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...

This isn’t exactly new news but a few months ago we posted the video of Beeminder CTO Bethany Soule’s talk at the 2015 Quantified Self conference and we finally got the video for my talk at QS2015 as well so we’re posting that too! I’m including the whole transcript below after the embedded video but...

We’re honored to have Team Habitica here on the Beeminder blog to tell you more about Habitica and about using Habitica and Beeminder together. They’re in some ways very different but also quite compatible! For new year’s eve we wrote a guest post for the Habiticans, introducing them to Beeminderland....

It’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...

My cofounder and I are proud to be featured on the latest Sources & Methods podcast. One of many things we talk about in that episode is Dilbert creator Scott Adams’s claim that goals are for losers. We’ve decided that our response to that needs to be its own blog post. So, for those just tuning in,...