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The Beekeeper Program: Beeminder-Based Lifecoaching
2014-01-01 • by Erica EdelmanThis post is by Erica Edelman, our very first employee! She’s been knocking our socks off since we met her a couple months ago, and apparently the feeling was mutual because last week she moved to Portland from Columbus, Ohio to start with us full-time. The main excuse to hire her was that she’ll be...
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Be Nice To Yourself
2014-01-13 • by bsouleI originally wrote this as a beemail and everyone seemed to love it, so I’ve blogged it for the rest of the world to see. I do realize how vaguely self-serving this advice is. And perhaps hard to generalize to people who are not founders of Beeminder. But it works for me! With the new year, and bunch...
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Our esteemed cofounder, Bethany Soule, gave a talk at the 2013 Global Quantified Self conference in San Francisco. We just got the video of it and wanted to share it with you, along with a transcript and the slides. See also our previous Quantified Self interview from 2011 and our previous Quantified...
February
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Another Press Roundup Part Deux, Revisited: Return of the Beeminder Buzz Returns Again!
2014-02-02 • by Erica EdelmanIt’s that (randomly-chosen) time of year, folks! The time we brag about all the awesome press Beeminder’s been getting. Our excuse to do this today is that the legendary Amby Burfoot just published an article about Beeminder and StickK and behavioral economics in Runner’s World online. Before that...
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Beeminder ♥ Code School
2014-02-11 • by dreevesWe’re pretty over the moon for Code School and very proud to announce this partnership. The Code School folks are announcing it simultaneously on the Code School blog as well. Since many or most of you are here directly from Code School with no previous exposure to Beeminder, we’re starting with a...
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Beeminder: A User's Guide for New Bees
2014-02-22 • by dreevesHow Beeminder works is you tell us your goal and we map out a Yellow Brick Road for you to stay on. As long as you stay on the road you're safe, but if you fall off we'll charge you money! We give you seven goals to play around with at the beginning. These start at $0, so if you fall off once
March
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Fat Cyclist Weight Loss Competition with Beeminder
2014-03-05 • by bsouleWe’re big fans of the Fat Cyclist and, if you’ve been following along closely, you might recognize him from the aftermath of our 1000th UVI, when Henrik Wist won our $1000 and then paid it all to charity. So we were really excited when he asked us to help him run a weightloss competition with teeth....
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Eat Your Vegetables
2014-03-15 • by bsouleWith the Fat Cyclist weight loss competition underway, we're thinking about weight loss a lot. We've got some useful posts planned. In the meantime, we have Bethany hating on
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Bee's Guide To Beeminding Weight Loss
2014-03-25 • by bsouleI’ve been thinking about beeminding weight loss a lot lately and the thing is, beeminding weight loss sucks! But not any more than losing weight in general sucks. Even for people who really like the whole commitment device craziness, Beeminder sometimes feels aversive. I believe that happens when you...
April
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Get Things Done (Or Else!) With Beeminder and GTBee
2014-04-03 • by Andy BrettAt 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...
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Heartbleed and Other Epic Crashes of Ineptitude
2014-04-14 • by dreevesWe’ll start with the non-nerd version. Last week there was a massive security breach in some very standard software used by most sites on the internet, including Beeminder. Let us first quickly reassure you that your credit card info gets secured by our much more savvy payment processor, Stripe, and...
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(Never)Minding Both Sides
2014-04-24 • by dreevesHere’s a suggestion we hear from time to time: “Let me mind both sides of the Yellow Brick Road!” For example, maybe you want to neither sleep too much nor too little. Conceptually you could do this with a goal that was a combination of Do More and Do Less. You’d be penalized for going off the Yellow...
May
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New Feature: Supporters
2014-05-04 • by dreevesTechnically 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 — who...
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Beeminding Your Way Out of Your Comfort Zone
2014-05-14 • by Jess WhittlestoneRecently, I’ve been trying to get myself out of my comfort zone more often. I’ve been finding it… uncomfortable. One thing I’ve been trying to do is talk to strangers more frequently. I genuinely want to get better at this. I think it will make me more comfortable socially as well as being a valuable skill generally. But every time I
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We were (and are) pretty pleased with our Duolingo integration but in this guest post, software developer and language-learning expert Eric Kidd puts that to shame. It’s seriously impressive. (If you’re a programmer we also highly recommend Eric’s blog, Random Hacks.) I learned to speak French in my...
