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:

Improve your conscientiousness. Conscientiousness involves a variety of tendencies: useful organization, strong work ethic, reliability, planning ahead, etc. Each of these individual skills can be learned. The techniques for overcoming procrastination are useful, here. Some people report that books like Getting Things Done have helped them become more organized and reliable.

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.