It’s one thing to see a gushing testimonial from someone in the honeymoon phase of using Beeminder. Professor Brent Yorgey wrote such a post in 2013 (“Beeminder has changed my life”) in which he detailed the myriad ways he was using Beeminder after discovering it 6 months prior. A whole other level...

One of the main things we’re working on right now is making Beeminder more comprehensible to newbees. We’ve even hired a web designer, Josh Pitzalis, to help us with a big redesign. Writing blog posts explaining (sometimes obscure) things about Beeminder is very much not furthering that objective. But...

It’s our first ever listicle! We tried these out in a daily and weekly beemail and even among those most hardcore users, many didn’t know about many of these features. For the average feature in this list, 30% of daily subscribers and 40% of weekly subscribers weren’t aware of it. So here they are, listed...

When we were smaller we’d take pains to point out that our guest bloggers weren’t just friends of ours. I mean, they usually are friends of ours, but they’ve generally been Beeminder fans who then became friends. (Turns out hardcore beeminding is a strong predictor for us liking you a lot!) The point...

News! We scrapped the overcomplicated concept of Freebees. But don’t panic! By scrapping it we mean that you don’t need to know the term “freebees” or worry about buying them: All goals can now be created with an initial pledge of $0. Can we get a hallelujah? (If you want to cap your pledge at $0, you...

Our previous post, “Ego Depletion Depletion,” generated a lot of discussion and I found I was contradicting myself on the question of what willpower is exactly. First a recap, hopefully in plainer English, about what all the fuss is about. A big finding in psychology is that “willpower is like a muscle”....

This is crossposted on Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done blog. The big news in psychology this week is that Baumeister’s Ego Depletion model is bunk. At least it has failed to replicate. I’m trying not to gloat too much but I’ve been pooh-poohing Ego Depletion for years. My take has been, based on...

Anyone remember our old blog post from 2012 about accidentally running a query that started deleting our whole database? It’s pretty entertaining and helpfully demarcates the parts that non-nerds should skip. If you’re a non-nerd I’d stick with (the non-nerd parts of) that post. The executive summary...

The doctrine of revealed preference — that you can infer someone’s utility function based wholly on what they choose to do — has an illustrious history. John Locke said “the actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.” And Ludwig von Mises said “the scale of values or wants manifests...

Another month (or so), another swarm of Beeminder buzz. Since new year’s resolution season just ended we got included in a lot of lists (resources for succeeding in college, resources for MBA students, apps to stay motivated in 2016, top resolution apps, and more apps to keep your 2016 resolutions). The...