If it’s important to you to [exercise / practice an instrument / eat better / you name it] but you find that you never get around to it (a “round tuit”, get it?), well, we have an app for that. Think of Beeminder as your Round Tuit dispenser. The problem is common: not everything that’s important comes with a built-in deadline or squeaks or whines loud enough. “One more day” of not exercising really won’t hurt, but it’s all too easy to slide down a Slippery Slope of Sloth. “One more day won’t matter” is true every subsequent day forever!

Beeminder is a way to make the important urgent. Tell Beeminder the bare minimum number of weekly hours or workouts or servings or blog posts or whatever you’re measuring. That establishes your Yellow Brick Road. Follow it or Beeminder will yell at you. If that’s all you need — the reminders to stay on track — great! Beeminder will be free for you forever. More likely though, reminders from a bot will be too easy to ignore and you’ll derail at least once. That’s when the true urgency comes in. If you want to try again after your first derailment, you’ve got to pledge actual money to unfreeze your yellow brick road. Now you really have to take that road seriously, or cough up the money you pledged.

The initial pledge is $5 and, like the Beeminder reminders, that may prove too easy to ignore. But that problem is soon solved as well: If you derail and pay the $5 pledge, it takes a $10 pledge the next time. It quickly explodes after that: $30, $90, $270, and so on, tripling each time. No matter how rich or recalcitrant you are, it won’t take many initial derailments before staying on that Yellow Brick Road is as urgent as it is important.

You’ll get a round tuit when Beeminder says you will.

Image credit: Etsy

I recently won $1000 (sharing a $10k prize) for the following essay on how to solve what people in healthcare call the adherence problem, which costs the healthcare system “billions of dollars in unnecessary hospitalizations and nursing home and rehab costs”.

My prize-winning essay in its entirety follows. (I gave the actual money to Bethany in exchange for solving my own medical adherence problem, namely, dealing with all our health insurance paperwork.) It’s adapted from the inaugural post on the Beeminder blog, which I recommend over this version. But this version now comes with a nice stamp of credibility, thanks to Innocentive.

How do you induce someone to take needed medication who (1) doesn’t consider their personal health a priority, (2) is not sure they even want to deal with their condition, (3) is not always convinced of the value of medication, and (4) lacks confidence in their doctor? The answer is: patient education. For every one of those obstacles, there’s no shortcut. But this challenge is about an even deeper problem, exemplified by the patient who claims their personal health is indeed a priority, very much wants to deal with their condition, has no doubts about the value of their prescribed treatments, has full confidence in their doctor, and yet still fails to comply, simply because their good intentions fall by the wayside.

This problem goes far beyond compliance with medication. Many of us have a problem following through on our intentions in all aspects of life. And it’s more than just a difficulty in predicting our future desires. It’s not that you say to yourself, “Gee, I thought I wanted to get in shape but it turned out there was always something really good on TV!” No, even in hindsight, you regret not doing what you said you wanted to do. It’s not even that you’re merely conflicted about what you want. The trade-off you made — more TV watched, still not in shape — was patently ridiculous. You somehow don’t do what you genuinely want to do. Philosophers back to Plato and Aristotle have a fancy term for this paradoxical failure of the will: akrasia. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior. Another way to define akrasia is by generalizing from procrastination to include preproperation as well. Procrastination is the irrational delay of tasks with immediate cost and delayed benefit. Preproperation is the irrational not delaying of (overindulgence in) activities with immediate benefit and delayed cost.

Why do we have this problem? The technical answer is time inconsistency and is illustrated nicely in a study on grocery-buying habits: When buying groceries online for delivery tomorrow people buy a lot more ice cream and a lot fewer vegetables than when they’re ordering for delivery next week. In other words, our preferences are inconsistent — in fact, logically contradictory — over time. Your ability to weigh the costs and benefits (yumminess, healthiness) is severely compromised when some of those costs or benefits are immediate, which is why the ice cream vs vegetables decision plays out so differently when you decide it from a distance.

How do we solve this problem? The answer is self-binding, that is, the use of commitment devices. The term commitment device is from game theory and applies to strategic situations. It refers to a way of changing one’s own incentives to make an otherwise empty threat or promise credible. This can be quite rational. A classic example is from Thomas Schelling, who pioneered this aspect of game theory. You’ve been kidnapped and you’d like to promise your kidnapper that if they let you go you won’t rat them out to the police. The promise is useless because the kidnapper knows you’ll have no incentive to keep it once you’re free (and so they won’t set you free). But if you can change your future incentives (implicate yourself in the crime, perhaps?) then suddenly your promise can carry weight. [1] Limiting your future options by voluntarily imposing consequences on your future self can be quite valuable in a strategic negotiation or conflict.

But it’s hard to characterize as rational the use of self-binding with no one but oneself… until you appreciate that there’s in fact more than just one self. [2]

Sapid Sweets and Seductive Sirens

Here’s a ubiquitous example. Why not save money by buying bulk-size candy? It’s technically entirely irrational not to. You should buy the bulk size, save the money, and then ration it to match the pace you’d eat it at when buying the individual sizes. Same consumption rate, less cost. The problem is your future self won’t be rational with a pile of candy in the house. Sugar is a bit addictive, after all. So it’s worth spending some extra money to constrain the choices of your gluttonous future self. Similarly, some smokers buy cigarettes by the pack instead of the carton, paying a hefty premium to throttle their future consumption.

The classic, prototypal example of self-binding is Odysseus tying himself to the mast of his ship so he could listen to the Sirens without getting lured onto the rocks. Calling Homer’s Sirens addictive is an understatement since they pretty much literally control your mind. But there are a lot of things in modern society (hello, Internet) that are at least a little addictive and getting more so. [3] In “The Acceleration of Addictiveness Paul Graham argues that this trend is fundamental to the growth of technology itself.

