Author: shanaqui

Nicky Walters is Beeminder’s new Support Czar! The Support Czar (a position previously held by such luminaries as Alice Monday and Chelsea Miller) is in charge of answering most of the email you send to support@beeminder.com and coordinating us other workerbees to answer the rest of it. And I guess...

Your beloved Support Czar Nikki (AKA shanaqui) is next in our trapped-in-our-apartments blog series (previously: Mary on creating challenges) and gives some inspiring examples of how they’re beeminding their health, happiness, and higher education (like learning more about COVID-19!). Everything’s...

If you’ve read my introduction post, you might remember the Support Buns. If you haven’t, well, I have three rabbits whose calling in life is to jump onto my keyboard and type sage advice to all users, given even a quarter of a chance. Let me introduce you to them briefly. Their names are Hulk, Biscuit,...

I want to read more books. I already read a lot of books, but I want to read more! It sounds like that should be a simple thing to beemind. Do-more graph, set the rate to however many books I want to read per day/month/year, go! It has turned out that it’s a lot more complicated than that, and because...

Sorry to spoil the suspense with the title there. (Unless you don’t know the term “dogfood” but we’ve blogged about dogfooding so much that probably you do.) We recently took a poll of daily and weekly beemail subscribers and (tied for) most popular was hearing more from Support Czar Nicky on how we’re...

We are overdue for a blog post about using Beeminder for school and studying. In the very early days of Beeminder, we had a brilliant guest post from Gandalf Saxe when he was a wee undergrad. Now he’s an engineer at Apple, working on Siri. We’re going to go ahead and take a chunk of credit for that. His...

Announcement! Beeminder and Focusmate are officially integration partners! Beeminder’s Support Czar, Nicky, is here to tell you about it! See also the announcement on Focusmate’s blog as well as the Beeminder Community group on Focusmate. Being a big fan of both Beeminder (obviously!) and Focusmate,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We’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...

We’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

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...