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GymPact vs Beeminder
2012-08-01 • by dreeves[UPDATE: GymPact (later Pact App) sadly shut down in 2017.] If we were nervous about our competitors — and we’re not — we might be most nervous about GymPact. GymPact is currently an iPhone app (UPDATE: Android as well now) that pays you money for going to the gym, funded by the slackers who failed to...
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Synonyms for Self-Binding
2012-07-21 • by dreevesWe’ve been collecting a list of synonyms for the crazy lifehack that sites like Beeminder facilitate. In addition to us being shameless SEO-whores, it seems like this list could be genuinely useful for humans, especially the kind of humans who read the Beeminder Blog. Here’s how a co-founder of StickK...
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Case Study: Triathlon Training
2012-07-10 • by bsouleThe Beeminder founders completed the NYC Triathlon yesterday. I was nearly twice as fast as Danny in the swim — 1.5 km down the Hudson — but he took those 15 minutes back out of me on the 40 km bike course. Danny was hilariously lopsided. There were only a few people in his division slower than him in...
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Press Roundup: What's the Buzz?
2012-06-30 • by dreevesIn the beginning of the year we covered our coverage on Quantified Self and Mark Forster’s Getting Things Done blog. There’s been a lot more since then. Here are the highlights
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Hammers and Chisels
2012-06-20 • by dreevesWe have a new competitor about to launch: Lift! Their (meta) goal is the same as ours. They want to “eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals”. Our approaches, however, are quite opposite. Or at least they have opposite sign. Lift emphasizes in their pre-announcement blog post today that they...
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Portland Seed Fund Demo Day
2012-06-11 • by bsouleFour score and seventeen days ago, we announced our acceptance into the Portland Seed Fund. Today we are proud to announce that we have graduated. To mark the occasion, here for posterity is our demo pitch, verbatim! Jim Huston and Angela Jackson were phenomenal in putting together an amazing demo day,...
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Birds and the Bees: Chirpify and Beeminder Shack Up
2012-06-03 • by dreevesUPDATE 2014: Sadly (for us), Chirpify pivoted away from Twitter-based payments so this post is now obsolete. We will add Paypal support at some point for people who need that payment option (keep bugging us if that’s you!) and we’ve now added direct Twitter integration. We’re often advised that Beeminder...
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Getting Back On The Wagon
2012-05-25 • by Philip HellyerThis is a guest post by Philip Hellyer who can walk on water and outrun bullets, with the help of Beeminder. He eloquently describes what we think is currently the single biggest pain point (though there are many) with Beeminder right now — how to keep from procrastinating indefinitely on getting back...
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Beeminder: Round Tuit Dispenser
2012-05-17 • by dreevesIf it's important to you to [exercise / practice an instrument / eat better / you name it] but you find that you never get around to it (a 'round tuit', get it?), well, we have an app for that. Think of Beeminder as your Round Tuit dispenser.
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Innocentive $10k Challenge: Increasing People's Ability to Start and Stay on Task
2012-05-03 • by dreevesI recently won $1000 (sharing a $10k prize) for the following essay on how to solve what people in healthcare call the adherence problem, which costs the healthcare system "billions of dollars in unnecessary hospitalizations and nursing home and rehab costs". My prize-winning essay in its entirety follows. (I gave the actual money to
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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- rationality (203)
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- navel-gazing (121)
- case studies (109)
- tips (98)
- best-of (92)
- meta (84)
- new features (82)
- FAQ (76)
- startups (69)
- nerdery (64)
- productivity porn (63)
- integrations (58)
- science (57)
- guest posts (51)
- quantified self (49)
- yellow brick road (48)
- PSA (47)
- dog food (46)
- ...and 180 more tags
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.