So what’s the antidote? There’s an endless stream of advice about how to beat akrasia but I believe that most of it misses a very fundamental point that renders it nearly useless: The myopic future self that thwarts your intentions is every bit as smart as your current, forward-looking self. You can make lists and set rewards and break tasks into small chunks, or plan diets and buy treadmills and establish routines, but mostly your future self will see right through all the tricks and just won’t give a damn. That version of yourself just wants to surf the web and/or eat pie. So that’s what you do, when the chips are down.

The only way to be immune to future-you thumbing his or her nose at your current intentions is self-binding. Which is to say that successful anti-akrasia tricks will involve commitment devices. That’s because, by definition, a commitment device meaningfully constrains your recalcitrant future self’s actions. Here are a slew of commonly and not-so-commonly used commitment devices.

List of Real-World Commitment Devices

1. Buying the individual-sized instead of the bulk-sized candy
2. Buying a gym membership even when it would be cheaper to buy individual passes, i.e., purposefully making it a sunk cost
3. Getting a mortgage in part to force yourself to save [see the first reason listed at messymatters.com/buyrent for buying vs renting]
4. Deleting games from your computer
5. Going somewhere without internet access to get work done or using a purposefully handicapped computer
6. Signing up for a class (or hiring a private instructor) when in theory you could just draw/run/paint/whatever regularly on your own (but without the commitment of the class you won’t)
7. Using software that stops you from visiting time-wasting sites like facebook; e.g., LeechBlock or SelfControl
8. Not having a TV in the house (even though it would be worth having for certain occasions)
9. Identifying and eating as a strict vegetarian/vegan despite not actually minding whether you eat an occasional animal product
10. Starting a project close to its hard deadline to limit the amount of time you can spend on it (though more often this is a manifestation of rather than a remedy for akrasia!)
11. Not buying an unlimited metro card because once the subway fare is a sunk cost you won’t be as motivated to commute by bike
12. Choosing to live somewhere that will force you to walk/bike further (in theory you could live closer and take a longer route, but you won’t)
13. Having more than the minimum tax witheld from your salary, a zero-interest loan to the government, to force yourself to save enough to pay your taxes
14. Using Certificates of Deposit with withdrawal penalties that outweigh the slightly higher interest rate they pay compared to a savings account
15. Not taking a high-paying job for fear of getting hooked on the lifestyle it will lead to
16. Using debit cards instead of credit cards, which force you not to spend more than you have
17. Withdrawing less cash from the ATM to limit future spending
18. Putting money in a Christmas Club (aka Santa Saver) account — a savings account that you cannot withdraw from until December [4]
19. Taking a diet pill that causes diarrhea when you eat too much fat
20. Putting your alarm clock across the room (a cheap example since it involves an explicitly compromised future self, in this case a groggy one)
21. Taking Antabuse to cause yourself to get sick if you consume alcohol
22. Using the kind of piggy bank that you have to smash open to get the money out
23. Undergoing bariatric surgery, which works by causing pain/nausea whenever you eat too much in a sitting
24. Banning oneself from casinos or online poker sites (they offer this functionality)
25. As a domestic violence victim, preferring no-drop prosecution [5]
26. In an experiment by Dan Ariely on his students, “irrationally” choosing to be bound by spaced-out deadlines for course projects [6]
27. Getting married as a way to make it hard to break up? (this may be more about proving your commitment than about imposing a commitment device on yourself)
28. Using a device to ration out pain medication
29. Preferring coupons or gift certificates with expiration dates to ensure you’ll eventually get around to using them [7]
30. Preferring gift certificates at all instead of cash
31. Using a layaway program to force yourself to save up for a cherished item
32. Using a so-called kosher phone, actually available in Israel, that stops working on the Sabbath
33. Traveling somewhere to do something that you could but won’t do at home, like to escape distractions that you don’t have the willpower to simply ignore
34. Investing in mutual funds instead of index funds to keep yourself from overtrading
35. Using MasterCard’s inControl credit card that shuts off once a set budget is reached
36. Using Blackberry’s “NOTXT n’ Drive” which shuts off texting when your car is moving
37. Preventing drunk-dialing with iphone apps like “Don’t Dial” and “The Bad Decision Blocker”, or Google’s “Mail Goggles”
38. Using the noprocrast feature on Hacker News (to block your own access to the site after a pre-specified amount of time)
39. Dumping salt and pepper on the rest of your dessert
40. Preventing yourself from making impulsive purchases with your credit card via a collection of tips from LifeHacker
41. Not getting a parking permit or otherwise making it more expensive to use your car, as a way to encourage your future self to drive less

What I find fascinating about that diverse list of commitment devices is the minuscule dent they put in the overall problem of akrasia. The tricks people actually use are mostly — with some interesting exceptions, such as #23 — band-aid solutions. The problem is not with the concept of precommitment. (Remember that akrasia is fundamentally a problem of your future self failing to follow through on your current intentions.) The problem is failing to commit hard enough. Take a goal like weighing twenty pounds less in a year. Band-aid commitment devices are things like keeping junk food out of the house and joining a gym. Why not get straight to the heart of the problem and make a contract with a friend that commits you to forfeiting a very painful sum of money if you don’t follow through on your weight-loss plan?

Websites like StickK.com and Beeminder.com make it easy to do just that, also breaking down long-term goals like losing weight into weekly or even daily commitments to stay on track, using monetary commitment contracts to ensure compliance.

Bright Lines

Many people react viscerally to the idea of involving money. I’m partial to money myself but I don’t claim it’s the only way. Still, many obvious alternatives — like harnessing social disapproval — can fail if implemented naively. To make the long-term consequences of failing at your goal immediate, you need a bright and painful line. Using shame as a motivator with a public graph of your progress doesn’t quite cut it because there’s minimal shame in having one datapoint slightly off track — you’re still totally going to catch back up, right? As you then gradually drift away from your target the shame grows only gradually as well. You’re back in “one more day won’t matter” akrasia-addled fantasy land. (I speak from experience.)

What sites like StickK and Beeminder offer, in addition to tangible and immediate consequences for going off track, is setting a bright line so you know exactly what going off track means.

To return to the specific case of healthcare, I would like to conclude with an example of a patient committing on Beeminder to gradually lower their fasting blood sugar (used with permission): beeminder.com/heavyg/bs.

