Tag: commitment contracts

[UPDATE 2015: We’ve learned that we don’t need to be this uptight or hard-nosed about derailments. Just reply to the email asking if the derailment was legit and say why you don’t consider it to be. We will believe you. If you want something closer to the original vision articulated in this old blog post...

[UPDATE: The new place for calling the Beeminder founders out when they derail on their meta goals is in the Beeminder forum.] Half a year ago, with Beeminder in its infancy, we committed to averaging one User-Visible Improvement (UVI) to Beeminder every day for at least the next six months. That contract...

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:

This is a guest post by Philip Hellyer who can walk on water and outrun bullets, with the help of Beeminder. He eloquently describes what we think is currently the single biggest pain point (though there are many) with Beeminder right now — how to keep from procrastinating indefinitely on getting back...

Until now you haven’t had much choice about how much to pledge (put at risk) on your Beeminder commitment contracts. It starts out free, then $5, then each subsequent time you derail from your yellow brick road you’re encouraged (though not forced) to jump to the next pledge level for your next attempt:...

My mom recently lost $5,000 to my brother in a commitment contract gone wild. That was started in part as an experiment early in Beeminder’s beta period before we’d thought of things like the exponential pledge schedule. Believe it or not, it was actually a pretty positive outcome: my mom gradually...

UPDATE: A revised and updated version of this article is now on Messy Matters. It’s amazing where one trivial user-visible improvement per day will eventually get you to. We’ve made 1000 user-visible improvements (UVIs) to Beeminder in the last 1000 days. We had to or we’d have owed one of our users...

At its core, Beeminder is a tool for getting yourself to do things using money as an incentive. Most goals on Beeminder focus on making steady progress over time. But some goals, and some people, work better with a different model. Let’s say you have to call someone by the end of the day today, and...

Technically we deployed this feature over two months ago, but not very well so we didn’t have much fanfare. It was one of our daily UVIs (@beemuvi) and we mentioned it in a beemail. The feature itself is pretty self-explanatory: In the Settings for a goal you can add supporters — friends, family, enemies...

We use the word “goal” a lot but, ironically, we agree with Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) who argues that goals are for losers. He points out that the most amazing people he knows tend not to just have goals that they achieve and then are done with, but systems for constantly improving. This is the biggest...

This is crossposted on Messy Matters. Let’s talk about science! Beehavioral science. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week has been all over the news. It’s much better than previous studies and statistics I’ve seen on the efficacy of commitment devices. Not because...

For those just tuning in, let’s review the Three Great Beeminder Epiphanies. The Yellow Brick Road — bringing long-term consequences near (and using the graphs as the basis for commitment contracts) The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon — flexible self-control (getting the most out of commitment contracts...

This is a post by Philip Hellyer, which he wrote before Chelsea Miller’s recent Weasel Heart-To-Heart but which serves as a sequel, or perhaps a prequel — advice on avoiding those problems in the first place. Maybe you can be counted on to faithfully and unfailingly report true numbers to your own commitment...

January 1st being a culturally significant temporal landmark, it’s not as silly as it may seem to focus on it as a natural time to make New Year’s resolutions, or to set general goals for 2019. We’d go so far as to say it’s those pooh-poohing New Year’s resolutions (including our past selves!) who...

Malcolm Ocean has been on both sides of the accountability relationship. Among the many roles he’s played is professional accountability provider: initially as Beeminder’s beekeeper, and now also independently with people who use his app, Complice, and want 1-on-1 help. He also has experience making...

Sometimes Beeminder goals have loopholes, like you could dehydrate yourself to get your datapoint below the bright line on your weight-loss graph (please don’t!). There are plenty of things like that and I probably shouldn’t think too hard about more examples. Sometimes loopholes like that can ruin...

Earlier this year we completed a lovely Beeminder book club to read behavioral scientist Katy Milkman’s new book, How To Change. The discussion all happened in the amazing Beeminder forum but as a private group of 18 of us, so we could trash talk the book guilt-free (or just to be able to talk more...

Beeminder user Parrhesia recently told us about a failed attempt to proselytize Beeminder. The person he recommended it to said they knew about Beeminder and viewed it as self-blackmail. That it degrades trust in your future self. They advocated behavior change by bringing your present self and future...

A fun fact about predicting your own behavior, particularly publicly, is that the act of predicting it changes the prediction. “I’m 75% likely to maintain my Duolingo streak all year, but now that I’ve said so I’m actually 90% likely, but now that I’ve said that, …” Or what happens when the probability starts very low but you add a wager? It’s like this self-describing xkcd