I haven't read The Four Hour Work Week, but I have read The Motivation Hacker by Nick Winters, and haven't been able to move beyond attempts at success spirals and enforcing work times by disconnecting the internet. Mostly, I think of the most powerful motivators he mentions to require the kind of precommitment that could be quite costly if you fail, and given my financial situation and personal history regarding doing what I plan to do, I would be hard pressed to bet more than $10 that I'll accomplish any given task in a given interval.

Basically, he had some starting capital and a few reliable allies when he set out on his high-productivity mission. I tend to expect that, had I either, I would be accomplishing much more.

The idea, of course, is to make failure so costly that one can't help but succeed. I have a much more pessimistic view on how my brain works. Putting something costly enough to truly hurt up as collateral seems likely to motivate me to want to work, not enough to actually work. (Something similar to this happened in late 2010, and I was even on Focalin at the time, and all it managed to accomplish was making me so miserable that I switched from Focalin to Prozak by the end of the month. It was not as high-stakes as the sorts of things I was imagining trying, but it did manage to ruin something I'd been planning for about a year without accomplishing anything.) I suspect that if I tried Beeminder, I'd lose all the money I've made in the past 1.25 years pretty quickly. (All the money I've made comes down to about $300, minus some software upgrades.)