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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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Honeymoons, True Love, and Yet More Buzz
2016-05-24 • by dreevesIt’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...
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What It Means To Give Beeminder Your Credit Card
2016-05-09 • by dreevesOne 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...
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16 Obscure Beeminder Features
2016-04-26 • by dreevesIt’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...
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Walking On Custard
2016-04-14 • by Neil HughesWhen 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...
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Death To Freebees; Or, Freebees Für Alles
2016-04-02 • by dreevesNews! 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...
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What Is Willpower?
2016-03-21 • by dreevesOur 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”....
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Ego Depletion Depletion
2016-03-09 • by dreevesThis 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...
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MongoMapper to Mongoid; Or, Breaking All The Things
2016-02-25 • by dreevesAnyone 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...
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Revealed Preference
2016-02-15 • by dreevesThe 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...
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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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.