Further Reading

In addition to the links included above, I recommend the following:

1. Choice and Consequence by Thomas Schelling, in particular the chapter “The Intimate Contest for Self-command” (I believe this subsumes his seminal 1978 AER article on Egonomics)
2. “A Tale of Two Selves”, a discussion of commitment devices by Dan Goldstein including his own strategy of committing to leaving cash on the subway for failing to meet a writing goal (and actually doing it)
3. “How to Use a Commitment Contract to Change Your Habits”
4. Carrots and Sticks by stickK.com co-founder Ian Ayres
5. A Paul Bloom article in The Atlantic, “First Person Plural”, on the multiple selves theory of akrasia
6. Article in Fast Company, “Why Customers Will Pay You to Restrain Them”
7. Breakdown of Will by George Ainslie (creator of picoeconomics.org); this book lays out the case for hyperbolic discounting, the basis of my claim that the secret to beating akrasia is to not make decisions under the influence of immediate consequences
8. Stanford researchers debunk theory that willpower is a limited resource
9. Radio Lab episode (from 7:07 to 16:10) discussing the Stanford marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification (see also this New Yorker article); the ability to delay gratification at age four is highly predictive of future life success, and the key to success for the kids who could delay gratification was the use of tricks to distract themselves from the marshmallow staring at them
10. The “You Are Not So Smart” blog on procrastination
11. Time inconsistency illustrated in a comic
12. An example of what not to read on procrastination: the only purportedly practical thing in this Psychology Today article is saying that procrastination can be solved with “highly structured cognitive therapy”; everything else is just psychobabble and pointless taxonomizing
13. RadioLab episode featuring Thomas Schelling
14. Short article by Dan Ariely in Scientific American, “How Self-Control Works”, recapping the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment and the conclusion that it’s all about self-binding tricks
15. The earliest treatment of akrasia and time inconsistency that I know of in the economics literature: Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization by R. H. Strotz in Review of Economic Studies, 1955-1956

Footnotes

Image: The History of Money

[This is a guest post by Lee Nathan, pictured above. Lee is a freelance web developer / designer who has spent the last four years researching lifehacking and personal development.]

Our bodies and minds have evolved to enjoy life right here and now because it could be gone tomorrow. We crave fatty foods because they gave us extra padding in case we couldn’t eat next week. We crave sweets because they gave us energy to keep ourselves alive. Then came all the conveniences of the modern world. Sweets are no longer just healthy fruits but an endless bounty of candy, cakes, and ice cream. Fatty foods are no longer hard to obtain. They’re right there at the local McDonald’s. But our bodies and the primitive parts of our minds keep telling us that we need as much of these foods as we can possibly take in. So we tend to over eat, without any of the physical work it used to take to acquire food. The problem — for the lucky first-world readers of this blog — is how not to eat to excess, and how to induce ourselves to get physical exercise that is no longer a natural part of daily life.

Traditionally, we never had to worry about things like retirement and cancer. We were lucky if we lived to be 40. But now, modern medicine and a shift to a very technical society means we need to think about our futures and how to get there. You can think of yourself as actually two selves. Your primitive monkey self wants what it needs to survive and it wants it right now. It doesn’t care about tomorrow because there may not be one. Your other self is your future self. The concept of our future selves is a very abstract concept to our primitive monkey brains. This future self sits back and reflects on all the things that have happened in your life. Often it looks back with regret because your monkey self didn’t toe the line and ensure the happiness of your future self. Your monkey self may be overweight, out of shape, and not accomplishing anything. Your future self is healthy, fit, and successful. At least that’s how your current self sees it. But often your current self is unable to do the things necessary to create that future self. It’s simply not how your still-primitive monkey brain is wired. If you find the thought of your primitive mind insulting, think about life just 200 years ago. It wasn’t much different than 2000 years ago, with the exception of agriculture. People still had to do physical work to stay alive. People didn’t have modern conveniences like Starbucks and McDonald’s. If you wanted food, you worked for it. If your clothing fell into disrepair, you fixed it. If you needed to go somewhere, you walked or rode a horse. We haven’t evolved much since the times of our great great grandparents. But we are living much longer and have to be much more thoughtful.

“Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” — Mark Twain

Over the years I have made many promises to myself. I’ve promised myself I’d eat better, drink less beer, and get more exercise. I’ve had mixed results with all of them. As my future self comes to be, I find that ultimately nothing has changed. Then I noticed an interesting disparity. A few years ago I got a dog. If my dog is neglected, he will suffer or die. When I got him, I promised him I would always take care of him and think of his needs before anything else. I have a serious obligation to my pet and he is completely dependent on me upholding that obligation. Since I got my dog, he’s had healthy meals every day. He’s gotten exercise and play time twice a day and has been taken somewhere special at least once a week. I haven’t been nearly so thoughtful or loving with myself. The difference is that I have a contract with my dog. I don’t have a contract with my future self. The problem is that my future self isn’t a present entity. If I forget to feed my dog his tummy starts growling. If I neglect to exercise him he can’t manage his energy levels. However if I overfeed my self or fail to exercise my self, my future self suffers in silence. It will be a miserable creature, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I’m risking an early death.

We need to treat our future selves better. We need to create contracts with our future selves so that we can both be happy. One way of doing this is by setting goals. A goal is a way of saying, this is who I want my future self to be. The problem is that usually we leave it up to our future selves to figure out how to do it. We procrastinate. The future self is an abstract concept that the monkey self doesn’t understand or care about. The modern human, however, has to be more evolved and overcome the akrasia created by our monkey selves.

There are a number of tools out there to help us do better by our future selves. Many of them fall into the category of lifehacking. Some of my personal favorites are GTD and Benjamin Franklin’s spreadsheet for changing habits. A great tool for Franklin’s habit system can be found at Joe’s Goals.

But there are some hugely important things missing from these tools:

• Accountability, accountability, accountability.
• The ability to quantify results.
• The ability to create and maintain a contract with your future self.

