Strategy Memo: Beeminder Is Pledge-Focused
2021-01-22 • by dreevesSince we like letting you all peek behind the curtain of Beeminder, let’s dive in with this internal strategy memo that our beeloved Queen Bee sent to the team last month, reproduced here verbatim: Howdy my sweet bee people, We’ve subjected you to a lot of polarized ideas about Beeminder pricing over...
February
The Burgle Bug Fairness Principle
2021-02-04 • by dreevesBeeminder’s bug classification system is like so: Bitty Bugs are barely bothersome. Baneful Bugs make Beeminder blatantly wrong, but not in any breach-of-contract way, unlike… Bum-steer Bugs which may make you derail by leading you astray about the state of your graph, or, worse: Bamboozle Bugs making...
Do-Zero Goals Considered Harmful
2021-02-17 • by Chelsea MillerLook what we found in the attic! Our original Support Czar, Chelsea — known for such classics as “Beemind Easy Things” and “Weasel Heart-To-Heart” — wrote this screed in 2017. It was a much better screed when she wrote it, because Beeminder was way worse then than it is today. (Yay!) So we modernized...
March
What Not To Beemind
2021-03-02 • by Chelsea MillerWhat appalling apostasy is this? It’s not like that! Beeminder just isn’t quite perfect for absolutely everything. It’s *practically* perfect for absolutely everything. Practically perfect for a surprising breadth of things? This post just happens to be about the exceptions. It’s a sequel to both the...
Previously on the Beeminder blog: debating negative vs positive reinforcement and, in case you care about using these psychology terms correctly, clarifying that negative reinforcement ≠ punishment. Also “Beeminder: Like Pact Except All We Do Is Take Your Money”. Here’s a common (pointed) question about...
April
Bayesian Willpower
2021-04-08 • by dreevesA couple weeks ago, Scott Alexander wrote “Toward a Bayesian Theory of Willpower”. This is my recap of the theory, my tentative verdict, and what I think it means for Beeminder and motivation hacking more generally. Let’s start with defining terms! Akrasia means failing to do something you rationally...
Is Beeminder A Crutch?
2021-04-21 • by dreevesBeeminder creates a series of intermediate daily deadlines, working towards some desired long-term goal. As you probably know, it does that with real-money commitment devices. It’s common to come down to the wire on those deadlines every dang day. It’s powerful motivation. But is it… too powerful? If...
May
How To Name Your Goals
2021-05-04 • by dreevesThe other day year doing support, we ran into someone with a goal named “studying_4_out_of_the_8_first_hours_of_the_day”. We were so offended by this that we’re writing a whole blog post about how not-ok that goalname is. Beeminder is highly opinionated software and our opinion is that, in addition...
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Hello Bright Red Line
2021-05-28 • by dreevesI believe this is our first blog post with a theme song. Remember last year when we replaced Beeminder’s Yellow Brick Road with a so-called Yellow Brick Half-Plane? The idea was that instead of a line on your graph to your goal and a band on either side of the line to keep your datapoints on, we instead...
June
Fake Data Is The Devil
2021-06-10 • by dreeves“I eagerly anticipate how you’re going to write a blog post about an infohazard.” — User in the Beeminder community Discord This is going to sound funny but we’ve toyed with having a rule in the Beeminder community against even mentioning the concept of fake data. Especially funny is that instead we’re...
July
Beeminder ♥ CodeCombat
2021-07-26 • by dreevesFun fact that is not remotely a coincidence: The founder and CEO of CodeCombat is a friend and Beeminder superfan and previous guest blogger here on the Beeminder blog! In fact, Nick Winter is the first person to create more than one of the apps/services/devices in our autodata integrations gallery...
Fractional Beeminding
2021-07-02 • by dreevesBethany previously described this basic idea at the end of my old Bucketminding post. Malcolm Ocean of Complice invented it. Here’s what we mean by fractional beeminding: If your metric for your Beeminder graph is a big chunky thing — say, number of blog posts — you can set your graph’s precision (number...
August
Make A Plan To Forget
2021-08-26 • by dreevesThis is going to sound painfully obvious at first — “Don’t assume you’ll remember things! Create reminders!” — but bear with me. There are two useful, nonobvious things here: Sometimes you think of something you need to remember while, say, driving, or talking to someone. You can’t always email yourself...
September
Nicky's Ultimate Support Secret: Dogfood
2021-09-08 • by shanaquiSorry to spoil the suspense with the title there. (Unless you don’t know the term “dogfood” but we’ve blogged about dogfooding so much that probably you do.) We recently took a poll of daily and weekly beemail subscribers and (tied for) most popular was hearing more from Support Czar Nicky on how we’re...
Complice's Gloves Come Off: Announcing Micro Commitment Contracts in Complice
2021-09-28 • by Malcolm OceanWell, Complice lulled us into complacency with all their talk of how complementary Beeminder and Complice are and now here we are. Today they’re launching micro commitment contracts; presumably tomorrow will be macro commitment contracts. And from there, all out war. Ok, no, Malcolm Ocean is back to...
October
Loss Aversion vs The Endowment Effect
2021-10-12 • by dreevesThis is part 1 of a two-part series. First we explain loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. (Spoiler: loss aversion is a generalization of the endowment effect.) Asking Google how those things are different currently yields a fog of opaque logorrhea, so we hope this is enlightening....
Loss Aversion Aversion
2021-10-30 • by dreevesThis is part 2 of our two-part series on loss aversion. Previously we explained loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. Here we (as Beeminder) disavow loss aversion as a tool for behavior change. This isn’t like “Ego Depletion Depletion” or other debunking posts we’ve done. We...
November
Nicky's Secret To Beeminding Studying: It's About Time
2021-11-12 • by shanaquiWe are overdue for a blog post about using Beeminder for school and studying. In the very early days of Beeminder, we had a brilliant guest post from Gandalf Saxe when he was a wee undergrad. Now he’s an engineer at Apple, working on Siri. We’re going to go ahead and take a chunk of credit for that. His...
December
Calendialing
2021-12-02 • by dreevesThis is adapted from a forum post which was adapted from a daily beemail which was adapted from a fiftieth of Brent Yorgey’s brilliant, classic guest post. Do you have a meta goal that makes you schedule breaks every week for what’s coming up on your calendar? You should! Unless you like the stress...
Beeminder ♥ Focusmate
2021-12-27 • by shanaquiAnnouncement! Beeminder and Focusmate are officially integration partners! Beeminder’s Support Czar, Nicky, is here to tell you about it! See also the announcement on Focusmate’s blog as well as the Beeminder Community group on Focusmate. Being a big fan of both Beeminder (obviously!) and Focusmate,...
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
- bee-all (334)
- rationality (187)
- akrasia (176)
- navel-gazing (117)
- case studies (106)
- tips (97)
- best-of (92)
- meta (81)
- new features (76)
- FAQ (75)
- startups (64)
- nerdery (62)
- productivity porn (61)
- science (57)
- integrations (54)
- guest posts (51)
- quantified self (49)
- yellow brick road (48)
- dog food (46)
- self-binding (45)
- ...and 168 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.