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.