2024

Well, everyone, Happy New Year! 2023 is gone and 2024 is ticking, and it’s the traditional time of year to be RESOLUTE. We’ve written about the science of this stuff before. Katy Milkman calls it the Fresh Start Effect, and I am absolutely not immune. You can find my New Year’s Resolution: Ride...

Do you know about Pigouvian taxes? I’m sad that normal humans don’t know about this. There are so many things that liberals and conservatives argue about that Pigouvian taxes just magically resolve into the best of both worlds! But googling it yields a sea of impenetrable economics jargon, so let me...

Some people don’t need Beeminder, and our hats are off to them. Some people are psychologically incompatible with Beeminder, which is fine, there are other techniques they can use. And then there are the people who create DIY Beeminders. For example, you can share a spreadsheet with a friend and send...

It’s funny how often advice seeking takes the form, “Oh man, I don’t know how to convey XYZ,” and the person you’re asking replies, “How about literally ‘XYZ’?” And you’re like, “Huh. Yeah, wow, I am a genius, thanks!” There’s probably a lesson there for relationships but I mention it because it happened...

We’re excited to be featured in a Humble Bundle! If you’re already familiar with Humble Bundle you might associate them pretty heavily with gaming and therefore be slightly confused right now. So first off, no, we’re not pivoting into games; we’re still leaving that up to Habitica. But when Humble Bundle...

You know what we heard people like? Listicles! Here are the top 5 new Beeminder features and updates we randomly want to tell you about! If your favorite isn’t here, check the full list of 4,812 of them. (You read that right — Beeminder’s over-a-decade-long changelog has close to 5,000 entries and...

WakaTime bills itself as “dashboards for developers”. It tracks various productivity metrics as you code, which it tracks via a plugin for your editor of choice. Yes but I use QuackPad Pro++: The Duck-Typed Editor You’re in luck! Well not you, weirdo. But if your editor of choice actually exists then...

Last month we announced a handful of new features and we’d like to start by adding one more to the list. Namely, if you fail to enter data on a do-less goal and Beeminder enters a pessimistic presumptive report (PPR) for you, that goal will sort to the top of your dashboard until you add the missing...

First, we’d like to present a foresight award to Beeminder (and Manifold) user ianminds, who predicted we’d do this almost a year ago. Cutting to the chase, here’s how things work now. As ever, when creating a goal, you can choose to have it start at $0 or to put $5 at stake from the get-go. The interface...

A new feature of Beeminder is that when you create a goal you can choose to start in Feet-Wetting Mode, meaning the goal initially has no money at risk but after a week it bumps itself to the standard initial stakes of $5 (and exponentially up from there). And we said last time that we weren’t tampering...

The Beeminder YNAB integration is officially launched! YNAB is, certainly for the kind of people who read this blog, the best tool for budgeting. Beeminder is the best tool for getting you to use your budget. It’s a match made in money heaven. (YNAB is short for You Need A Budget and is pronounced “why-nab”.)...

Group goals are alive! Multiple people can all commit to a single goal! Find it in the Settings tab below your graph: Backing up, this has been in private beta for over a year. Then this past weekend I was at Manifest (which was pretty amazing, btw, highly recommended, and tons of Beeminder fans) where...

I’ve kept a Beeminder journal in the forum for over five years now. I don’t remember who initially inspired me to do it, but it’s a practice I’ve faithfully kept up every week since February 2019. You can check out all my Beeminder journals still — they’ve been separated into threads by year, of late,...

We have two excuses to blog about this. First, we’re using our new group goals feature to experiment with something we’re calling Book Brigades. To quote myself from the forum post about it: A book brigade is a very small group of very like-minded

Grayson Bray Morris has been a bright spot in the Beeminder community almost since the beginning. She’s currently taking a break from the internet, but before she peaced out she gave us permission to canonize this classic 2015 (!) post from her old blog, by publishing it here on Beeminder’s blog. The...

This blog post started its life during the pandemic, as part of a series in the daily beemail called Madhack Mondays. Here’s a highly beemindable workout idea for the dead of winter if you have stairs in your house. Put 100 marbles or legos or whatever in a bowl at the bottom of your stairs. Then...

In a recent poll of most annoying things about Beeminder graphs there was a surprise winner. People really want to specify the plot range of their graphs using relative dates. Like always showing just the most recent month of data on the graph. Well, your wish is (sometimes, when we feel like it) our...

Once again, we’re releasing an integration I’m enthusiastic about right around my birthday, and this time it wasn’t even planned that way! So what is Oura? They make wearable health trackers in the form of rings, which are super wearable and maybe even a little bit stylish. (Uh, don’t take any style...

Being a smidge embarrassed by the term “user-squeaming”, we sat on this draft for years. But when we used it again this morning we decided the concept handle had officially stuck and figured it was time to give it the imprimatur of a blog post. User-squeaming means being excessively squeamish about what...

Beeminder as the nuclear option means beeminding something as an insurance policy. You have a nice graph of your progress but you maintain enough safety buffer that you’re not in danger of derailing and getting stung (being charged money for going off track on your goal, for those just tuning in). In...

Question from the internet: What do we mean by calling Beeminder hyperrational goal tracking? Before I give my answer, here’s a recent example from the inventor of Ruby on Rails using “hyperrational” in the context of sociopathic companies: [Fines on tech companies] put a price on criminal behavior,...

Remember Fractional Beeminding? We’ve been putting it to great use for such goals as Our meta goal to keep churning out autodata integrations Project Euler, and Workerbee-Visible Improvements. A key clarification before reviewing how it works: fractional beeminding doesn’t mean beeminding something with...

Users have been lobbying for this feature for years. Finally we threw in the towel and implemented it. Hitting the Uncle Button (crying uncle) means accepting a derailment before the clock runs out. This is actually kind of critical to let users do and it’s silly it took us so long. I mean, for starters,...

Welcome one and all to this announcement of our latest Beeminder integration: Curlminder. This one’s for the nerds. The idea is that you give us a URL and a regular expression, and we fetch the contents of the webpage, match it on the regex, and pull out a number. In theory you can use this to beemind...