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I’ve been railing against automated copyright dates for years but just learned Serine Molecule scooped me in Copyright Notices Are Not Clocks: You should update the copyright year whenever you make nontrivial, copyrightable changes to your work. Not every year, and definitely not automatically. If you...
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Beeminder Making You Do Self-Indulgent Things
2023-01-27 • by dreevesThis isn’t a new idea but I keep noticing how great it is to have Beeminder make you do something fun. Ahh, Beeminder… hearteyes-emoji! Here’s how Bee put it in a 2013 blog post about beeminding outside the box: I especially love beeminding hobbies because it is both an enforcement and an excuse....
February
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X-Treme Nerd Interlude: How To Upgrade Your Stripe Checkout Integration In Just Four Easy Years!
2023-02-10 • by bsouleCirca 2019 or so Stripe released a big update to their Checkout product, the previous iteration of which we’ve been using to collect your payment info on Beeminder for over 11 years now. This is the tale of how it took us four years to migrate to that new version. Alright, it did not literally take four...
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Beeminder's Plans To Take Over The World
2023-02-24 • by dreeves“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.” — Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality I came across this draft from 2010 or 2011, before we’d publicly launched and with just a smattering of beta users we’d recruited one by one. It had a note-to-self: “rewrite...
March
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Announcement: Signing Up For Beeminder Requires Hard-Committing To Use Beeminder
2023-03-10 • by bsouleThat’s right my little bees: we put a commitment device in our commitment device to bring out the commitment flavor of the commitment device. Does everyone know the soup nazi from Seinfeld? Basically it’s an interesting episode in Seinfeldnomics (and boy howdy do we like economics) where there’s a soup...
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Derailing It Is Nailing It
2023-03-24 • by shanaquiWe’ve talked before about how paying is not punishment because derailing is not failing, but fellow workerbee Clive pointed out that we could flip that negative formulation around. Derailing isn’t just not failing. It’s actively succeeding. Or, since obviously it still needs to rhyme, “Derailing It...
April
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Feature Announcement: Parceling Out Goals Sting-ily
2023-04-13 • by dreevesYou know how it used to be that you only got three goals on Beeminder’s free plan? Well stop the presses! Now you get three goals on Beeminder’s free plan, and you earn extra goals by derailing existing goals. Does that still sound kind of restrictive? Dare I say… stingy? (The bee puns, in addition to...
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Beeminder ♥ Lichess
2023-04-27 • by dreevesThe Beeminder Lichess integration is officially launched! Lichess is basically the cool kids version of Chess.com. As yet more evidence of what huge nerds Beeminder users are, a chess playing website got voted up towards the top of our list of candidate autodata integrations. And not just voted up....
May
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Smithing Your Habits
2023-05-11 • by Melissa SmithThis is a guest post by Melissa Smith of Datasmithing! If you like Beeminder and other Beeminder-adjacent things like BaaS or Complice, but want more troubleshooting and guidance, you might like Datasmithing. (You might also like her blog which includes such gems as the graph paper
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Beeminder ♥ trydeepwork.com
2023-05-25 • by bsouleWe’re excited to announce our official integration with trydeepwork.com! See also the announcement on the trydeepwork blog which is also a pretty brilliant introduction to Beeminder’s philosophy. Cal Newport’s classic book Deep Work is quite popular with Beeminder users [1], so we predict a lot of you will
June
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Common Reactions To Beeminder
2023-06-08 • by dreevesDid you just hear about Beeminder (“get charged money if you go off track on your goals, what?”) and have one of the Four Canonical Dismissive Reactions, prompting the person you heard about Beeminder from to point you to this post? Great! Pick your reaction and let’s dive in. 1. “That’s (evil) genius, I would
July
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Wolf vs Harford on The Power of No vs Yes
2023-07-12 • by dreevesHere are two handy wisdom nuggets: (1) Adam Wolf’s trick of committing now to start doing something in 30 days (i.e., create a goal with a 30-day initial buffer) to overcome the mental friction of getting yourself on the hook. (2) Tim Harford’s heuristic of only
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The Anti-Ontology Principle
2023-07-27 • by dreevesThere are a lot of things in the category of “nerd tendencies I’ve had to unlearn”. I often turn them into capital-P Principles as a way to drill them into my head. Eventually I intend to collect them all into a meta post but here are a few random examples in the meantime: the Anti-Magic Principle, the Anti-Settings Principle, the Shirk-n-Turk Principle, and the Anti-Robustness
August
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What Should Elite Athletes Beemind?
