I just ran into http://eshock.blog.com/ which seems like almost the perfect example: outright negative reinforcement, which he admits has wound up training him to not use it:
To recap the last 12 days: Things worked out for me, but not as well as they should. I didn’t use the device anymore. I had to manage certain important things besides just working and that sort of throwed me out of my routine or made me fall back to old methods. I also highly suspect that I have not been using the device anymore because I trained myself to avoid it (because it is painful). Some superficial reasons exists, such as broken bluetooth kernel drivers, that attributed to the lack of usage....You might just avoid or stop using it without your consent, as part of a negative reinforcement learning curve...Very quickly you will have difficulties to ‘push the trigger’ initially. You can only apply light to medium shocks, because it quickly becomes near-impossible to you to expose yourself to shocks that are too painful (you literally become incapable of pushing the trigger or just bearing with it)
I've recently been thinking a lot about working on items in Luke's article How to Be Happy. Here's one in particular I've struggled with a long time:
I particularly want to work on avoiding procrastination. I've tried several techniques for avoiding procrastination, but I always seem to relapse away from using them. 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. That's what I plan to do in this thread. I encourage others to use it for the same purpose.
I'm not sure how to best exploit LessWrong for this purpose. Tentatively I plan to come back weekly and post comments on my progress, though suggestions for better ways to do this are welcome.
This thread can also serve as a place for sharing information on what techniques for approving conscientiousness, not procrastinating, etc. have worked and not worked for people in the LessWrong community.
Over the next week, I plan on specifically focusing on implementing kalla724's advice on attention control, which worked when I first tried it but I've fallen away from using. I also plan on trying to make better use of productivity-related browser plugins like Delayed Gratification.
And again, advice on how to tweak this project greatly appreciated.