Things that worked for me for at least two years:
Smartphone GTD app: +10. The track record is 3 years or so. Absolutely indispensable. My primary app used to be Astrid, and when Yahoo killed it, I switched to Wunderlist (mostly because their Astrid import worked on the first try, and they imported all my recurring tasks correctly). I'm also playing with Remember the Milk, and really I like their user interface so far.
Automating life with recurring tasks in a smartphone GTD app: +9. Again, 3 years or so. I have a lot of recurring tasks in my app, with various recurrence periods, ranging from daily (e.g. pills) to once-in-several-days (usually checking up on important processes) to weekly (usually shopping and household chores) to monthly (administrative duties, banks, taxes and payroll) to yearly (dentist check-ups, important birthdays etc). The problem with this is that not all GTD apps do recurring tasks properly, or at all, and that there's no smartphone GTD app on the market that fully satisfies all my requirements regarding recurring tasks. Because of that, I'm seriously thinking about rolling my own app / service.
Trello: +8. I've been using it since the beginning (about two years ago), and it has become essential for my workflow. I use two kinds of board organization, a project-based one (e.g. "Ideas", "Next up", "In development", "Testing", "Done"), and a freeform structure for personal and idea-capture boards. I wish their Android app was more convenient though.
Several promising things that not yet passed the 2 years test:
No mainstream news / social media: +10. I've been doing this since the last December, and it worked great so far, so I'm not going back.
GTD contexts: +6. I'm just discovering this, so the official track record is less than a month. Essentially, I separate tasks in my GTD app into groups, where a group corresponds to what GTD calls context, for example "Before going to work", "At work", "Shopping", "Before sleep". The implementation of lists / tags / contexts in my previous GTD app, Astrid, was atrocious, so I, without realizing it, was organizing my tasks into makeshift contexts using priorities, e.g. Red = before work, Yellow = at work, Blue = anytime, Gray = before sleep. When I switched to Wunderlist, I liked their approach to lists a lot more, and when I named the lists, I realized that they correspond to contexts.
I'm curious (nonjudgementally): do you get your news now from non-mainstream sources, or do you stay away from news altogether? I ask because I am considering trying this anti-akrasia tactic myself, but am unsure regarding the details.
About three and a half years ago, orthonormal ran an akrasia tactics review: an open-ended survey asking Less Wrong posters to give numerical scores to productivity techniques that they'd tried, with the goal of getting a more objective picture of how well different techniques work (for the sort of people who post here). Since it's been years since the original and Less Wrong has grown significantly while retaining akrasia as a major topic, I thought it'd be useful to have a new one!
A modified version of the instructions from the previous post:
Every so often, I'll combine all the data back into the main post, listing every technique that's been reviewed at least twice with the number of reviews, average score, standard deviation and common effects, as well as links to the relevant reviews <edit: mostly canceling the last two parts part because I think it'd be too much work for me for too little benefit for the reader>. I'll do my best to combine similar techniques appropriately, but it'd be appreciated if you could try to organize it a bit by replying to people doing similar things and/or saying if you feel your technique is (dis)similar to another.
I'm not going to provide an initial list due to the massive number of possible techniques and fear of prejudicing answers, but you can look back on the list in the last post if you want. If you have any suggestions for how to organize this (that wouldn't require huge amounts of extra effort on my part), I'm open to hearing them.
Thanks for your data!
——
Updated through 7/23/13. Organizing these turned out to be a lot harder than I expected and involved a lot of subjective categorization, so consult the primary sources.
——
6 reviews:
Beeminder: +5.3 (SD 1.8). Details of how it's used vary a lot.
Getting Things Done (GTD): +2.8 (SD 4.0). A very broad and modular system, with opinions differing on different parts.
4 reviews:
Remember The Milk:+5.5 (SD 3.0). Frequently mentioned in conjunction with GTD.
Pomodoros: +4.5 (SD 2.5).
3 reviews:
Scheduling: +4.7 (SD 3.7)
Leechblock: +3.0 (SD 0.8)
Social precommitment: +0.7 (SD 2.6)
Unaided self-reinforcement: +0.7 (SD 0.9)
2 reviews:
Trello: +5.0 (SD 3.0)
HabitRPG: +4.5 (SD 0.5)
LW Study Hall: +4 (SD 3.0)