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.
Burning the ships. And for the more general thing we’re trying to do, of which commitment devices address part, I call it motivation hacking.
I call this an ingenious ploy to drive search traffic to your site :)
Ha, yes! Note the second sentence: “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.”
Speaking of which, I just updated the list with a few more terms. You’re welcome, googlebot.
same idea as ‘tying oneself to the mast,’ but a radiolab piece i heard a while ago called these Ulysses Contracts.