Easy, cached success spirals/gamification/HabitRPG: +4 (3 months). I think a significant amount of the benefit I derive is from having a small string of dailies that get done first (ish) thing in the morning, hence the success spiral. Having mental checkpoints for when each daily is "late" helps me keep track of when it's time to move on to the next thing. Colorful clicky boxes and lighthearted 8-bit-esque graphics also help. The site is down with some regularity, but since I only need to refer to it a few times per day, I have actually found this to be barely any impediment to its overall utilty.
Recursive taskification, which I do with Workflowy +3 (2 months). When I'm not accomplishing much because I have multiple tasks with too many components to keep track of and I feel overwhelmed, Workflowy's endlessly nestable and rearrangeable items encourage me to just record any relevant task without getting hung up on the "but what if I put something in the wrong category" mental block. (I think this tactic and Workflowy would be worth more points if I had more complicated tasks on a regular basis.)
Making a Schedule +5 (6? months). Sometimes thoughtfully organized to break up active and sedentary tasks, but even when not thoughtfully organized at all, offers a small amount of pressure to be doing something in particular while at the same time making answering "so what am I supposed to be doing?" easy.
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!
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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.
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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)