2022

This is still pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing but it makes me very happy. Not just because I love pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing (we could say Product Vision if we wanted to sound more respectable) but because a couple years ago this sounded preposterously theoretical and fantastical...

UPDATE: See follow-up post announcing No-Excuses Mode. An under-appreciated fact about Beeminder is that it doesn’t force you to do anything. It just puts prices on things and you continue to do whatever you feel like doing, factoring in those prices. Just like you might buy a box of cookies if the...

Previously on the blog, we pitched a particular framing of Beeminder in which paying is not punishment. People seem into it! Which is good because it was setting the stage for this announcement: We’ve killed the old weaselproofing feature and replaced it with something we think is much better: No-Excuses...

Saying “control system” makes this sound fancier than it is. We mean it in the simplest sense, like how your thermostat is a control system. The temperature dropping makes your heater turn on, which makes the temperature rise, which makes your heater turn off. Slightly fancier is if the heater dials...

Last time we talked about the control systems approach to backlogs. Quick recap: make a manual do-more goal where you add a +1 for completing something and keep adjusting the slope of the bright red line such that the backlog keeps steadily shrinking. This works not just for clearing a backlog but for winning the red queen race — dispatching things at roughly the rate they're coming in at and preventing another backlog from accumulating.

This is a sequel to the previous post on Backlog Freshening. It’s been gratifying to hear testimonials from you all about how valuable you’ve found this — for tasks in TaskWarrior, songs in one’s piano repertoire, and of course issues in GitHub. By popular demand, here’s Support Czar Nicky with the...

Want to hear my latest weirdo approach to diet? Probably you do, out of morbid curiosity at least. My goal in concocting this was to implement something a bit like intermittent fasting as a weight management strategy, and also to nudge my eating in a healthier direction. Also I like alliteration. More...

We’re pretty enamored with integrating with learn-to-code tools. Most recently CodeCombat and Project Euler. Before that was Code School, back when that was a thing. And of course we have our GitHub integration, aka Gitminder. Today we’re excited to announce our partnership with freeCodeCamp! As...

Way back in 2014 we blogged about how people who wanted to mind both sides of the red line (called the Yellow Brick Road in those days) were all wrong to want that. We’re still pretty opiniated and still aren’t adding this as a feature, but we thought we’d give a more nuanced answer and some more practical...

Let us start by saving you a lot of time: No. Beeminder does not need to or want to be on the blockchain. Are you still here? We figured we’d write about this now because a new Beeminder competitor called STEPN has been getting lots of buzz lately. The idea with STEPN is that you ante some hundreds...

Working in Beeminder support, it’s hard to avoid noticing that folks sometimes feel a bit embarrassed about their goals. Or at least of the fact that they need to beemind learning how to juggle goslings when everyone else is born knowing how. So let me put it right out there: my most socially embarrassing...

Beeminder user Parrhesia recently told us about a failed attempt to proselytize Beeminder. The person he recommended it to said they knew about Beeminder and viewed it as self-blackmail. That it degrades trust in your future self. They advocated behavior change by bringing your present self and future...

Hej venner! We (Danny and Bee, that is) are on the right (as in “dexter”, not necessarily “correct”) side of the Atlantic Ocean for a bit. Come meet up with us and discuss Beemindery things, like group goals, commitment devices, auctions, and algorithms for participatory democracy? Meet me in Copenhagen?...

Huge thanks to Geoff Hubbard (aka insti) for a delightful meetup in Copenhagen, including board games and nerding out about Beeminder and other topics. We just got home and Beeminder wants us to publish a blog post. Since we’re jetlagged, and since World War II has been on our minds, here’s something...

It’s official! The Beeminder StoryGraph integration! The StoryGraph is basically a better, nerdier version of GoodReads. I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I really (really really really) love books and reading. I’ve talked about it on the blog before, I talk about it in the forum, I have umpteen...

Once upon a time, I had a prescheduled one-day break on all my Beeminder goals. I’d had something on my calendar that day and, thanks to my calendialing meta goal, I’d planned ahead to be free of beemergencies. Or much fewer beemergencies than normal at least. But then it turned out that whatever that...

Today’s post (content warning: weight loss) was inspired by Jacob Falkovich and David B. Clear. First, an update on my previous weight loss post from back in April, Alliterative Alimentation. I’d only been doing that for a couple months then and it’s now been over 6 months and it continues to go swimmingly....

Nathan Arthur (aka narthur, of TaskRatchet fame and who we’re now proud to also have on the Bee Team part-time) had such an amazing response to some Beeminder skepticism in a forum thread about Beeminder vs CBT that we asked him to blog about it. The backstory is that sometimes people accuse Beeminder...

The other day (a Very Other day, because I’ve pulled this from the bottom of Quite A Pile of blog post drafts) we were musing idly amongst ourselves about what the psychological effect would be if Beeminder pledges were amounts like $4.99. The answer is it doesn’t matter because I can’t stand so-called...

Beeminder is not just for the productivity-über-alles types who try polyphasic sleep and whatnot. I mean, it can definitely accommodate that, if that’s what you’re into. Stress can be valuable, we get it. But what if you already have too much stress? Should you avoid Beeminder? We are very biased but...

Beeminder is very good at keeping you on the wagon but it’s still possible to fall off. When that happens, why does it? We’ve asked people that a lot over the years and thought we’d collect the reasons. 1. Bugs or other technical issues with Beeminder From our perspective, there are still plenty of bugs...

It’s official! Beemind anything with an RSS feed! This is a slightly nerd-oriented integration but copying and pasting URLs around is really the only skill you need to set this up. And then once it’s set up, you don’t need to do anything at all ever (except for the thing you’re beeminding of course)....

As you likely know if you’ve ever beeminded your weight, you can add a moving average line on top of your data on your Beeminder graph. You can also add a so-called aura around your datapoints. The idea is to see trends in your data without being distracted by daily fluctuations, particularly when data...

There’s a famous philosophy thought experiment about how the concept of forming an intention might not be as coherent as it seems. Suppose some magic mind-reading aliens (you know the type) offer you a million dollars to drink a nasty but ultimately harmless toxin. Let’s say it makes you puke your guts...

Imagine if signing up for Beeminder meant committing to use Beeminder. As part of signing up, you’d create a meta goal measuring the number of total datapoints added on all your other goals. Now the clock would be ticking to get an object-level goal created and to start adding data to it! That vision...