I’ve found all of these things in Beeminder.

“If you drop the ball, it’s no longer your future self who pays the price, it’s you.”

Accountability is massive. Your future self is, after all, in the future. So right now there’s just you and your primitive monkey brain. There’s nobody looking over your shoulder, waiting to throw a banana at you if you smoke another cigarette or eat another Twinkie. Which is why having a financial incentive with Beeminder is so important. With Beeminder, if you choose to stake a financial obligation on your goal, you’re being held accountable every day. Failure is no longer the problem of your future self. It’s your problem every day. If you drop the ball, it’s no longer your future self who pays the price, it’s you. You’re being held accountable.

The ability to quantify results is one that I hadn’t even considered before Beeminder. But it’s vastly important. It’s easy enough to say I’m overweight or I’m not. But what about all those months and years in between being successful and not successful where there are often intangible degrees? It’s so easy to get lost and say I’m a failure because I haven’t succeeded yet. Hence the yellow brick road. Every day that you stay on it (or on the good side of it) you can say you are successful even if your goal has not yet been fully realized.

And then there’s the contract. The contract is in the graph itself. Your monkey self and your future self can both look at it and tell whether you’ve been loyal to the program. Adding a financial incentive seals the deal. If you fail, both your current and your future self lose out. But if you stay on your yellow brick road, both selves win.

Lee Nathan
beeminder.com/bafilius

[The Beeminder founders, Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves, presented at the Portland Quantified Self Meetup on April 10. This is what they said.]

We’re excited to be here! We used to go to Quantified Self meetups in New York and we just moved here, to pursue the Portlandian Dream of working a couple hours a week in a coffee shop and going to clown school. [They hate it when you say that.] Actually it was to join the Portland Seed Fund and work on our awesome Quantified Self startup which we are totally not here to pitch!

Rather, this is about beeminding the building of Beeminder, which means showing you graphs of things like the 7000 person-hours we’ve spent working on this. (Technically 6986 and counting. Pitching Beeminder totally counts.) [Remember, we’re not pitching!]

“Bethany concocted what she dubbed the Voluntary Harassment Program to keep me churning out chapters.”

Right, so the self-quantifying journey that is Beeminder begins in 2005 when I was scrambling to get my PhD thesis written and Bethany, who I had recently met and, obviously, fallen head-over-heels for, concocted what she dubbed the Voluntary Harassment Program to keep me churning out chapters. That was a smashing success and we continued to experiment on ourselves with crazy incentive schemes and productivity hacks until 2008 when we started getting friends and family in on the fun, with what we called Kibotzer — the kibitzing robot — which was an early incarnation of Beeminder, and the point where those 7000 person-hours started.

We had read a Paul Graham essay about startups called “How Not to Die” in which he suggests that if you could just fully commit yourself to not giving up, your chances of success would be 90%, which he emphasizes he’s being perfectly serious about. [1]

So we were like “We have an app for that!”. And we started tracking our time — which we had written a nifty time tracker for called TagTime, which this is also not a pitch for (in fact it’s not exactly user friendly — it requires cloning a git repository and working knowledge of vim) — but it is super awesome and integrates with Beeminder and these graphs were generated automatically from that data.

We got up to 2000 person-hours or so and we still weren’t publicly launched, our beta users couldn’t create new goals without going through an admin interface, and it was seriously tempting to throw in the towel and get a real job. The only interesting thing we learned was that 40 hours of work per week is damn hard when you’re only counting actual work. We were also reminded of the adage “You make what you measure”.

“We committed to averaging one User-Visible Improvement to Beeminder per day.”

So we decided to commit ourselves to visible inexorable forward progress. In February of 2011 we committed to averaging one User-Visible Improvement to Beeminder per day. (We made that public in a blog post a couple months later.) We call them UVIs. If we failed — if we were ever off-track as measured by our meta Beeminder road — we’d pay a user [Dr Evil pose] $1000.

I actually pushed back hard about this when Danny first suggested it. It was a scary prospect, and seemed like it was potentially problematic. What about refactoring (not user visible), writing tests (not user visible)? What if I needed to work on some bigger feature that couldn’t be rolled out in bits and pieces?

But finally, upon reassurances that we could pick arbitrarily small things to tweet, and the pretty stark reality that we weren’t getting the right things done without the commitment, I agreed.

“The UVI road may have literally saved Beeminder”

So how did this new focus change things? How has it affected Beeminder’s growth? First, there’s more than one time when the UVI road may have literally saved Beeminder. In May of 2011 we had a huge family reunion (on a boat). It was nearly three weeks of travel, and we built up a huge safety buffer of UVIs to get us through.

But you know how it is after a family vacation. You need a vacation from your vacation. And when your job is coding, it’s even harder to get back to work after three weeks away — you have to load all that code back into your head. We actually had a UVI due on one of the first couple days back. We had to get to work (to the tune of $1000).

We realize this is not a direct correlation with success, but we think there are a lot of positive ways it has shaped us as we’ve grown. Our company has become one where the focus is on making our users happier every single day (on average!). Our customers are really ecstatic about that. Which makes them shockingly happy to pay us when they go off track. Of course, we track a lot more than just UVIs and time. [2] Which you can now ask about if anything particular jumps out at you!

Following are our somewhat tongue-in-cheek slides, also viewable on Prezi:

Footnotes

[1] Another apt quote from that essay: “Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!”

[2] Our UVI meta road may have saved Beeminder, but it’s beyond all doubt that our blog meta road has kept our blog from petering out. (Whenever you see someone skating the edge of their yellow brick road it’s a sure sign that Beeminder can take credit for some of the output.)

This article is cross-posted on Messy Matters.

