Pomodoro Poker
2015-01-20 • by dreevesLast week Bee talked about Tocks. That’s our neologism for 45-minute pomodoros, as well as our characteristically over-engineered system for minding them. She listed some gamification-y tips for effective tocking and assured everyone that all our other ideas involved money. That of course included beeminding tocks, as discussed last time, and certainly includes
February
Bucketminding
2015-02-03 • by dreevesIn which Danny dispenses advice on beeminding your bucket list. This first came up in the context of maniac weeks but don’t stop reading if you think those are idiotic! It’s about how to make sure you do something you intend to do but which isn’t amenable to just putting on your calendar or otherwise...
One of my vices is that I drink a bit too much. Not to the level where I have a problem, but it would be strictly better if I cut out about 2 or 3 of the drinks I have in a typical week. This seems like an obvious use case for Beeminder. I’ve previously beeminded units of alcohol consumption and concluded that, measured as a total number of units per week, I’m completely
March
Beeminder ♥ Garmin
2015-03-10 • by bsouleAnother official integration! We’re so excited to be integrating with Garmin, one of the biggest and oldest names in wearable computey things! As a welcome to Garmin users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. If you’re just eager to get your beloved Garmin device connected to Beeminder,...
Should You Beemind The Moving Average?
2015-03-20 • by dreevesThis was tied for the most popular topic for us to write about in a mini straw poll of the daily beemail readers. I decided to blog it instead because a surprising number of people have proposed this over the years (also it’s a blog beemergency day). Beeminder users being, to put it mildly, rather sophisticated,...
April
Monkeys Are Afraid of Bees
2015-04-09 • by Mary RenaudThis is a guest post by chipmanaged. We often describe guest post authors as “avid Beeminder users” but @chipmanaged takes the cake. Not only does she have 67 active Beeminder graphs, she’s written a custom dashboard for them, along with various tools using the Beeminder API that implement new features....
GmailZero: Not Just For Your Inbox Anymore
2015-04-29 • by bsouleUPDATE 2019: Changes to GmailZero! Google recently stopped supporting their very old OAuth1 authentication strategy, which is what we’d been using to access all y’all’s Gmail accounts. We’ve talked about our Gmail integration, GmailZero before. (Actually we talk about email a lot, including recently...
May
If This MIND That: Beeminder ♥ IFTTT
2015-05-08 • by bsouleAnnouncement! There is now an official Beeminder Channel on IFTTT! This is a big day for us. Our users have been begging for this for a very long time, and we in turn have been bugging IFTTT. In fact, Danny even wrote this Ode to IFTTT two years ago and included it in our application to be a channel...
Misfit and Bee-fit: Beeminder ♥ Misfit
2015-05-29 • by bsouleAnother official integration: Misfit! Look at us, all featured in their gallery and everything! This is an especially exciting integration for us personally -- our esteemed CEO has been wearing his Misfit Shine literally 24/7 for a year and a half now. As a welcome to Misfit users new to Beeminder, we'll start with a recap of what Beeminder is all about. For the full story, start at the very beginning. If you're just eager
June
Beeminder ♥ Skritter
2015-06-09 • by bsouleAnother integration, hot off the presses: Skritter! There is a funny back story with this one. Last winter our charmingly optimistic CEO, imagining we could have this integration done “like in a month”, got slightly telephone-gamed into committing to launch it in January. When we noticed what we’d gotten ourselves into we offered a
The Seinfeld Hack; or, Don't Break The Chain
2015-06-29 • by dreevesConnoisseurs of productivity porn, which we’re afraid to say this blog may count as, probably know about the Seinfeld Hack, also known as Don’t Break The Chain. The idea’s so simple (in a good way) that you don’t even need to follow the link to LifeHacker where the idea originated. It’s merely the psychological...
July
Cranial Silicosis and Paths of Least Resistance
2015-07-16 • by dreevesFor 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...
Weasel Heart-To-Heart
2015-07-27 • by Chelsea MillerChelsea Miller is Beeminder’s Support Czar, meaning she’s in charge of making sure the rest of us at the beehive stay on top of all the email you send to support@beeminder.com. And in fact she answers a huge amount of it personally. Pretty much everything she writes to users puts a huge smile on my face....
August
Nine Greens
2015-08-07 • by Mirabai KnightThis is a guest post by Mirabai Knight, who beeminds many aspects of her life, in many creative ways. She’s been a proponent of Beeminder in the popular press as well as writing about it on her blog. Here she discusses — along with her latest Beeminder goals — an unanticipated (at least by us!) source...
As I write this, my cofounder (aka the Bee in Beeminder) is off running a 195-mile, 12-person relay race from Mt Hood to the Oregon coast, so tonight’s emergency blog post is up to me. I’m going to tell (part of) the story of how we keep getting ourselves into predicaments like running up and down steep...
September
Bee on Extreme Productivity (QS 2015)
2015-09-08 • by bsouleOnce again our esteemed cofounder, Bethany Soule, aka the Bee in Beeminder, gave a talk at the Global Quantified Self conference in San Francisco. But you don’t have to take our word for it. We now have video proof. We’re also sharing the transcript and slides, in case anyone cares that much. It’s based...
Press Roundup: A Year of Buzz
2015-09-18 • by dreevesRemember our press roundups? What’s The Buzz? Beeminder Buzz at 30,000 Feet Front Page of the Wall Street Journal Another Press Roundup Part Deux, Revisited: Return of the Beeminder Buzz Returns Again! Press Roundup 5 Well we got super lazy about them and it’s been a year since the last one. So now we...
October
Revamped Reminders
2015-10-01 • by bsouleIf your name is “Beeminder” then reminders really need to be part of your core competency. Alerts and nudges about your goal are fundamental to our contract with you, the user, to do our very best to help you meet the goals you’ve set, and only take your money as a last resort. So much so that if...
Fourth Anniversary of Beeminder
2015-10-29 • by bsouleBeeminder is four years old! We’d liiike to get this blog post started by telling you what we’ve been working on this last year (revamped reminders! so many new integrations! new versions of smartphone apps! meetups and Quantified Self!), buuut you’re probably more interested in the question of whether...
November
We’re hugely impressed with both Malcolm Ocean and his now two-year-old startup, Complice. We’re especially proud that Malcolm’s been beeminding User-Visible Improvements to Complice since the beginning. Complice is quite beautifully done (maybe thanks in part to the more than 600 improvements logged?)...
Beeminder's Youngest User
2015-11-21 • by Faire Soule-ReevesImagine a world where children grow up with Beeminder as a way of life. Well we created Beeminder when our kids were babies so here in Portland (at least in our house) that world exists, as a reality. Here to tell you about that is Beeminder’s presumably youngest user, Faire Soule-Reeves. Hi! I am Faire...
December
Cyber Monday:
2015-12-01 • by dreevesOK, FineNever Again[UPDATE 2021: This is strictly for historical interest. Beeminder premium just costs what it costs now.] Of the roughly 6,000 active Beeminder users, we’re approaching 1,000 who like us so much that they’ve opted in to more frequent beemails. If you love us so much that you want to hear from us daily...
Buzzy Buzz Buzz: Discover Magazine Edition
2015-12-22 • by bsouleIt’s our 7th press roundup! This time we wanted an excuse to show off our coverage in last month’s issue of Discover Magazine. The author (who also covered us in The Washington Post earlier this year) does a good job of making accessible the research on and the underlying causes of akrasia, and defending...
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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- FAQ (75)
- startups (63)
- nerdery (62)
- productivity porn (61)
- science (57)
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- quantified self (49)
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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.