I’ve recently stopped picking at the skin on my fingers, a bad habit that I’ve had for as long as I remember, and that I had considered to be maybe intractable because it was just too ingrained for to long, and too tempting (my fingers are always right here with me, and I generally started picking without realizing it). I had also put off trying to tackle this with Beeminder for a long time (since I started using Beeminder in fact), thinking that it was going to be hard and I was very likely to fail. I had previously succeeded in stopping picking for a full month on a few occasions, but ended up backsliding. I’m now at almost three months, so hopefully I’m over the hard part.
I just simply created a do-less goal for number of times picking, initially choosing a number that I thought was much higher than I would have any urge to get close to (I think 10 times/day or something). Initially it was of course hard, and I’m sure that I missed a bunch of times if you were to go over a video recording of my day or something, but in general it worked very well (to my complete surprise). It was hard at first but the urges got less after a few days or a week, and I reduced the road rate (with a huge safety buffer). After about two months I made a different goal of not even touching the skin on my fingers (in the way that would normally provoke an urge to pick it) as a way of increasing the intensity.
I think that even if you miss a lot of datapoints at first because the habit is so unconscious, just the fact of entering the data into Beeminder is brings it more into your consciousness, and trains you to recognize when you are doing habit, which by itself is helpful in reducing or eliminating it. Anyway, it’s worked for me, YMMV.