June
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Beating Beeminder Burnout
2014-06-04 • by dreevesHere’s a perennial topic on Akratics Anonymous: How do you keep from feeling overwhelmed by all the myriad things things you’re beeminding? I'm going to repeat my advice buried in a previous blog post, which is actually to
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Bethany's Maniac Week
2014-06-07 • by bsouleLast week Danny took our children to Canada while I attempted a Nick Winter style maniac week. It was delightful, though less epic than its namesake. Nonetheless it was a massively productive work week for me compared to my average. Here’s a time-lapse video of me working. So fascinating! Look how...
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Clearing Up Confusion About Exponential Roads
2014-06-28 • by dreevesUPDATE 2017: This whole post is of historical interest only. We have gotten rid of exponential roads in Beeminder! Once in a while someone tries to set up a yellow brick road where the steepness automatically increases by, say, 10% each week. It seems like a so-called exponential road (available with...
July
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Ringcycles Wins Fat Cyclist Weight Loss Contest!
2014-07-07 • by dreevesThis is crossposted on the Fat Cyclist blog. Greetings not-so-fat cyclists! We’re pretty much beside ourselves with how the first annual (oh presumption!) Beeminder Fat Cyclist Weight Loss Competition turned out. When we say we’re beside ourselves we mean that literally — Beeminder is a husband-and-wife...
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How I Use Beeminder
2014-07-18 • by Philip HellyerWhen I first introduce people to Beeminder, they either recoil in horror or they want to dive right in. But the easiest way to defeat a new system is to overload it [1], so if you read this blog post and then immediately create a bunch of goals, I’ve probably failed. There are two obvious ways to overload a system: volume and intensity. In Beeminder terms, volume is creating more goals than you’re able to keep current, and intensity is setting too aggressive a slope. You might want to lose
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The Type Bee Personality
2014-07-29 • by dreevesPeople often ask, sometimes incredulously, what kind of person uses Beeminder. We’ve found that the following personality traits are required: 1. Akratic (obviously), 2. Ambitious/motivated (ironically), 3. Self-aware (knowing the limits of one’s motivation), 4. High-integrity (to not spoil the whole point by
August
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Birds and The Bees: Beeminder Has Twitter Integration
2014-08-05 • by Chris GoodmanWe are exceedingly proud to debut the work of our intern, Chris Goodman, in this blog post. Chris has joined us this summer through Saturday Academy’s ASE Internship program. Both Chris and Saturday Academy have knocked our socks off. Chris had not written a line of Ruby when he started, and now, well,...
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Don't Be a Smarmbot
2014-08-25 • by dreevesIn which the CEO of Beeminder quibbles with Patrick McKenzie, aka patio11, about what we call smarmbot emails, while noting how much we adore Patrick McKenzie (else we wouldn’t bother quibbling with him). Humans of the internet! This post isn’t really for you, but if you’re curious what we’re talking...
September
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Press Roundup 5
2014-09-04 • by dreevesWe’re such press darlings! This is our fifth big press roundup. For the sake of completeness (and because I’m certain you’re terribly eager to read every word of all our press coverage ever), here are the previous four: Press Roundup: What’s the Buzz? Beeminder Buzz at 30,000 Feet, and other New Year’s...
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What To Mind: Picking a Metric
2014-09-14 • by dreevesWe 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...
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New Feature: Pledge Caps
2014-09-24 • by dreevesThe exponential pledge schedule is a key part of the, dare we say it, genius of Beeminder. It means you quickly reach a pledge that’s highly motivating and keeps you on track for a long time. But one more exponential step beyond “highly motivating” was often “OMG too scary I quit”. That outcome is...
October
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Freebees: Not Actually Free
2014-10-04 • by dreeves[UPDATE 2016-03-25: This whole post is completely obsolete! That’s a wonderful thing. We made everything simpler and better. In short, all goals can now start at $0 pledged and there’s no need for a concept of freebees at all. So don’t read on except out of historical interest!] So many changes lately...
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New Discourse Forum!
2014-10-15 • by dreevesWe committed in a beemail recently to announcing a series of things that we’ve been brewing, culminating in our 3rd anniversary blog post, coming this month. This is one such thing. Drumroll… Beeminder has a new Discourse forum! It lives at forum.beeminder.com and all of the following are fair game...
