Technically, it depends on your utility function. However, even without knowing your utility function, I can say that for such a low amount of money, your utility function is very close to linear, and option 5 is the best.

I had brought some books from the LW reading list I had in my collection

Do you have a link to the reading list?

Improve the ergonomics of your computer situation:

• Better chair
• Better desk
• Keyboard without a numpad so that the mouse doesn't need to be so far out
• Bigger monitors/multiple monitors
• If your computer is at all slow or annoying-to-use, consider whether better hardware could help that (and thus reduce the stress of using it). E.g. getting an SSD could decrease load times if you find those problematic

Buy nice clothes

PSA: You can download from scribd without paying, you just need to upload a file first (apparently any file -- it can be a garbage pdf or even a pdf that's already on scribd). They say this at the very bottom of their pricing page, but I didn't notice until just now.

Lukeprog's How to Beat Procrastination is a good instructional for building any kind of habit. Personally none of it really stuck for me until I read Nick Winter's The Motivation Hacker though (it has basically the same information as Luke's post, it just stuck with me more).

Beeminder is also a good way to pre-commit (mentioned in both Luke's post and The Motivation Hacker) to things in order to combat impulsiveness. I recommend this approach to using beeminder in order to also increase expectancy. Impulsiveness and expectancy are two of the components in the "procrastination equation," which, as Luke says, "accounts for every major finding on procrastination, and draws upon our best current theories of motivation."

Precommitment is an interesting aspect of game theory that ties in well with lukeprog's how to beat procrastination.

Some thoughts:

• I think this post is a good illustration that productivity, like nootropics, can be highly individual, but the payoff for experimenting on yourself is very high. Everyone should take the time and effort to become an expert on what makes them tick and how to motivate themselves.

• I think a lot of what makes productivity hard is that the things you want yourself to do are significantly less rewarding than other things you have in your environment. There are a few reasons for this: first, your environment has superstimuli like computer games. I stopped playing computer games a few years ago and I can attest that "work"-ish things I want myself to do are substantially more appealing & interesting. Second, you make the things you want to do aversive by telling yourself to do them and then not doing them. So the solution is to learn to only tell yourself to do things when you're actually going to do them. (Possibly useful: have a chair that you sit in for work only and only tell yourself to work when you're sitting in that chair, and only sit in the chair when you've got reasonably high energy, focus, and morale.)

• I've suffered from this phenomenon you describe: Trouble was, I was caught in a catch 22: when I squirreled away in my room being "productive" I felt like I was missing out, and when I went outside to have "adventures" I only wanted to be elsewhere. It's great to hear that I'm not the only one who suffers thus, and it's useful to know your solution. Though for me, it's more like when I spend too much time alone I get lonely, but oftentimes hanging out with people feels like a waste of time. Doing social stuff 1 weekend-day and 1 weeknight a week sounds like a good solution... I've kinda been wondering if social interaction is something that should be done on a regular basis kind of like taking vitamins. (Separately, I'm curious if social interaction time is more rejuvenating if spread out or chunked. Is it better to spend 20 minutes with friends every day of the week or spend 140 minutes with friends 1 day of the week? I suspect the former is better.)

I invented mental puzzles to keep me entertained during class, including a stint in my teens where I worked out the base 12 multiplication tables.

Anyone else willing to share some specifics or can you expand some more on this? I'm still not past compulsory lectures, and I'd like to know how people keep their mind sharp secretly inside their skulls when everything moves so slowly you'd want to put time on fast forward. I usually review Anki cards, but that's not always possible.

What kinds of puzzles would be generally useful not just to programmers and other math oriented people? Mental arithmetic to a point is certainly useful for almost anyone.

Thank you. I will try to remember.

Game theory is not like calculus or evolutionary theory--something any alien race smart enough to develop space travel is likely to formulate. It does represent human values.