Here’s a simple madhack from one of my favorite YouTubers, CGP Grey: Weekend Wednesday. His video is pretty pithy and persuasive but let me make my own contribution to the internet by turning it into my own typed words that you can read quieter and faster. Claim: Five workdays in a row is too much....

This is about TV and video games, not food, to be clear. This blog post started its life as a Madhack Monday based on a random piece of life advice from my friend Jacob Falkovich. Specifically this one: “Binge a show / video game for a couple of weeks, then take a break from TV for a couple of weeks....

Workerbee Simone saw a weird error on Beeminder one day and sent me this screenshot: That rang no bells but naturally I grepped the source code for “ERROR_0304” and found this: return "ERROR_0304" // passed in bad format string; should never happen My past self was saying, “if this ever happens, which...

RIP Mark Forster (1943-2025). We first met Mark (on the internet) in 2012, which is also when he started using Beeminder. Forster’s systems and insights have featured in many Beeminder blog posts over the years. But the best of all hasn’t appeared until now. Years ago we collaborated with Mark on a...

Announcement: You can now jump down as many pledge steps as you like without waiting a week between jumps. And pledges and pledge caps don’t have to be changed separately — the right things just happen, like if you push the pledge cap below the current pledge, that starts a one-week timer for both of...

A full 10 years ago we published a listicle, “16 Obscure Beeminder Features”. Number 15, we could say, surprised us. With its longevity and practicality. Since we don’t actually want to clickbait you, here it is: If you have over a week of safety buffer you’re immune to the akrasia horizon. Quick...

BoardGameGeek is an online community for board and card game geeks. They have reviews of every board game imaginable, from Your Favorite Niche Game, to Candy Land, to Cribbage, as well as community forums, the rules, etc. It’s kind of a forum meets a wiki meets blog. It’s a great resource for finding...

This is pretty obvious and, by definition, is what most people already do, but we’ve found the concept handle useful. When we notice one of our concept handles has stuck, it’s handy to have a blog post to link to that defines it. In this case, it’s a strategy for minimizing software headaches. Namely,...

Deadline snoozing in Beeminder refers to scooching your deadline later as it’s bearing down. Traditionally we’ve allowed any deadline changes until six hours before the deadline. But we’ve always hated that. It’s arbitrary and hard to remember. We have a whole essay railing against such things — the...