I think you're definitely on to something. I've thought about a kind of "procrastination redirector" where you have, say, a list of "bad activities" and a corresponding list of "good activities".

For a simple example, you could change your hosts file so that news.ycombinator.com redirects to a tutorial for whatever new language/framework you've been dying to try.

You could come up with a neural-linguistic-reprogramming-esque way of getting yourself to do just about anything: "Sitting on the couch? Why not walk one lap around the house?"

Voila: a machine that nags the shit out of you.