I wonder if it's possible to hack an electronic air freshener in this way. Make it make the room smell nice when you're working especially quickly. Sound might also work, or maybe both together. I suspect it would be a weaker reinforcer than candy, but it could be immediate without distracting you, and you might tire of it less quickly than candy. (I should try this myself at some point, but I think I've already been classically conditioned to associate typical perfume smells with my eyes burning (classmates at a school I went to liked to spray one I was allergic to all over the locker room), so I'd have to find one that has an unusual scent, or one that can spray things like spirit of peppermint instead.)

I find that just marking when I finish things is a bit reinforcing for me, especially if there's a chart, and especially if it shows completion time relative to the due date. (Right now, I'm using Tom's Planner, a Gantt chart app, for one of my class projects. It's working really well.)

I also tried adding "meetings" to Google Calendar for everything I did for about a week, and I think it reduced the time I spent not working on things, but my "work" time might have been a little less intensely productive than normal. I stopped because having to record everything I did got really annoying after a while. I suspect part of the problem was that the user interface wasn't optimized for using it that way, so I'm planning to try building something that makes it easier to record, while still showing a chart of how the time was spent.

I wonder if involving another person in this system would make it more effective, since social approval tends to be really motivating for humans. Though, that would require there to be another person who is usually around when you're working and wants to participate.

aside from my task list, what else can I connect to?

• RescueTime (records what websites and applications you use and for how long)
• word count of a text editor or word processor
• a keylogger

If your typing speed has a strong correlation to how quickly you're getting your work done, I wonder if you could combine RescueTime to automatically only count typing in certain applications. Though you'd also have to have some way to avoid accidentally rewarding for non-work use of word processors and such.