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Here’s an obvious principle of personal finance: If you can spend $100 now to prevent spending $200 next year, definitely do that. But in startup finance, it can totally make sense to decide to pay the $200 next year. Because your business is growing exponentially and $200 next year may easily be less...
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Fancy 404s For Fellow URL Fetishists
2023-11-15 • by dreevesToday I would like to pick a fight with WordPress. I’m still a huge fan of the company (Automattic). They’ve done a lot for us over the years and I have good friends who work there. But blog posts work better as beefs so forget all that. Let’s talk about what a wrongy-wrongpants WordPress is with their...
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The Five Beeminder Goals I Wish I'd Had In College
2023-10-18 • by shanaquiWe’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
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Beeminder ♥ Readwise Reader
2023-09-27 • by Adam WolfReadwise Reader is a powerful tool for “power readers”. It’s like a supercharged read-it-later app, with first-class support for notes and highlights and tags. Now, you can keep track of your Readwise Reader items using Beeminder. You save things like web pages, PDFs, YouTube videos, Twitter threads, or aim it at an RSS feed or an
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The Theory And Practice Of Predicting One's Own Behavior: Prediction Markets as Commitment Devices
2023-09-20 • by dreevesA fun fact about predicting your own behavior, particularly publicly, is that the act of predicting it changes the prediction. “I’m 75% likely to maintain my Duolingo streak all year, but now that I’ve said so I’m actually 90% likely, but now that I’ve said that, …” Or what happens when the probability starts very low but you add a wager? It’s like this self-describing xkcd
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Ex WordPress Ad Astro Per Narthurius
2023-09-06 • by Nathan ArthurThis is another X-Treme Nerd Interlude post. Last time we announced, mercifully briefly, our shiny new blog redesign and if you’re a normal human you should read that, nod thoughtfully, say “looks lovely”, and be on your merry way. The rest of you can frolic deep in the weeds here with
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Ditching WordPress and a Shiny Blog Redesign
2023-08-23 • by dreevesThis is our first official post on our shiny new WordPress-free blog. Confetti-emoji! For well over a decade the Beeminder blog was on WordPress, hosted by WP Engine. That was...
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What Should Elite Athletes Beemind?
2023-08-09 • by dreevesHere are two facts about elite athletes that sound contradictory at first blush but aren't: 1. Elite athletes, being more efficient at propelling themselves, burn fewer calories per mile than muggles. 2. Elite athletes, being better at turning calories into motion, burn more calories per hour than muggles. It all makes
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The Anti-Ontology Principle
2023-07-27 • by dreevesThere are a lot of things in the category of “nerd tendencies I’ve had to unlearn”. I often turn them into capital-P Principles as a way to drill them into my head. Eventually I intend to collect them all into a meta post but here are a few random examples in the meantime: the Anti-Magic Principle, the Anti-Settings Principle, the Shirk-n-Turk Principle, and the Anti-Robustness
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.