Tuesday, December 29th, 2020
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... »
Tuesday, December 15th, 2020
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... »
Thursday, December 3rd, 2020
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... »
Friday, November 20th, 2020
By popular demand… (I.e., thank you to our fantabulous
community for the impetus to
»
Saturday, November 7th, 2020
This is crossposted at essay.dev which is clearly also for nerds!
For years we’ve gotten advice to
»
Monday, October 26th, 2020
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... »
Wednesday, October 14th, 2020
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... »
Saturday, October 3rd, 2020
By popular demand — specifically, being the winner of
our poll — we’re catching you up on the latest research on the marshmallow test!
The
»
Friday, September 18th, 2020
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... »
Friday, September 4th, 2020
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... »