Archive for 2020

How To Beemind Nebulous Goals

Tuesday, December 29th, 2020
How To Beemind Nebulous Goals

Beeminder works brilliantly for quantifiable, graphable goals. What about nebulous projects like remodeling your kitchen or finding a therapist? It doesn’t really work for those things. Unless! Unless you find a clever metric to mind. Like the word count in a log of your progress. Here’s what I recommend: Create a... »

Beeminder’s Achilles Heel

Tuesday, December 15th, 2020
Beeminder’s Achilles Heel

Beeminder’s Achilles heel is that you need a meta-Beeminder to get yourself to create a Beeminder goal in the first place. (We sometimes call it Beeminder’s bootstrap problem.) Here’s a trick to mitigate that problem: Create a goal as soon as you think of it, but with an initial flat spot of a week or a month or... »

Ice Cream Truck Loopholes

Thursday, December 3rd, 2020
Ice Cream Truck Loopholes

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 a goal. But other times, ironically, such loopholes... »

Upside-Down Support

Friday, November 20th, 2020
Upside-Down Support

By popular demand… (I.e., thank you to our fantabulous community for the impetus to »

Strategy Memo: Beeminder Is For Nerds

Saturday, November 7th, 2020
Strategy Memo: Beeminder Is For Nerds

This is crossposted at essay.dev which is clearly also for nerds! For years we’ve gotten advice to »

Beeminding the Right Thing: A Bookcase Study

Monday, October 26th, 2020
Beeminding the Right Thing: A Bookcase Study

I want to read more books. I already read a lot of books, but I want to read more! It sounds like that should be a simple thing to beemind. Do-more graph, set the rate to however many books I want to read per day/month/year, go! It has turned out... »

Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses “Ratcheting Breaks Breaks” Bug

Wednesday, October 14th, 2020
Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses “Ratcheting Breaks Breaks” Bug

Are you somehow stumbling upon this blog post without knowing anything about Beeminder? Hoo-boy are you in the wrong place. But here’s a frenzied attempt to catch you up in time: Beeminder graphs your progress toward goals by drawing a bright line, called the Yellow Brick Road, that you commit... »

The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: A Retrospective

Saturday, October 3rd, 2020
The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: A Retrospective

By popular demand — specifically, being the winner of our poll — we’re catching you up on the latest research on the marshmallow test!   The »

Happy Now, Beeminder?

Friday, September 18th, 2020
Happy Now, Beeminder?

Programming note (not that kind of programming; we could call it a doubly meta note?): The blog is now mobile-friendly! You’re welcome. This week we (by which I mean our robotic minions, by which I mean Google Alerts) noticed a Beeminder-relevant blog post out on the internet. It’s very short so I can... »

How To Write Functional Specs II: The Spec-List

Friday, September 4th, 2020
How To Write Functional Specs II: The Spec-List

Writing software involves a lot of backing yourself into corners. For even the simplest-seeming program, you find yourself adding duct tape and chewing gum to satisfy different requirements and logic bugs that come up. Then you gradually whittle it back down and end up with a few simple lines and it’s... »