UPDATE: This whole post is of historical interest only. We have gotten rid of auto-widening roads in Beeminder! In November 2017 we stopped using this feature on all new goals. Then in January 2020 we fully killed the feature by force-converting all existing roads to have a fixed width. Beeminder is...

[UPDATE 2015: We’ve learned that we don’t need to be this uptight or hard-nosed about derailments. Just reply to the email asking if the derailment was legit and say why you don’t consider it to be. We will believe you. If you want something closer to the original vision articulated in this old blog post...

This is a friendly reminder about our friendly mass of incandescent gas. For beemindees in the northern hemisphere (i.e., all but one or two of you, I believe), this is a reminder that the days are as long as they are going to get right now and are getting shorter from here on out. So if you’re beeminding...

This is a guest post by Josh Jordan. While waiting for a Beeminder beta account, I tried using StickK to help me lose some fat. StickK is a brilliant concept and I hope they succeed in a big way, but I don’t like their weekly weigh-ins, for two reasons: It’s way too easy to temporarily and unhealthfully...

We hate to promote our competition but TimeCarrot.com is an interesting idea (albeit rough around the edges) that some of you will be interested in. Most of you know about StickK.com, which facilitates commitment contracts on arbitrary goals (but no visualization or automatic daily accountability, like...

“I did all the right things and it didn’t work” The kind of people who say that, Beeminder is not for them. Beeminder is for goals you know you can achieve, and definitely want to achieve, yet historically have failed at. Some people don’t relate to the psychology there. Apparently you didn’t want it...

David Reiley is an economist and a Beeminder beta user, albeit one who has yet to partake of a commitment contract. He asks the following: For those of you who have given yourselves big incentives to do something, do you ever find that you are shortchanging other important areas of your life as a result?...

You may have noticed the shiny new design of Beeminder. For nerds who know about such things: we switched to Ruby on Rails. For non-nerds: we added buzzwords to our internets! Either way, it was kind of a big deal, even though it doesn’t look like much just yet. Step one was to replicate everything that...

Here’s a blindingly obvious insight: if you drive blind you’ll probably drive off the road. Less obvious is that that applies almost as certainly to your Beeminder yellow brick road. Michelle, who has very thick skin (figuratively speaking!) and agreed to let us feature her here, illustrates the point...

This is an interesting case study. Martin put $5k at risk on a very conservative goal — spending at least 8 hours a week on a house renovation project for a total of 249 hours by May 5. He actually signed the contract on Oct 21, right before he started shooting up above his yellow brick road. He maintained...