The problem of self-control may be a ridiculous first world problem but it’s the granddaddy of first world problems and I want to solve it. We live amidst a deluge of opportunities for instant gratification, especially in the form of food and entertainment, and most of us don’t handle it well. The general problem, known as akrasia, is this: you understand your own best interests when you consider them dispassionately, but in the moment your decision-making is distorted. The best time for, say, a workout is always “tomorrow”. And the best time to start working is after “just one more” clip of [redacted; save yourself!] on YouTube. Knowing that the problem boils down to time scales (hyperbolic discounting) implies the fundamental solution: commitment devices. For example, many people buy cost-inefficient individual-sized packs of cigarettes or candy, paying a premium to throttle their future consumption. Deleting games from your computer or going somewhere without internet access to get work done is another common example. You need to lock yourself in to your chosen course of action, like maintaining a healthy weight, eating right, or getting blog posts written every month.

When we wrote about this for the inaugural post on this blog, we included a straw poll with a slew of commonly used commitment devices. As we pointed out then, the tricks and lifehacks on that list are surprisingly toothless — they’re mostly band-aid solutions. Economists have been wondering for at least half a century why we don’t see more serious use of commitment devices in the real world. But they’ve had an answer for equally long. As Robert Strotz speculated in 1955 [1], the reason is risk and uncertainty, “both as to future tastes and future opportunities.” [2] This should be obvious to our data-nerd readers. We sometimes call it the Principle of Delayed Commitment: the simple decision-theoretic fact that you shouldn’t commit to a course of action until you have to. Flexibility is valuable; laziness is a virtue. For example, you shouldn’t toggle the state of the toilet seat after you use it because you don’t know what state the next person will want it in. What if you expend the effort toggling only to have the next person to use the bathroom, perhaps you, toggle it right back? Such waste! I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here. [3] Or take going to the gym. You shouldn’t pay for a membership if you can, for a similar price, pay as you go. After all, in the future you may decide not to go to the gym, making pay-as-you-go cheaper, in expectation.

“Two forms of irrationality can cancel each other out”

But you know where this is going. Yes, you might well decide not to go to the gym, but it probably won’t be a rational decision. The solution, ironically, is more irrationality. Commitment devices blatantly violate the principle of delayed commitment, removing future flexibility for no reason other than to thwart your future self. But if that impetuous version of yourself will undermine your own goals (such as getting in shape) then that’s quite rational from your current perspective. Two forms of irrationality can cancel each other out. Which is to say that if you irrationally over-weight immediate consequences — if you’re akratic — then you should “irrationally” pre-commit.

A gym membership is a literal commitment contract, albeit a weak one. It turns the gym fees into a sunk cost, committing you to pay whether you visit the gym or not. Commitment devices may be an old idea but they’re enjoying a technology-fueled renaissance in the form of a crop of new web services. GymPact had the clever idea to give the standard gym membership commitment contract more teeth, by charging an additional fee for missing workouts. StickK.com — a pioneer in bringing commitment devices to the web — generalized the idea and offers commitment contracts on anything you can (pre)specify. Fighting irrationality with irrationality is easier than ever.

But we’d like to make those two irrationalities cancel each other out while minimizing the collateral damage. In other words, bind yourself with a commitment device that thwarts your akrasia while retaining maximum flexibility as to future tastes and future opportunities. [4]

The Akrasia Horizon

Here’s a now well-tested way to do that, by focusing on data tracking:

Akrasia Horizon: The time horizon beyond which you can make rational decisions, undistorted by akrasia

1. Retain the flexibility to change your contract in light of new information [5] (like, 40 hours of actual focused work per week is damn hard!). That sounds like it defeats the point of a commitment contract, but recall the fundamental problem of akrasia: over-weighting immediate consequences. To beat akrasia you only need to bind yourself for whatever the horizon on “immediate” is. Based on a study on grocery-buying habits — when buying groceries online for delivery tomorrow people buy a lot more ice cream and a lot fewer vegetables than when they’re ordering for delivery next week — and our own accumulating evidence, we’re taking that akrasia horizon to be one week.

2. Just commit to progress. You don’t have to know what you’re committing to when you commit, which also sounds (oxy)moronic but what I mean is this: Commit to keeping your data points on a path to your goal (the “yellow brick road”) that you have control over as you go, subject to the akrasia horizon. That is, commit to something like “work out more” or “lose weight” and then decide as you go what that means based on your data.

So a maximally flexible self-control tool is one that commits you to keeping all your data points on a path to your goal that you specify and can change the steepness of at any time. The only part of the path that’s fixed is the upcoming week. [6]

Easy Street

You may be wondering how anyone could ever fail to stick to a commitment that’s this flexible. Here’s how: if you’re highly akratic. Such a person may well find it a daily struggle to stay on track. Yeah, you can always choose to wuss out and flatten the yellow brick road, but only starting in a week, which you don’t want to do. You want to wuss out Right Now, dammit! I mean, just for now, while you eat this pie, and then you’ll behave again. No such luck though.

The daily struggle to stay on the road does not induce you to touch that road dial. You always want to make it easier “just for today” — which the akrasia horizon doesn’t allow — and you always think you’ll get your act together by next week.

Eight Hundred Dollar Postscript

For three years now we’ve scrambled to make sure a Messy Matters post got out the door at least once in every calendar month. Such is the powerful psychology of “don’t break the chain”, also known as the Seinfeld hack. But the Seinfeld hack’s greatest strength is also its fatal flaw: Once you do break the chain, all the motivation it provided bursts like a bubble. You’ve got to somehow motivate yourself to build up another long chain to not break. Until then you’re on a “one more day won’t matter” slippery slope of sloth. (Notice how we missed our end-of-February deadline and how many days into March it now is!)

Well, Beeminder, as we say, is safety rope for slippery slopes. So it’s time to do this right! We shall henceforth publish on Messy Matters as often as the following yellow brick road dictates, or give one of you $800. We’ll get the added flexibility, of course, to change the rate of posts as needed, subject to the akrasia horizon. I think it can also add a different kind of flexibility and help prevent end-of-month all-nighters: If we publicize a draft of a post (to the hard-core Messy Matters readers who follow our twitter feed) that will count as half a post (publishing a draft will count as the other half).

I’m quite serious about this $800 offer, subject to some fine print [7]. As the dozen or so people who have collected on our $20 typo bounties will attest, we’re good for it. [8]

 
Illustration by Kelly Savage. Thanks to Bethany Soule, Sharad Goel, and David Yang for comments.
 

