Self-shaming

Behind on that research project? Here's an idea: Set deadlines and pledge to donate money to charity if you miss them. Better yet, a charity you detest.

Mari Brick, for example, wants to work 10 hours a week on a paper she must finish in order to earn a master's in social policy at the State University of New York -- a challenge, because she also has two kids and a full-time job. Through the Web site StickK.com, co-founded by two Yale professors and a Yale management-school student, Brick committed herself to donating $50 to the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation in any week she fails to meet her goal.

StickK attracts a disproportionate number of scholars, reports David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education. And Glenn found other striking examples of scholars using self-punishment and self-shaming as motivators. During International Dissertation Writing Month, or InaDWriMo, for example, held the last two Novembers, grad students make pledges on their blogs about how much they are going to produce. They fess up when they fall short. A sociologist at the University of Arizona put the most embarrassing picture of himself he could find up on Facebook, swearing to take it down only when he finished some crucial manuscript revisions.

There's a long intellectual tradition of such strategies. The Greek orator Demosthenes once shaved half his head so he would not be tempted to go out into public until it grew back. As planned, he spent the next three months indoors practicing his rhetoric.