Some of my recent forays into reinforcement learning have been very helpful. I should point out that my life is made a whole lot easier by having a very co-operative OH who is willing to reward me or withhold reward as appropriate, so I've not needed to resort to building a robot!

Things that have been successful:

• Every time I think about {thing I enjoy obsessing about}, I go and do the washing up. I used to have a massive ugh field around washing up, but this has quickly diminished (within days!) via association with the nice thoughts. We're thinking of applying this method to other things I have ugh fields around, since it was so quick and effective.
• I've been doing a similar thing to D_Malik with regards to Anki cards. However, it was impractical for me to withhold a reward I would be having on a daily basis, so my OH is implementing "withhold {nice thing} unless I have reviewed my Anki cards for the previous 5 days". It's not as immediate as not eating, but seems to be sufficiently encouraging thus far.

But yeah, having a person help me do it means I avoid any sort of precommitment failure, and generally makes things much easier!

(Side note: Curly brackets clearly denote euphemisms, but I didn't want to be too crude.)