[dcheong]

Agreed to a certain extent. Yes, blindly increasing the pain will limit your possibilities, but appropriate application of it is a good move.

If you're in the planning phase or design phase, you don't want to needlessly time box it and/or punish yourself for failing to meet a deadline, because it will limit what you come up with.

However if you're in the building phase, say all the broad stroke type of decisions have been made and the main task is plain old coding / grunt work, you can use the pain to motivate you from distractions and procrastination.

dave

[ii]

Yes, here I agree 100%. For grunt work fear and punishment are the best motivators. But not everything is a grunt work!