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Beeminder ♥ HabitRPG
2014-10-25 • by dreevesHabitRPG and Beeminder have a remarkably similar history and remarkably similar users. We consider this a match made in heaven. In fact, we and the HabitRPG folks have been talking about this for literally years now, so we’re very excited to finally be shipping it, thanks to the hacking skills of our own Alice Monday, and with assistance from Alice Harris. As a welcome to HabitRPG users new to Beeminder, we’re starting with a
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New Feature and Veritable Paradigm Shift: Arbitrary Deadlines
2014-10-28 • by dreevesA simple-seeming feature is now live: You can set custom deadlines on goals! Until now, you’ve had till midnight every day to make sure you’re safely on Beeminder’s yellow brick road. (Or for non-autodata goals you’ve had a grace period till 3am to get your data entered.) As fanatic and highly akratic...
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Beeminder Turns Three!
2014-10-28 • by bsouleYo Yo Yo and a buckle of gold, Beeminder just turned three years old! This time last year we were sitting in a hotel in San Francisco during the Quantified Self global conference, excited about our year of autodata integrations, exponential revenue growth, and being featured in the Wall Street Journal....
November
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Beeminder ♥ Zapier: Hundreds of New Integrations in One
2014-11-19 • by dreevesWe’re beaming with pride at being the latest official Zapier integration. See also Zapier’s announcement. This is arguably our biggest announcement since the Beeminder API two years ago. In case you don’t already know about Zapier, it’s a more
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1000 Days of Fruits and Vegetables
2014-11-28 • by alysDo you have trouble eating an appropriate amount of vegetables? Do you repeatedly buy them, then watch them wither and decay, feeling guilty about the waste of money and the impact on your health? Do you find healthy eating to be overwhelmingly complicated? I was like that for years. But for exactly one thousand days today, I have
December
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Beeminding Rituals
2014-12-04 • by Leah LibrescoThere’s something a little weird for me, intuitively, about beeminding parts of my spiritual life. After all, in Romans 12:19, it is written “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” So, if I turn to Beeminder to
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Code and Catholicism: Beeminding Praying and Integrating Beeminder on iOS
2014-12-11 • by Pedro Paulo Oliveira Jr.Last week Leah Libresco blogged about beeminding rituals. This week we’re continuing the Catholic theme with a guest post by veritable Renaissance man, Pedro Paulo Oliveira Jr. Pedro Paulo has a popular iPhone app for praying the rosary and has used the Beeminder API to include beeminding one’s praying...
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Beeminder ♥ Sleep as Android
2014-12-31 • by bsouleAnother integration! And one that I personally use daily (well, nightly). Sleep as Android is a popular sleep tracking app that’s delightfully nerdy and quantified-self focused. (Much like Beeminder!) As a welcome to Sleep as Android users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. For Beeminder...
About
Beeminder is goal-tracking with teeth. We plot your progress on a graph with a Bright Red Line (formerly Yellow Brick Road). If your datapoints cross that line, we take your money.
The Beeminder blog is a hodgepodge of productivity nerdery and behavioral economics written by the founders and various friends.
Start Here
Does Beeminder sound super crazypants? Just confusing? One of the first things you may want to check out is our User's Guide for New Bees. Check out other posts we're most proud of by clicking the "best-of" tag below. If you're a glutton for honey, the "bee-all" tag has everything we still think is worth reading. Other good ones are the "rationality" and "science" tags, if you're into that.
Tags
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- rationality (205)
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- navel-gazing (121)
- case studies (109)
- tips (98)
- best-of (92)
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- new features (82)
- FAQ (76)
- startups (70)
- nerdery (64)
- productivity porn (63)
- integrations (58)
- science (57)
- guest posts (51)
- quantified self (49)
- yellow brick road (48)
- PSA (47)
- dog food (46)
- ...and 180 more tags
Beeminder Community
Most of the action is in the Beeminder forum. Or if you want to be slightly social without risking getting distracted arguing on the internet, you can do pomodoros online in sync with other Beeminder users and productivity nerds in the Beeminder coworking room on Complice.
Akrasia
Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command over oneself"; adjective: "akratic") is the state of acting against one's better judgment, not doing what one genuinely wants to do. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.