-belief-reality conflict, you will not "negotiate fairly" with your other interests, which means you won't really think about the areas where conflicts will arise, which means those other interests will dominate, and your oaths will eventually fall by the wayside.
So I'm glad it worked for you, but I strongly recommend that others NOT add this sort of "leverage" - it's not necessary and can be damaging. The critical factor is inter-interest linkage, not consequences of failure.
Richard Bandler actually encourages people embarking on something new that they might backslide on, to actually visualize themselves backsliding... repeatedly! And then to imagine this making them MORE motivated to proceed.
And if you think about it, this is actually an example of the same principle I described above - linking an interest to a context where a conflict might occur. In this way, even if backsliding does occur, it still contributes to the goal, rather than detracting from it.
In contrast, what you have done sets up an expectation that a single failure will lead to the destruction of someone's entire life... and that is NOT a responsible thing to suggest or prime, EVER.
As a matter of personal preference, I enjoy (and endorse) commenting and and reading comments on old posts—it nudges everything a bit more toward long content.
Related to: Akrasia, Hyperbolic Discounting, and Picoeconomics, Fix It And Tell Us What You Did
A while back, ciphergoth posted an article on "picoeconomics", the theory that akrasia could be partially modeled as bargaining between present and future selves. I think the model is incomplete, because it doesn't explain how the analogy is instantiated in the real world, and I'd like to investigate that further sometime1 - but it's a good first-order approximation.
For those of you too lazy to read the article (come on! It has pictures of naked people! Well, one naked person. Suspended from a graph of a hyperbolic curve) Ainslie argues that "intertemporal bargaining" is one way to overcome preference reversal. For example, an alcoholic has two conflicting preferences: right now, he would rather drink than not drink, but next year he would rather be the sort of person who never drinks than remain an alcoholic. But because his brain uses hyperbolic discounting, a process that pays more attention to his current utility than his future utility, he's going to hit the whiskey.
This sticks him in a sorites paradox. Honestly, it's not going to make much of a difference if he has one more drink, so why not hit the whiskey? Ainslie's answer is that he should set a hard-and-fast rule: "I will never drink alcohol". Following this rule will cure his alcoholism and help him achieve his dreams. He now has a very high preference for following the rule; a preference hopefully stronger than his current preference for whiskey.
Ainslie's other point is that this rule needs to really be hard-and-fast. If his rule is "I will drink less whiskey", then that leaves it open for him to say "Well, I'll drink some whiskey now, and none later; that counts as 'less'", and then the whole problem comes back just as bad as before. Likewise, if he says "It's my birthday, I'll let myself break the rule just this once," then soon he's likely to be saying "It's the Sunday before Cinco de Mayo, this calls for a celebration!" Ainslie has some much more formal and convincing ways of framing this, which is why you should read the article instead of just trusting this summary.
The stuff by Ainslie I read (I didn't spring for any of his dead-tree books) didn't offer any specific pointers for increasing your willpower2, but it's pretty easy to read between the lines and figure out what applied picoeconomics ought to look like. In the interest of testing a scientific theory, not to mention the ongoing effort to take control of my own life, I've been testing picoeconomic techniques for the last two months.
The essence of picoeconomics is formally binding yourself to a rule with as few loopholes as possible. So the technique I decided to test3 was to write out an oath detailing exactly what I wanted to do, list in nauseating detail all of the conditions under which I could or could not be released from this oath, and then bind myself to it, with the knowledge that if I succeeded I would have a great method of self-improvement and if I failed I would be dooming myself to a life of laziness forever (Ainslie's theories suggest that exaggeration is good in this case).
I chose a few areas of my life that I wanted to improve, of which the only one I want to mention in public is my poor study habits. I decided that I wanted to increase my current study load from practically never looking at a book after school got out, up to two hours a day.
I wrote down - yes, literally wrote down - an oath in which I swore to study for two hours a day. I detailed exactly the conditions that would count as "studying" - no watching TV with an open book placed in my lap, for example.
I also included several release valves. The theory behind this was that if I simply broke the oath outright, the oath would no longer be credible and would lose its power (again, see Ainslie's article), and there would be some point where I would be absolutely compelled to break the oath (for example, if a member of my family is in the emergency room, I refuse to read a book for an hour and a half before going to check up on them). I gave myself a whole bunch of cases in which I would be allowed to not study, guilt-free, and allowed myself five days a month when I could just take off studying for no reason (too tired, maybe). I also limited the original oath to a month, so that if it didn't work I could adjust it without completely destroying the effectiveness of the oath forever. Finally, I swore the oath in a ceremonial fashion, calling upon various fictional deities for whom I have great respect.
One month later, I find that I kept to the terms of the oath exactly, which is no small achievement for me since my previous resolutions to study more have ended in apathy and failure. On an introspection level, the need to study each day felt exactly like the need to complete a project with a deadline, or to show up for work when the boss was expecting you. My brain clearly has different procedures for dealing with vague responsibilities it can weasel out of, and serious responsibilities it can't, and the oath served to stick studying on the "serious" side of the line.
I am suitably cautious about other-optimizing and the typical mind fallacy, so I don't promise the same method will work for you. But I'd be interested to see if it did4. I'd be especially interested if everyone who tried it would post, right now, what they're trying so that in a month or so we can come back and see how many people kept their oath without having too much response bias.
Footnotes
1: I'm split on the value of picoeconomic theory. A lot of it seems either common-sense if taken as a vague model or metaphor, or obviously false if taken literally. But sometimes it's very good to have a formal model for common sense, and I'm optimistic about someone developing a more literal version of it that explains what's actually going on inside someone's head.
2: Ciphergoth, as far as you know does Ainslie ever start making practical suggestions based on his theory anywhere, or does he leave it entirely as an exercise for the reader?
3: I don't read a lot of stuff on productivity, so I might be reinventing the wheel here.
4: For people trying this, a few suggestions and caveats from my experience: