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Beeminder Open to the Public
2011-10-13 • by bsouleBeeminder is now officially launched and open to the public. Invite all your loser friends who need a kick in the pants! If you’re just tuning in, here’s the three-sentence version of what Beeminder is: Beeminder is like StickK.com (cash commitment contracts to force yourself to lose weight, not procrastinate,...
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Dog Food Renewed
2011-11-14 • by bsoule[UPDATE: The new place for calling the Beeminder founders out when they derail on their meta goals is in the Beeminder forum.] Half a year ago, with Beeminder in its infancy, we committed to averaging one User-Visible Improvement (UVI) to Beeminder every day for at least the next six months. That contract...
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Beeminder Hits the Oregon Trail
2012-03-06 • by bsouleBeeminder headquarters is now officially in Portland, Oregon! We’re proud and excited to announce that we’ve been accepted into the Portland Seed Fund’s newest class of startups. We’re in the esteemed company of
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Portland Seed Fund Demo Day
2012-06-11 • by bsouleFour score and seventeen days ago, we announced our acceptance into the Portland Seed Fund. Today we are proud to announce that we have graduated. To mark the occasion, here for posterity is our demo pitch, verbatim! Jim Huston and Angela Jackson were phenomenal in putting together an amazing demo day,...
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Case Study: Triathlon Training
2012-07-10 • by bsouleThe Beeminder founders completed the NYC Triathlon yesterday. I was nearly twice as fast as Danny in the swim — 1.5 km down the Hudson — but he took those 15 minutes back out of me on the 40 km bike course. Danny was hilariously lopsided. There were only a few people in his division slower than him in...
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Beeminder: We Use That; or, WeUseThat: Beeminder
2012-08-09 • by bsouleWe were interviewed by WeUseThat today. Here’s what we said! We are Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule, co-founders of Beeminder. We make people more awesome via the threat of taking their money. Specifically, we plot
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Beeminding Outside the Box
2013-03-16 • by bsouleLet’s talk about some novel ways to use Beeminder! Whenever we hear about one of these I want to slap up a big smiling picture of the user in our “new favorite Beeminder” frame. First though, this entire post is a thinly veiled excuse to point out that OHMYGODGUYS Fog Creek likes us, they really really...
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Beeminder Buzz: Front Page of the Wall Street Journal
2013-04-24 • by bsouleExciting news about Beeminder today: we’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal! It’s an interesting little write-up about the Quantified Self movement as “digital mother” — capturing Beeminder’s relationship to Quantified Self beautifully — and features one of our favorite beeminders (Okay,...
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Catch-up Unmustered; or, Easier is Harder
2013-06-14 • by bsouleRule #1 of Beeminder: Things that make staying on the yellow brick road easier make reaching your overall goal harder. There’s no free lunch. Any leniency today will get paid for down the (wait for it) Road. (Update from the future: Our switch from “Yellow Brick Road” to “Bright Red Line” kind of...
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Beeminder ♥ RunKeeper
2013-09-03 • by bsouleRunKeeper! Now with more running! and cycling! and walking! Beemind all the RunKeeper things! Get it while it is hot! Actually, we’ve had an integration with RunKeeper for over a year now — it was the third autodata source to land on our front page. We’re up to eight now. TagTime was the zeroth , Withings...
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Scheduled Breaks!
2013-09-13 • by bsouleWe have once again knocked off what was the highest voted item from our feedback forum: you can now schedule flat spots in your yellow brick road. In fact, you can schedule any change in your road, between arbitrary dates, as long as it starts outside the akrasia horizon. Even more flexible self-control!...
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Beeminder Turns Two!
2013-10-13 • by bsouleYo-yo-yo! We’re two! So perhaps we should say yo-yo? Remember two years ago when we launched? You almost surely don't! (If you do, let us know because we have
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Be Nice To Yourself
2014-01-13 • by bsouleI originally wrote this as a beemail and everyone seemed to love it, so I’ve blogged it for the rest of the world to see. I do realize how vaguely self-serving this advice is. And perhaps hard to generalize to people who are not founders of Beeminder. But it works for me! With the new year, and bunch...
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Our esteemed cofounder, Bethany Soule, gave a talk at the 2013 Global Quantified Self conference in San Francisco. We just got the video of it and wanted to share it with you, along with a transcript and the slides. See also our previous Quantified Self interview from 2011 and our previous Quantified...
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Fat Cyclist Weight Loss Competition with Beeminder
2014-03-05 • by bsouleWe’re big fans of the Fat Cyclist and, if you’ve been following along closely, you might recognize him from the aftermath of our 1000th UVI, when Henrik Wist won our $1000 and then paid it all to charity. So we were really excited when he asked us to help him run a weightloss competition with teeth....
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Eat Your Vegetables
2014-03-15 • by bsouleWith the Fat Cyclist weight loss competition underway, we're thinking about weight loss a lot. We've got some useful posts planned. In the meantime, we have Bethany hating on
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Bee's Guide To Beeminding Weight Loss
2014-03-25 • by bsouleI’ve been thinking about beeminding weight loss a lot lately and the thing is, beeminding weight loss sucks! But not any more than losing weight in general sucks. Even for people who really like the whole commitment device craziness, Beeminder sometimes feels aversive. I believe that happens when you...
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Bethany's Maniac Week
2014-06-07 • by bsouleLast week Danny took our children to Canada while I attempted a Nick Winter style maniac week. It was delightful, though less epic than its namesake. Nonetheless it was a massively productive work week for me compared to my average. Here’s a time-lapse video of me working. So fascinating! Look how...
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Beeminder Turns Three!
2014-10-28 • by bsouleYo Yo Yo and a buckle of gold, Beeminder just turned three years old! This time last year we were sitting in a hotel in San Francisco during the Quantified Self global conference, excited about our year of autodata integrations, exponential revenue growth, and being featured in the Wall Street Journal....
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Beeminder ♥ Sleep as Android
2014-12-31 • by bsouleAnother integration! And one that I personally use daily (well, nightly). Sleep as Android is a popular sleep tracking app that’s delightfully nerdy and quantified-self focused. (Much like Beeminder!) As a welcome to Sleep as Android users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. For Beeminder...
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If you’re reading the Beeminder blog there’s a 95% chance you know about the Pomodoro Technique. The idea is to decide a task, do focused work on it for 25 minutes, and then get up and take a 5-minute break. Rinse and repeat. Apparently it was invented in the 1980s but Danny independently invented...
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Beeminder ♥ Garmin
2015-03-10 • by bsouleAnother official integration! We’re so excited to be integrating with Garmin, one of the biggest and oldest names in wearable computey things! As a welcome to Garmin users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. If you’re just eager to get your beloved Garmin device connected to Beeminder,...
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GmailZero: Not Just For Your Inbox Anymore
2015-04-29 • by bsouleUPDATE 2019: Changes to GmailZero! Google recently stopped supporting their very old OAuth1 authentication strategy, which is what we’d been using to access all y’all’s Gmail accounts. We’ve talked about our Gmail integration, GmailZero before. (Actually we talk about email a lot, including recently...
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If This MIND That: Beeminder ♥ IFTTT
2015-05-08 • by bsouleAnnouncement! There is now an official Beeminder Channel on IFTTT! This is a big day for us. Our users have been begging for this for a very long time, and we in turn have been bugging IFTTT. In fact, Danny even wrote this Ode to IFTTT two years ago and included it in our application to be a channel...
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Misfit and Bee-fit: Beeminder ♥ Misfit
2015-05-29 • by bsouleAnother official integration: Misfit! Look at us, all featured in their gallery and everything! This is an especially exciting integration for us personally -- our esteemed CEO has been wearing his Misfit Shine literally 24/7 for a year and a half now. As a welcome to Misfit users new to Beeminder, we'll start with a recap of what Beeminder is all about. For the full story, start at the very beginning. If you're just eager
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Beeminder ♥ Skritter
2015-06-09 • by bsouleAnother integration, hot off the presses: Skritter! There is a funny back story with this one. Last winter our charmingly optimistic CEO, imagining we could have this integration done “like in a month”, got slightly telephone-gamed into committing to launch it in January. When we noticed what we’d gotten ourselves into we offered a
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Bee on Extreme Productivity (QS 2015)
2015-09-08 • by bsouleOnce again our esteemed cofounder, Bethany Soule, aka the Bee in Beeminder, gave a talk at the Global Quantified Self conference in San Francisco. But you don’t have to take our word for it. We now have video proof. We’re also sharing the transcript and slides, in case anyone cares that much. It’s based...
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Revamped Reminders
2015-10-01 • by bsouleIf your name is “Beeminder” then reminders really need to be part of your core competency. Alerts and nudges about your goal are fundamental to our contract with you, the user, to do our very best to help you meet the goals you’ve set, and only take your money as a last resort. So much so that if...
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Hard-Committing To Do Something "Soon"
2015-10-22 • by bsouleDeadlines are really important. Without them things don’t ever get shipped. But they’re also — if you can hard-commit to them, which you have to or else they’re pointless — kind of awful and arbitrary and stressful. Epiphany: Beeminder gives a way to get the key advantage of a deadline without the stress...
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Fourth Anniversary of Beeminder
2015-10-29 • by bsouleBeeminder is four years old! We’d liiike to get this blog post started by telling you what we’ve been working on this last year (revamped reminders! so many new integrations! new versions of smartphone apps! meetups and Quantified Self!), buuut you’re probably more interested in the question of whether...
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Buzzy Buzz Buzz: Discover Magazine Edition
2015-12-22 • by bsouleIt’s our 7th press roundup! This time we wanted an excuse to show off our coverage in last month’s issue of Discover Magazine. The author (who also covered us in The Washington Post earlier this year) does a good job of making accessible the research on and the underlying causes of akrasia, and defending...
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New Premium Feature: Weekends Off
2016-05-28 • by bsouleBeeple of the world want to take their weekends off, and for a long time the best answer we’ve had is “well, if you just make sure to get green by Friday night, then you can safely take Saturday and Sunday off”, which is highly unsatisfying to the truly akratic. Because if I had the discipline to “just...
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Newbee Corner: What Happens When I 'Derail'?
2016-09-10 • by bsouleFirst off, what do we mean by derailing? We mean you pass your deadline — midnight by default — with today’s datapoint in the red. Here’s an example of a goal right at the end of the day. The countdown has run out, and I still haven’t done my flossing: (Hover or long-press the graphs for more commentary.)...
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New Official URLminder Integration
2016-11-02 • by bsouleToday marks the beginning of the 17th annual NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated that’s NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. For 17 years folks have been joining together on the internet over the month of November to pen their own 50,000 word novels. This year they expect half a million participants. That’s a lot...
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Fifth Anniversary of Beeminder
2016-11-18 • by bsouleIt’s hard to believe it’s been 5 whole years since we were slamming red bull on dirty couches in a college-town garage, with our friends Sergei and Mark, moving fast and breaking things on our scrappy little startup, dreaming big about how we were going to change the world(wide web) with … Oh wait. I...
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In case you’re not a programmer and the title didn’t already scare you off, we’ll start by explaining why this matters for end users. Until now, anyone who wrote a 3rd-party autodata integration — automatically sending data to Beeminder — had to implement their own strategy for how often to check for...
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The Bee Team Goes To Amsterdam
2017-06-10 • by bsouleHallo onze vrienden! The Beeminder founders and Lillian and the founders’ kids, and other Beeminder friends from Portland will all be converging on Amsterdam next week, from June 15 through June 21st, for Quantified Self 2017. Beeminder, as usual, is a minor sponsor. Meet up with us We’re co-hosting...
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Beeminder Is Sixy!
2017-10-19 • by bsouleThe last year has flown by like a swarm of bees. We do one of these blog posts every year and they’re kind of a mix between a family Christmas letter and a state of the union address. We’ll spend a while congratulating ourselves on the charming new babies we made this last year, we’ll show you some...
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Feature Announcement: General Mercy
2018-08-22 • by bsouleIn the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth and derailing on a Beeminder goal meant getting a week of respite. That is still in fact the default. After derailing you get a week of safety buffer. It gives you time to re-evaluate how the goal is working, and time to adjust your Yellow Brick...
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In which we explain how a big feature of early Beeminder, auto-widening yellow brick roads, was wrong-headed and what we’re doing now instead. This is Part 1 with Just The Facts and the probably-very-safe-assumption that you don’t care about the convoluted history and just want to know how your graphs...
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Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses "Ratcheting Breaks Breaks" Bug
2020-10-14 • by bsouleAre you somehow stumbling upon this blog post without knowing anything about Beeminder? Hoo-boy are you in the wrong place. But here’s a frenzied attempt to catch you up in time: Beeminder graphs your progress toward goals by drawing a bright line, called the Yellow Brick Road, that you commit to having...
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Beeminder Goes To Copenhagen
2022-07-07 • by bsouleHej 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?...
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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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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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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
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Beeminder Featured on Humble Bundle!
2024-02-28 • by bsouleWe’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...
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Death To Zero Dollar Goals, Birth To Feet-Wetting Mode
2024-05-01 • by bsouleFirst, 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...
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Beeminder ♥ YNAB: Announcing the YNAB Autodata Integration
2024-05-27 • by bsouleThe 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”.)...
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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- rationality (205)
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- tips (98)
- best-of (92)
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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)
- dog food (46)
- ...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.