2023-08-09 • by dreevesHere are two facts about elite athletes that sound contradictory at first blush but aren't: 1. Elite athletes, being more efficient at propelling themselves, burn fewer calories per mile than muggles. 2. Elite athletes, being better at turning calories into motion, burn more calories per hour than muggles. It all makes
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Ditching WordPress and a Shiny Blog Redesign
2023-08-23 • by dreevesThis is our first official post on our shiny new WordPress-free blog. Confetti-emoji! For well over a decade the Beeminder blog was on WordPress, hosted by WP Engine. That was...
September
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Ex WordPress Ad Astro Per Narthurius
2023-09-06 • by Nathan ArthurThis is another X-Treme Nerd Interlude post. Last time we announced, mercifully briefly, our shiny new blog redesign and if you’re a normal human you should read that, nod thoughtfully, say “looks lovely”, and be on your merry way. The rest of you can frolic deep in the weeds here with
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The Theory And Practice Of Predicting One's Own Behavior: Prediction Markets as Commitment Devices
2023-09-20 • by dreevesA fun fact about predicting your own behavior, particularly publicly, is that the act of predicting it changes the prediction. “I’m 75% likely to maintain my Duolingo streak all year, but now that I’ve said so I’m actually 90% likely, but now that I’ve said that, …” Or what happens when the probability starts very low but you add a wager? It’s like this self-describing xkcd
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Beeminder ♥ Readwise Reader
2023-09-27 • by Adam WolfReadwise Reader is a powerful tool for “power readers”. It’s like a supercharged read-it-later app, with first-class support for notes and highlights and tags. Now, you can keep track of your Readwise Reader items using Beeminder. You save things like web pages, PDFs, YouTube videos, Twitter threads, or aim it at an RSS feed or an
October
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The Five Beeminder Goals I Wish I'd Had In College
2023-10-18 • by shanaquiWe’re slightly behind for the traditional September start date, but it’s not too late! The semester at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine started on 2nd October, and (thanks to Beeminder!) I got started back on my studies toward my distance learning MSc already. I don’t know about any of you, but whenever the new school year starts it feels like
November
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Fancy 404s For Fellow URL Fetishists
2023-11-15 • by dreevesToday I would like to pick a fight with WordPress. I’m still a huge fan of the company (Automattic). They’ve done a lot for us over the years and I have good friends who work there. But blog posts work better as beefs so forget all that. Let’s talk about what a wrongy-wrongpants WordPress is with their...
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Here’s an obvious principle of personal finance: If you can spend $100 now to prevent spending $200 next year, definitely do that. But in startup finance, it can totally make sense to decide to pay the $200 next year. Because your business is growing exponentially and $200 next year may easily be less...
December
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Rocks and Pebbles
2023-12-13 • by dreevesThanks to Stephen Covey (of “7 habits” fame) for popularizing if not inventing this metaphor / concept handle, and to David Ernst (of Secure Internet Voting fame) for pointing that out. Also to Scott Alexander for the concept handle concept handle. If you’re failing to carve out time for something...
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Introducing Honeygrams (and Honey Money)
2023-12-20 • by dreevesHappy Solstice! We have a meta-gift for you: Honeygrams! Meta-gift? Yes, you can now gift your honey money (FKA premium credit), even to people who don’t yet have a Beeminder account (give the gift of Beeminder?). It looks like this: If you put an email address in the “To” field instead of a Beeminder...
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
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- tips (98)
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- new features (82)
- FAQ (76)
- startups (70)
- nerdery (64)
- productivity porn (63)
- integrations (58)
- science (57)
- guest posts (51)
- quantified self (49)
- yellow brick road (48)
- PSA (47)
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- ...and 180 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.