Footnotes

[1] This is the earliest treatment of akrasia and time inconsistency that I know of in the economics literature: Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization, by Robert H. Strotz in Review of Economic Studies, 1955-1956.

This article is by our resident fitness expert, Melanie Reeves Wicklow.

Why Weigh?

If you’re fitness savvy you know you should be gaining muscle as you lose fat. So isn’t focusing on body weight silly, since muscle is denser than fat and ultimately we all want to be svelte and strong and lean, like a jungle cat? Maybe you have a fancy scale that tells you what really matters: percent body fat.

Unfortunately, estimating body fat from those electrical impedance devices is hardly better than a random number generator. They tell you something plausible only by factoring in your weight, height, sex, and age. Change any of these values and your body fat percentage on the scale magically changes. The Mayo Clinic backs us up on this.

“Beemind down to an upper bound on your ideal weight”

Minding your scale weight is actually reasonable even though it’s not the metric you truly care about. This is definitely true if you’re well outside your ideal weight range. Say you’re over a third body fat. Then you surely want your scale weight to go down as a side effect of losing the body fat, unless you also want to add bodybuilder levels of new muscle. [1] As long as your scale weight is right now definitely more than what it’s going to be when you’re at your ideal body composition then it’s a good metric to track. In other words, beemind down to an upper bound on your ideal weight. At that point you can switch to a truer but noisier or less convenient metric. [2]

Of course scale weight itself is a noisy metric, but not so noisy that it isn’t overcome by getting more data, which is the point of the rest of this article. For a nerdier treatment, check out the Signal and Noise chapter of The Hacker’s Diet. (The Hacker’s Diet helped inspire Beeminder and Beeminder incorporates its data-smoothing recommendations.) Non-nerds, read on.

Why Weigh Daily?

A single measurement of our weight is like a single photograph of our looks. You’re more photogenic when you’re laughing, for example, or sometimes the lighting or photographer is just better or worse. How would you react if you saw 149 on the scale and then a week later 150, even though you went to the gym more than usual? Would you throw your hands up, eat all the junk food in the house, and gear up for a better plan starting Monday? No! Maybe dinner the night before was a little larger than normal, or you drank a lot of water, or maybe you just haven’t emptied your bowels recently enough! In fact, one of our beeminders recently commented:

Weighing daily has been crucial for me. I realized that I sometimes fluctuated 1-2 pounds in one day, maybe just because I hadn’t pooped. If I only weighed myself once a week, I could easily attribute that fluctuation to real weight gain or loss.

These normal fluctuations in weight have nothing to do with whether you may have made progress that week. [3] Since weight isn’t a fixed number, sampling it only once a week doesn’t give you good information on which direction it’s going or how quickly, and you don’t learn much about your natural weight range. On shows like The Biggest Loser they weigh weekly, but that’s a game — they’re just trying to make good TV.

“More information is good”

There’s an established correlation between weighing more frequently and losing more weight / maintaining a healthy weight. [4] More information is good! For example, you can more quickly reverse a trend in the wrong direction. If you are scared to look at your weight for fear that you won’t like what you see, it becomes easier to not feel accountable for your actions. It’s a slippery slope once what you do right now doesn’t matter. You’ll be “good” when you start a new plan, soon, so it’s okay to be “bad” right now. Sound familiar? It’s a diet mentality and it doesn’t lend itself to achieving a balanced life, or maintaining a healthy weight and habits. People who achieve and maintain a healthy weight miss workouts sometimes and eat dessert or too many chips sometimes and it’s not bad, it’s part of life. Another beeminder put it this way:

I like that it motivates me to think in the short term about a long-term goal. Previously I avoided weighing myself frequently because I was too scared to see those day-to-day fluctuations, but I’m coming to the realization that those small fluctuations are what combine to make a difference — one way or the other.

I personally made this same shift once I started using Beeminder. It puts meaning to the daily fluctuating numbers.

Daily weighing can completely shift your focus. Note that I’m not advocating a focus on daily weight, but simply weighing daily in order to focus on what’s really happening. It takes a lot of trees to make a forest, and a Beeminder graph shows this very nicely. You can stop treating your weight loss as a Big Thing to deal with from date X to date Y while gearing up to follow a strict plan where deviating from it will throw you off the wagon, into the kitchen, and back to your Sunday night willpower-mustering. Instead, you begin to focus on each day for what it is: life, part of a journey, and a process. Will you sometimes miss workouts or overeat during that process? Of course! Your simple, attainable goal of being on track tomorrow, even with mistakes, becomes much more action oriented, short term, and therefore doable. Do something every day without letting a mistake derail you and pretty soon you’ve gotten somewhere!

“What you do today matters because you have a yellow brick road to be on tomorrow”

If you’ve spent a lifetime in the diet mentality, it’s not an easy thing to shift from. Weighing today at 199 and tomorrow at 201 messes with your head [5] even though you logically know you couldn’t possibly have gained two pounds in a day (you’d have to eat an excess of 7,000 calories [6] to accomplish that!). Weighing daily with the feedback of a Beeminder graph is a great way to shift out of that mentality. You’ll find you still have to fight to change your thinking in the beginning. With the actual number staring you in the face from the scale, you have a choice to make. You can let yourself believe that you’ve gained weight and therefore failed and need to start over with a new and better plan. Or, you can go look at your weight graph, see that you’re still on the road and take on the new day with the motivation to still be on track tomorrow. Work out a little harder, be a little more conscious of your food intake, get plenty of sleep (a great metabolism boost), and remind yourself repeatedly that you’re on track to your goal. You’re in the process of losing weight and what you do today matters because you have a yellow brick road to be on tomorrow. Drilling those positive thoughts into your head will keep you from dissolving into past habits, or dwelling on frustration or defeat. The next day, when your weight is (likely) back down a bit, you can enjoy the easy-to-come-by motivation, fostering yet another good day. The positive reinforcement from being a little more diligent the day before makes you want to do it again! If your weight then bounces up a bit again on another day, drill those positive thoughts into your head. Look at your graph to see that you are indeed moving in the right direction overall, and pretty soon the mental shift will happen and you will get over the hurdle that has held you back for so long.

