Beeminder: +4. The reminders are invaluable, the cash inventive maybe less so. The flexibility of being able to build up credit on some days for when a busy day, or a day of little motivation occurs is fantastic. My biggest problem is figuring out the best way to formulate goals.
Evernote to-do lists: +6. Haven't finished reading GTD, so I'm unsure how much overlap there is here. Essentially I have several sets of notes in evernote. Shopping, To-do, Long term projects / goals. As I think of things to do they get recorded in to do. I also review on my desktop the shopping and to-do lists each night before bed. I've trained myself into the habit of checking the to-do list each morning, lunch time and evening, and the shopping list at lunch time, and before leaving to go home from work.
The difference from how I tried to track things to do just a few months ago is night and day. I'm currently in the process of integrating a weekly (Sunday evening) review of my goals to see what new things should be slotted in to the next week's tasks.
I'm still trying to figure out how to handle things I need to do on future days (eg, follow up with the real estate agent on thursday). I'm currently recording these in the day's to-do with a note for the day to do it on, but not being able to tick off everything on the list reduces some of the visceral satisfaction of clearing the whole list out.
About three and a half years ago, orthonormal ran an akrasia tactics review: an open-ended survey asking Less Wrong posters to give numerical scores to productivity techniques that they'd tried, with the goal of getting a more objective picture of how well different techniques work (for the sort of people who post here). Since it's been years since the original and Less Wrong has grown significantly while retaining akrasia as a major topic, I thought it'd be useful to have a new one!
A modified version of the instructions from the previous post:
Every so often, I'll combine all the data back into the main post, listing every technique that's been reviewed at least twice with the number of reviews, average score, standard deviation and common effects, as well as links to the relevant reviews <edit: mostly canceling the last two parts part because I think it'd be too much work for me for too little benefit for the reader>. I'll do my best to combine similar techniques appropriately, but it'd be appreciated if you could try to organize it a bit by replying to people doing similar things and/or saying if you feel your technique is (dis)similar to another.
I'm not going to provide an initial list due to the massive number of possible techniques and fear of prejudicing answers, but you can look back on the list in the last post if you want. If you have any suggestions for how to organize this (that wouldn't require huge amounts of extra effort on my part), I'm open to hearing them.
Thanks for your data!
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Updated through 7/23/13. Organizing these turned out to be a lot harder than I expected and involved a lot of subjective categorization, so consult the primary sources.
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6 reviews:
Beeminder: +5.3 (SD 1.8). Details of how it's used vary a lot.
Getting Things Done (GTD): +2.8 (SD 4.0). A very broad and modular system, with opinions differing on different parts.
4 reviews:
Remember The Milk:+5.5 (SD 3.0). Frequently mentioned in conjunction with GTD.
Pomodoros: +4.5 (SD 2.5).
3 reviews:
Scheduling: +4.7 (SD 3.7)
Leechblock: +3.0 (SD 0.8)
Social precommitment: +0.7 (SD 2.6)
Unaided self-reinforcement: +0.7 (SD 0.9)
2 reviews:
Trello: +5.0 (SD 3.0)
HabitRPG: +4.5 (SD 0.5)
LW Study Hall: +4 (SD 3.0)