2017

Picking the right way to organize your to-do’s is a big decision. Paper & pencil, smartphone app, calendar, blank playing cards, or the old “in your head” method. A lot of folks use Todoist. While Todoist is fantastic for keeping track of your to-dos, if you combine it with Beeminder, you can use...

Last week we had a reporter contact us looking for examples of commitment contracts involving Donald Trump. She was wondering if anyone uses anything Trump-related as an anti-charity or “as motivation to, say, give more to charity”. The piece didn’t end up happening, but it inspired us to do a press...

At some point in your Beeminder experience, you may find yourself needing to contact support. Usually this is because your goal has derailed — but you actually did your goal and just forgot to tell Beeminder about it! A fair amount of people apologize for this and ask if it’s an approved excuse. Let’s...

META-UPDATE August 2020: All the updates were cluttering this up so we moved them to a changelog section at the end. UPDATE 2018 Mar: We made some changes! Like changing “REQ” for “feature request” to the semi-standard “RFE” for “request for enhancement” (because the former looked too much like “required”...

This is a guest post by Alex Strick van Linschoten, an ultra hardcore Beeminder fan since 2012. Alex has said he that almost couldn’t have gotten his PhD without Beeminder (which we’re delighted to say isn’t the only time we’ve heard that) and has blogged more than once about Beeminder as the secret...

For the last National Novel Writing Month we announced our new official URLminder integration. Well it’s been several months now and that integration has come a long way. So we wanted to both tell you about how much better it is and also give a fully newbee-friendly guide to beeminding your writing....

In case you’re not a programmer and the title didn’t already scare you off, we’ll start by explaining why this matters for end users. Until now, anyone who wrote a 3rd-party autodata integration — automatically sending data to Beeminder — had to implement their own strategy for how often to check for...

You may have heard the term “Maniac Weekend” around these parts before. It refers to a focused, concentrated 2.5-day period where one tries to cram in as much focused work time as possible. Sometimes these weekends have actually been Maniac Weeks, requiring as much focus as possible over the course of...

If you have a minute to add a rating or review for the new versions we’d be really grateful! Releasing a new version wipes out the previous ratings, so we’re starting from scratch. The Beeminder iOS app just got a long-overdue update, and it includes two sorta-huge new features! Apple Health integration...

Hallo onze vrienden! The Beeminder founders and Lillian and the founders’ kids, and other Beeminder friends from Portland will all be converging on Amsterdam next week, from June 15 through June 21st, for Quantified Self 2017. Beeminder, as usual, is a minor sponsor. Meet up with us We’re co-hosting...

Guess what? This is not actually the most buzzworthy Beeminder-related news right now. There’s some even bigger (and entirely unrelated) news that we can’t share yet. How’s that for an infuriatingly vague teaser? But to hold you over, we thought we’d let everyone know that as of this week we finally officially...

As of last week, our esteemed competitor, Pact, is officially shut down. We’re genuinely sad about that but were very touched that they endorsed us in their announcement to their users. Which is why many of you are reading this now, so… Welcome Pact users! The title of this post isn’t exactly true but...

“80% of success is showing up.” — Woody Allen “It should be completely implausible to describe a startup’s CEO as a flake.” — Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston’s heuristic for successful startups “Let your ‘yes’ mean yes, and your ‘no’ mean no. Anything more than this comes from the evil one.” — Matthew...

The time has come (the fandom said) to talk of many things. Of books, podcasts, and articles. Of victories and stings. With little further ado other than to point you to our collection of the last 10 press roundups we’ve done, here are all the nice things people have been saying about Beeminder since...

Brennan K. Brown has been using Beeminder for two years this week and is our new favorite user. (Don’t worry, we have a lot of favorite users. Mathematical fun fact: superlativity doesn’t imply uniqueness!) He achieved this coveted status (haha, but it does involve us mailing you stickers) by writing...

Brennan K. Brown is back with the sequel to his previous article. It’s a wonderful collection of advice and insight about creating Beeminder goals. Recommended reading for newbees and veterans alike! In my previous article, I talked about Beeminder’s unique way of thinking about goal-setting and self-accountability....

The last year has flown by like a swarm of bees. We do one of these blog posts every year and they’re kind of a mix between a family Christmas letter and a state of the union address. We’ll spend a while congratulating ourselves on the charming new babies we made this last year, we’ll show you some...

We know this is going to read like an April Fool’s joke to plenty of you. [UPDATE: To clarify, “bites” means mouthfuls, not like up-and-down motions of your jaw! Hopefully that makes this all slightly less bonkers sounding.] Like, how is it not impossibly tedious to keep track of how many bites of food...

We’re excited to have Prof Michele Gregoire Gill guest blogging for us! She’s a bonafide expert in what Beeminder is trying to do. Also she personally is a dedicated Beeminder user for the last 3 years. She’s here to tell us about how she came to love Beeminder and why! I’m a research psychologist who...

We’re honored to have sci-fi/fantasy author (and years-long Beeminder fan) Kara Timmins guest-blogging for us today about her secret to getting novels published. Ok, it’s not a secret. I mean, if we had our way it would be the diametric opposite of a secret. In case you haven’t guessed, it’s Beeminder....

Special guest post by Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex! This was originally published on LessWrong in 2012 but was in want of a better home. So it may be an exaggeration to call it a guest post when all Scott did was give us his blessing to resurrect it. But we figure he’s started down a slippery...