I've tried several techniques for avoiding procrastination, but I always seem to relapse away from using them.

This is something that used to confuse me terribly: why would people who find techniques that work for them, stop using them? For a while, I operated under an assumption that this was some sort of homeostasis, whereby people work to maintain a certain level of success (or lack thereof) and thus avoid things that would alter their level.

Then I realized that that isn't really an explanation of meta-akrasia, or at any rate, not a reduction of it.

The reduction is much easier to understand: people stop using anti-akrasia techniques because their use is not being reinforced.

This is a little counter-intuitive, and so my missing it initially is understandable: I assumed that a technique working should be reinforcement enough!

The problem is, an anti-akrasia technique is only positively reinforcing when you were expecting to fail, so then it feels positive by contrast. Once you're used to it, it no longer seems surprisingly positive, so the only actual reinforcement you get is performing whatever task you were putting off.

And if that task were something you found reinforcing, you'd not need the anti-akrasia technique in the first place!

So, in the long run, anti-akrasia techniques are self-extinguishing, unless they involve some sort of reinforcement, ideally one that arises naturally. (i.e., doesn't require you to do some extra behavior in order to make sure you're reinforced, which behavior must then also be reinforced.)

In other words, chasing anti-akrasic techniques is something of a dead end, if they don't affect how you reinforce yourself for the actual behavior. Because, if an "ugh field" surrounds the behavior, it will tend to spread to poison the anti-akrasia technique.

(Paradoxically, this means that people are slightly more likely to stick with unhelpful anti-akrasia techniques for longer than they do with ones that actually work, because the ones that work, quickly become negatively reinforcing. Presumably, the most reinforcing techniques will be ones that work sometimes, or appear to.)

Anyway, this means there are only two kinds of sustainable anti-akrasia tactics:

1. Those that provide a source of reward, either provided internally or externally, for the technique and the thing you're avoiding, OR
2. Those that alter your self-reinforcement for the task, so that you no longer desire to put it off.

Personally, I prefer the latter type, as I don't really know of many ways to do the former. Mostly, it seems that such methods require some sort of social support.... which brings us right back to:

But I've heard that you're more likely to stick with a plan if you log your progress in a place other people can see.

So, I would say that this will work as long as you find the attention reinforcing at the time you perform the task, not at the time when you log your progress. If, when you start a task, you feel good about being able to later log the progress, this is likely to be reinforcing at the right moment. If you wait until you have enough done to make a good report, you will probably burn out on the actual writing of the log as well.