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Trackers vs Lifehackers
2011-12-31 • by dreevesBeeminder makes pretty graphs of your progress. But if that’s your only reason to use Beeminder you might find it frustrating when your graph freezes because you deviated a bit from your Yellow Brick Road. More than the tracking — though that’s fundamental to it as well — we view Beeminder’s core feature...
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Quantified Self
2011-12-16 • by dreevesThis is crossposted from the Quantified Self blog. Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves have presented at New York City QS meetups (here and here) on a couple ideas that came together and turned into Beeminder, which they co-founded in 2010. Through much personal experimentation they’ve developed unique ideas...
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Beeminder Dashboard Widget
2011-12-01 • by dreevesWe’ve been using a simple Mac dashboard widget that esteemed co-founder Bethany hacked up to keep an eye on our Beeminder goals since before Beeminder was Beeminder. Here’s what it looks like on Dreeves’s computer: We mostly use it for TagTime-based goals, where the data is added automatically. For other...
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PSA: T Minus One Week to Thanksgiving
2011-11-18 • by dreevesToday is one week before Thanksgiving in the US. One week is also Beeminder’s akrasia horizon. That means if you would like to stuff yourself silly a week from today, or slack off, or otherwise make your bright red line do the opposite of what it normally does, then now is the time to adjust your commitment...
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Dog Food Renewed
2011-11-14 • by bsoule[UPDATE: The new place for calling the Beeminder founders out when they derail on their meta goals is in the Beeminder forum.] Half a year ago, with Beeminder in its infancy, we committed to averaging one User-Visible Improvement (UVI) to Beeminder every day for at least the next six months. That contract...
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It's Chunky Time!
2011-11-03 • by dreevesHere’s a question that keeps coming up. To paraphrase, Beeminder is great for stuff that needs to happen every day, but for stuff that happens sporadically in large chunks of time, won’t I quickly run off Beeminder’s smooth daily ramp? Au contraire! Beeminder allows brilliantly for chunkiness of time....
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The Want-Can-Will Test for Akrasia
2011-10-24 • by dreevesFailing to live a healthy lifestyle is or would be, for most of us, a classic failure of rationality — not acting in our own overall best interests. There certainly are people (including the terminally ill, but others as well) who are exceptions, for whom an unhealthy lifestyle is rational. For example,...
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Beeminder Open to the Public
2011-10-13 • by bsouleBeeminder is now officially launched and open to the public. Invite all your loser friends who need a kick in the pants! If you’re just tuning in, here’s the three-sentence version of what Beeminder is: Beeminder is like StickK.com (cash commitment contracts to force yourself to lose weight, not procrastinate,...
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Buzzing BeeBot
2011-09-22 • by guestThere’s an old saying that the only person who ever changes you is your mother because she does two things: she always has a simple message (eat your vegetables, brush your teeth) and she keeps repeating that message over and over. When we set out with Beeminder to help people modify their behavior, we...
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The Name "Beeminder"
2011-09-17 • by dreevesBeeminder has existed in some form since February of 2008, when we made a rather ad hoc tool for a friend to track her weight. The main feature was automated reminders to reply with your number each day, so we called it Kibotzer, the kibitzing robot. We described it like so: Kibitzer, noun: Someone who...
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
- bee-all (358)
- rationality (203)
- akrasia (187)
- 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.