Footnotes

[6] That’s like 10 loaves of bread, or 100 large eggs.

Beeminder headquarters is now officially in Portland, Oregon! We’re proud and excited to announce that we’ve been accepted into the Portland Seed Fund’s newest class of startups. We’re in the esteemed company of Gliph, GlobeSherpa, Good Works Now, Indow Windows, SERPs, Showkicker, and Tell it in 10. (Mouse over those for our attempts to describe them in a phrase.) Also some brilliant alumni of Portland Seed Fund like Geoloqi and Audioname.

We’re in a cozy office in the hyper-hipster Pearl District with the friendly folks at Upstart Labs. Our monitors are set up, our post-its are plastered on the walls, and we’ve put fenders on our bikes. We’re settling in nicely.

The Road Ahead

We’re both hardcore hacker nerds in desperate need of the business-oriented mentoring that Portland Seed Fund has to offer. But we’re committed (quite literally) to not letting that distract us from the actual product. To give that gradual, inexorable progress some direction, here are our high-level goals for the next few months:

1. Make the goal creation process much friendlier so people find it intuitive to dive in. There’s also a mental block many people have about the idea of Beeminder benefiting from failed commitments, which we have a great counter-argument for, but that doesn’t help with people who immediately walk away. We’ve also just started experimenting with subscriptions. We have one intrepid user who is paying $12/month to be able to jump to any amount at risk. Interestingly, he wasn’t concerned about paying the lower amounts but he worried that he wouldn’t reset after his initial failures so he wanted to go straight to the $270 pledge level to keep himself in line from the start. We’re still working on other features to include for premium subscriptions before we roll it out publicly. (Thanks so much to everyone chomping at the bit to get in on this!)

2. Automate emails that we’re currently sending semi-manually. We got a good start on that this weekend by automating our confirmation emails when someone falls off their yellow brick road. We also have work to do on lifecycle emails. We’ve been paranoid about being spammy so we’ve been slow to do this. We even have the bot reminder emails automatically decay in frequency until they stop, if you don’t reply to them. But with 3800 goals and growing fast, we need to get the humans more and more out of the loop.

3. Publish our API! We think this will be huge. Mainly we want to make it easy to do with many other companies what we’ve done so far as a prototype with Skritter.com — allow other services to automatically send data to Beeminder on behalf of users to update their graphs. So people using Skritter to learn to write Chinese and Japanese can commit to a certain amount of practice per week, without having to enter data into Beeminder separately. Of course we already have integration with the Withings scale and are excited to integrate with a million other devices.

4. And of course we have a laundry list of feature requests on our feedback forum that our users are clamoring for. We can’t begin to tell you how grateful we are to have such an enthusiastic and engaged user community.

Title image: Samuel McLaughlin

[This is a guest post by Gandalf Saxe, a student at the Technical University of Denmark studying Physics and Nanotechnology, in which he explains how he used Beeminder to beat procrastination and spread his studying more evenly throughout the semester.]

Having been a university student for some years now, I’ve come to appreciate just how important it is to spread out your studying over the whole semester. It’s the single most important aspect of good study technique. I’ll even go so far as to advocate the opposite extreme of the typical student’s modus operandi: Go into exam crunch mode in the beginning and end softly, making sure to get plenty of sleep, exercise, and good food in the final days before the exam and spend that final time mostly working through earlier years’ exams.

Standard Study Schedules

The first thing you’ve got to do as a student before any semester starts, is to get a good overview of your weekly schedule. All lectures, classroom exercises, lab time, etc, should be written into some kind of schedule or calendar (I use Google Calendar). Then write in your other commitments such as job, sports, etc — anything you do that is regular (use several colors for a good overview). Finally, decide how many hours you must study each week to be successful — most universities have official guidelines on this. For me it’s 45 hours per week including both the scheduled stuff and home reading. My scheduled hours at the university totaled 22.5 hours, which left another 22.5 hours to study on my own each week. But this was just my minimum, and I’ve found that 48-50 hours is a more fitting number for technical subjects like math, physics, and engineering. Make sure you also note assignments and tests that will require an extra workload so you can anticipate busy weeks in advance and plan extra-curricular activity accordingly.

So you distribute all these hours and set up a Standard Study Schedule, bearing in mind that that is all this is — a standard plan, a point of reference.

“I figured my personal motivation and common sense were sufficient to learn”

In my early college days I didn’t do this. I figured my personal motivation and common sense were sufficient to learn. It worked for me in high-school after all. And it’s true that personal motivation to learn and excitement for the subject are the primary ingredients of educational success. But I kept getting mixed results: I ended up way too busy in the fews weeks before the exam. This should sound familiar to most students. I felt palpable progress once I started making Standard Study Schedules, writing all regular activities into my calendar and making clear to myself how much studying was needed at home, and approximately when I had time in my week for it.

Commitment Devices

In November 2011 I decided to add the final ingredient: a commitment device. More specifically: Beeminder. Through all of 2011 I had begun to experiment with all kinds of tracking — my sleep, time spent on all daily activities, GPS tracking of my running, and recording every weight lifted at the gym. I was exploring whether collecting data about my life could transparently and objectively reveal my habits and time usage, hoping it could also help me change them. What I found attractive in Beeminder was that it was designed around the idea of reporting in every day, trying to stay near the ideal “yellow brick road” The yellow brick road allows for some variation but at the same time requires you to stay true to your goal every day! This seemed a great way to counter my still-worst enemy, procrastination. Adding in a money contract so you lose $10 or $20 if you fail is an ingenious way to kick the motivation up another notch.

I set a very specific goal: 200 hours of study in November — 45.16 hours per week. This included lectures, lab time, homework, everything. Behold the result:

“Let Beeminder’s yellow brick road be your guide!”

