SAD TROMBONE UPDATE 2022: The Misfit service is now defunct. This blog post is of historical interest only.
Another 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 to get your beloved Misfit connected to Beeminder, you can skip all this and start using Beeminder and Misfit together!
Beeminder Reprise
What’s special about Beeminder is that we combine Quantified Self — i.e., self-tracking, data collection, and visualization — with commitment contracts. So in addition to reminders to move, we add graphs of your cumulative progress and a penalty if you don’t keep up. You can adjust how hard your goals are along the way, but if you ever fall behind we charge you. Long-time Beeminder users find that those stings are well worth it for all the awesomeness we induce the rest of the time. But if the thought of having to pay money is too scary, that’s perfect: you’ll be very motivated to get out and get moving.
Misfit
If you’re into Quantified Self but don’t identify as a nerd, you’re probably super excited by Misfit. They make what is probably the only activity and sleep tracker that anyone’s ever refered to as “stylish” or “elegant”. I admit to thinking that is a pretty big deal. We’re impressed with the clever design that allows you to swap the tracker into different housings, so you can clip it to your bra, wear it as a modern-looking watch, pop it into a necklace pendant that makes it look like a flower, or even wear it on a piece of scrap yarn around your neck! (That’s how our CEO wears his.) It is small and attractive, and thanks to the design you can wear it to any event.
Even better than looking pretty, it’s also waterproof and uses a watch battery, with an expected life of about 6 months. You never have to charge it. In fact you could literally never take this off (and we don’t). And sleep is auto-detected. Talk about low friction.
Getting Started
Here’s how it works using your Misfit with Beeminder.
It’s really pretty easy. Once you authorize us to read your data from Misfit, Beeminder will automatically pull in all of your new Misfit data. All you have to do is keep syncing your Misfit per usual — there are no hoops Beeminder makes you jump through other than perhaps literally, if that’s your method of choice for upping your step count. We’ll send you reminders if you’re approaching the edge of your road, meaning if you haven’t been doing enough you’ll get notified. Misfit does a nice job of telling you how you’ve done today compared to yesterday, and our graphs show you the bigger picture of how you’ve done overall. Maybe yesterday you hardly got out of your chair, but that’s just one day! Beeminder will make sure that you stick to the goal you set in the long run. And if you do fall behind, we’ll charge you money (or ask you to add a credit card so that we can charge you next time).
