The second most puzzling thing about Beeminder, for those who don’t use it, is why people don’t lie to avoid paying us. Here’s why! Beeminder is foremost a Quantified Self tool, so it feels really wrong and counterproductive to falsify your data. People take a lot of pride in their graphs since it’s...

We’ve been referring to this internally as Beeminder’s New World Order but in fact it’s a natural consequence of The Third Great Beeminder Epiphany: Ever-increasing awesomeness should always be the path of least resistance. Namely, if you derail on a goal, the goal no longer freezes and waits around...

We’re often praised for our stellar customer support. For the possible benefit of other startups, or anyone else who’s curious, here are our secrets! First, all the usual “customer is always right” stuff is just common sense if you’re genuinely excited about promoting your company and having your users...

This is a guest post by Nick Winter, cofounder of Skritter and CodeCombat and author of The Motivation Hacker. He also works on Quantified Mind. We’ve mentioned Nick Winter and The Motivation Hacker before, in particular because we were so enamored with Nick’s beeminding of romantic gestures to his...

By popular demand, we’ve created a jargon file! We don’t expect this to be the permanent home of this glossary (maybe it belongs with our FAQ) but it’s on the internet now so from now on you can google things like “beeminder flatlining” and hopefully be sent here to learn what we’re

For a long time I found that I was spending too much time on certain unproductive things and struggled with getting myself to do what I actually wanted to do with my time. The big break came one morning when I noticed that there was a very tight correlation between the things I wanted to stop doing and the traditional Christian concept of

It’s been six months since our last crash of ineptitude so it’s time to disabuse you of the notion that we may have gotten our act together since then! The backstory is that we’ve been fortunate enough to have some scaling challenges — mostly due to our ridiculous architecture — so we decided we could...

Rule #1 of Beeminder: Things that make staying on the yellow brick road easier make reaching your overall goal harder. There’s no free lunch. Any leniency today will get paid for down the (wait for it) Road. (Update from the future: Our switch from “Yellow Brick Road” to “Bright Red Line” kind of...

If you asked 100 people to fill in the following blank, Family-Feud-style, what would be the most popular answer? “I’ve always wanted to learn ______” In an informal poll of authors of this blog post, the runaway winner was “a new language.” It’s pretty easy to get through “ciao” and “auf wiedersehen,”...

This is crossposted on AndyBrett.com. The third James Bond movie, Goldfinger, opens with an amphibious mission to destroy an illicit chemical processing facility. After emerging from the water and planting the explosives, Bond strips off his drysuit to reveal a perfectly pressed white tuxedo and calmly...