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Death To Weaselproofing; Announcing No-Excuses Mode
2022-02-22 • by dreevesPreviously on the blog, we pitched a particular framing of Beeminder in which paying is not punishment. People seem into it! Which is good because it was setting the stage for this announcement: We’ve killed the old weaselproofing feature and replaced it with something we think is much better: No-Excuses...
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Paying Is Not Punishment
2022-02-09 • by dreevesUPDATE: See follow-up post announcing No-Excuses Mode. An under-appreciated fact about Beeminder is that it doesn’t force you to do anything. It just puts prices on things and you continue to do whatever you feel like doing, factoring in those prices. Just like you might buy a box of cookies if the...
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The Bright Red Staircase
2022-01-26 • by dreevesThis is still pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing but it makes me very happy. Not just because I love pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing (we could say Product Vision if we wanted to sound more respectable) but because a couple years ago this sounded preposterously theoretical and fantastical...
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Beeminder ♥ Focusmate
2021-12-27 • by shanaquiAnnouncement! Beeminder and Focusmate are officially integration partners! Beeminder’s Support Czar, Nicky, is here to tell you about it! See also the announcement on Focusmate’s blog as well as the Beeminder Community group on Focusmate. Being a big fan of both Beeminder (obviously!) and Focusmate,...
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Book Review: How To Change
2021-12-15 • by dreevesEarlier this year we completed a lovely Beeminder book club to read behavioral scientist Katy Milkman’s new book, How To Change. The discussion all happened in the amazing Beeminder forum but as a private group of 18 of us, so we could trash talk the book guilt-free (or just to be able to talk more...
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Calendialing
2021-12-02 • by dreevesThis is adapted from a forum post which was adapted from a daily beemail which was adapted from a fiftieth of Brent Yorgey’s brilliant, classic guest post. Do you have a meta goal that makes you schedule breaks every week for what’s coming up on your calendar? You should! Unless you like the stress...
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Nicky's Secret To Beeminding Studying: It's About Time
2021-11-12 • by shanaquiWe are overdue for a blog post about using Beeminder for school and studying. In the very early days of Beeminder, we had a brilliant guest post from Gandalf Saxe when he was a wee undergrad. Now he’s an engineer at Apple, working on Siri. We’re going to go ahead and take a chunk of credit for that. His...
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Loss Aversion Aversion
2021-10-30 • by dreevesThis is part 2 of our two-part series on loss aversion. Previously we explained loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. Here we (as Beeminder) disavow loss aversion as a tool for behavior change. This isn’t like “Ego Depletion Depletion” or other debunking posts we’ve done. We...
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Loss Aversion vs The Endowment Effect
2021-10-12 • by dreevesThis is part 1 of a two-part series. First we explain loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. (Spoiler: loss aversion is a generalization of the endowment effect.) Asking Google how those things are different currently yields a fog of opaque logorrhea, so we hope this is enlightening....
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Complice's Gloves Come Off: Announcing Micro Commitment Contracts in Complice
2021-09-28 • by Malcolm OceanWell, Complice lulled us into complacency with all their talk of how complementary Beeminder and Complice are and now here we are. Today they’re launching micro commitment contracts; presumably tomorrow will be macro commitment contracts. And from there, all out war. Ok, no, Malcolm Ocean is back 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.
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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.