Synonyms for Self-Binding

We’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 defines, with admirable rigor, exactly what that lifehack consists of:

Entering into an arrangement which restricts one’s future choice set by making certain choices more expensive, perhaps infinitely expensive, while also satisfying two conditions: (a) one would, on the margin, pay something in the present to make those choices more expensive, even if one received no other benefit for the payment; and (b) the arrangement does not have a strategic purpose with respect to others.

(The above is excerpted from a wonderful survey paper on commitment devices.) I would paraphrase it as: voluntarily imposing penalties on your future self purely because you know yourself to be an impetuous fiend who will otherwise act against what your cool-headed current self knows to be your best interests.

Here’s a list of pithier ways to say that:

• Using a commitment device
• Self-binding
• Using a self-commitment device
• Creating a commitment contract
• Precommitting, or using a precommitment device
• Me-binding
• Beeminding
• Stickking (to something)
• Aherking off? [UPDATE: Aherk is gone now so that link points to our list of competitors where you can read about Aherk and others in our graveyard section]
• Tying oneself to the mast
• Employing counteractive self-control
• Motivation hacking (coined by Nick Winter)
• Burning the ships
• Setting up a Ulysses Contract or Ulysses Pact
• Bringing things inside the tunnel
• Making a threat bet
• Aligning your future incentives

And here are myriad related terms:

• Egonomics (a new competitor has borrowed this term: egOnomics Lab)
• Picoeconomics (coined by George Ainslie)
• Akrasia
• Self-control
• Procrastination
• Preproperation
• Addiction
• Counteractive control theory
• Programmable Self (coined by Fred Trotter of RunOrElse.com)
• Hyperbolic discounting
• Dynamic inconsistency, or Time inconsistency
• Multiple selves
• Delayed/deferred gratification
• Captology (coined by B.J. Fogg)
• (New year’s) resolutions
• Present-biased preferences or just present bias (coined by economists O’Donoghue and Rabin)
• Beta-delta preferences
• Baumeister’s Ego Depletion (I’m with Dweck on this one) [UPDATE: Ego Depletion Depletion]
• Mind over mind (coined by David McRaney)
• Second-order preferences
• Astheneia and propeteia (Aristotle’s terms for the two kinds of akrasia: weakness and impetuousness)
• Executive functions (psychology term)
• Temporal Motivation Theory
• Preference reversal (though the term has a more general meaning in behavioral economics, referring to any inconsistency in preferences; it’s only time inconsistency that’s relevant to akrasia)
• Deposit contracts
• Internalities are externalities imposed on your future self
• Time Bridges (Gaia Dempsey’s coinage for systems like Beeminder)
• Incentive alignment
• Constraint Theory, proposed in Jon Elster’s Ulysses Unbound
• Price Pacts, coined by Nir Eyal

If we’ve missed any, please leave them in the comments!

UPDATE: Thanks Nick Winter, Hilary Anne Mayhew, and others for the additions, now added above.

UPDATE: We’ve also been collecting a long list of examples of self-binding, aka commitment devices, at blog.beeminder.com/akrasia and recently reproduced in a Quora thread on self-improvement.

UPDATE 2017-2021: We continue to add terms here that we come across, and have even added commentary as hovertext on all the above links.