Looking at the data in retrospect I was surprised by the amount of variance day-to-day. Even though the weekly average will typically come to around 45 hours, there are many days at 1-3 hours and at 9-12 hours of studying. I knew that it varied from day to day, but the sheer amount of variance surprised me. While some of the variance resulted from procrastination and distractions, most of it is actually okay and totally natural; we’re human, not machines. What’s not okay is to have several lazy weeks of 2-3 hours per day on average, then a crunch in the final two weeks before the exam of 10-12 hours per day. A short period of 2-3 hour days is fine, but even a single week of that will set you back too much in a typical semester. Unfortunately I did have a very late-nighter and a single all-nighter (note the big vertical jumps in the graph) which means I didn’t sail quite smooth enough. But the point is: let Beeminder’s yellow brick road be your guide! You can work hard for a few days and earn a buffer-day for when you’re worn out! This also encourages better sleeping and eating to make the extended work periods liveable, perhaps even enjoyable.

In the end the work has to get done. Your books, the examiners, and especially your future self don’t care what excuses you had for not doing the work. And all my experience tells me that the hardest part of studying (and in most matters) is taking the first step. It’s almost fictitious because it’s all up there in your head — that mental blockade of not wanting to begin work. The good news is that Beeminder solves that start-up problem elegantly. It tells you “just get going because you simply can’t afford NOT to do anything today”, and most often you keep on studying quite automatically thereafter. On other days I have no motivation issues, in which case Beeminder acts as a bank for my good conscience — the good work is converted into buffer time where I can relax or do other things.

Fine Print and OCD

“No particular 30 minutes will make or break you so 199.5 is as good as 200”

Racing towards finishing my first Beeminder goal I thought I was doing pretty well. But on the very last day I almost failed. The funny thing happened is that I didn’t meet my “200 study hours” goal for November, only 199.5 and the final half hour fell just on the other side of midnight! (Note that the final dot is orange instead of blue.) Had I failed? On the other hand I was still on the yellow brick road. I wrote to the Beeminder creators, Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule, with my question. Here is how Bethany answered:

You fulfilled your Beeminder commitment [even though] you can’t say you did 200 hours! The numbers don’t lie … but the month was still a total success, right? 200 is a nice, round, focal number to pick, but also completely arbitrary, and as far as academic success goes, there’s no particular 30 minutes that will make or break you, so 199.5 is literally as good as 200. Which is really what Beeminder is totally awesome at. It’s an incontrovertible record of what you actually accomplished, but it also allows for a little bit of leeway without degenerating into a fuzzy line that doesn’t have any sting.

Which was a good point for such a perfectionist, occasionally borderline OCD person such as myself. Without a tool like Beeminder it’s hard to tell that 199.5 is just as good as 200 hours.

Postscript

November was a great success and I’ve been using Beeminder on and off ever since. I don’t use it for everything, just for a small, albeit important, class of things I want. I have made no promise to use it regularly, but only when I feel motivated and it makes sense for me. So far this has been almost every month, mostly for study time tracking. When I do use it, I’m making a clear and strong commitment to myself. (Next, inspired in part by Jake Jenkins, I plan to beemind my piano playing!)

And by the way, all of this blog post was written with the help of Beeminder. In December I promised to write about this, but nothing really happened until I committed to X amount of words/day through Beeminder in February.

Image credit: the interwebs, possibly originally a “demotivational poster”

Say you have a hard deadline in a month and you know you’ll end up down to the wire. You check the exact time of the deadline and see that it’s 9am. Groan! That portends a brutal all-nighter. Why (oh why) couldn’t they have made it 9pm the previous night? (Same story for deadlines that are timed so as to ruin a holiday.)

Note that that lamentation is patently crazy.

Nothing prevents you from setting your own deadline 12 hours ahead of the real one. But I’ve heard such lamentations often, including from myself. Such people are classic akratics and should derive huge value from forcing themselves to make steady progress as the deadline approaches, eliminating that all-nighter. They rarely do though. Instead they (we) resolve to pretend the deadline is earlier, and then throw that pretense out the window and pull the all-nighter on the last night anyway. StickK and Beeminder (and others) are offering something hugely valuable for such people.

Next week we’ll blog about one such person solving that problem beautifully with Beeminder. UPDATE: blog.beeminder.com/gandalf

Layaways

Here’s another example of akrasia: failure to save up for an important purchase, like a new washing machine. This is a real problem for people living on a limited income and with poor credit — a combination which has been more common since the financial crash of 2008. What’s needed for akratics such as these is a way to force yourself to gradually set aside small amounts of money until you’ve saved up enough for the big purchase. As James Surowiecki points out in The New Yorker last month, an old solution to that problem is regaining popularity in the current recession: layaway.

As with all commitment devices, using a layaway is superficially irrational. You’re strictly better off setting the money aside in a bank account, earning interest and retaining flexibility to reevaluate the purchase. But you’re akratic, so the money won’t stay in that bank account long enough. Thus a commitment device, even a somewhat costly one like layaway, may be quite rational.

Or you could beemind your saving, as some Beeminder users are currently doing. If that goes well, you’ll hear from them here as well.

Illustration: Christoph Niemann, The New Yorker

If you’re a connoisseur of productivity porn then you probably already know about Mark Forster and his Get Everything Done blog. Or you might know his various time management books, the most well-known being “Do It Tomorrow”. He’s also the inventor of the AutoFocus system, which has been featured more than once on LifeHacker.

Forster has long advocated clarifying solid commitments as a core time management principle, so perhaps it should be no surprise that he has jumped on Beeminder with both feet. In fact, over the last several days he has written a series of articles and short posts about Beeminder. This has been a near watershed for us. There’s a decent chance that if you’re reading this now it’s because of Mark Forster!

We already believed that Beeminder was the everlasting secret to personal productivity. That’s why we quit our day jobs so we could try to change the world with it. [1] But having a recognized expert like Forster singing our praises is an amazing feeling. Not to mention the influx of new users that has resulted. We feel like Sally Field at the Oscars.

Footnotes

[1] Data nerds are just phase one!