“I did all the right things and it didn’t work”
The kind of people who say that, Beeminder is not for them. Beeminder is for goals you know you can achieve, and definitely want to achieve, yet historically have failed at. Some people don’t relate to the psychology there. Apparently you didn’t want it as bad as you thought, they point out, or you would’ve actually done it. A reasonable objection! If you think that way, Beeminder isn’t really for you either.
Beeminder is for procrastinators and addicts and flakes. In a word, akratics. An akratic is someone who suffers from akrasia, which we wrote about in the inaugural post of this blog. (There’s also a definition in the sidebar.)
Akratics Anonymous
For such people (ourselves emphatically included), we’ve started a rather exclusive mailing list called Akratics Anonymous. We discuss crazy commitment devices we use on ourselves, behavioral economics and the theory of akrasia, as well as akrasia-related features of Beeminder that are in development. If you’re the type who uses commitment devices on yourself (not counting the standard ones) send a note to dreeves@beeminder.com and we’ll add you to the list.
Update (July 2011)
The Akratics Anonymous list is now non-exclusive. In fact, you can join it right here:
| Subscribe to Akratics Anonymous |
Another Update (2014)
We’re now migrating Akratics Anonymous to the Beeminder forum.
Update from the far future (2024)
The Beeminder forum continues to thrive. For something exclusive, there’s now the Beeminder Discord. But we obviously can’t tell you here how to get in on that. Also we decided the link (for the text “people who say that”) in the first sentence of this post to an ancient weight loss question on Yahoo Answers seemed kind of mocking. Plus the answers were low quality. Embarrassment all around. So that link is removed above, but since we hate revisionist-history edits, you can still see it down here, if you must.