Beeminder Home
Previously on the Beeminder blog: debating negative vs positive reinforcement and, in case you care about using these psychology terms correctly, clarifying that »
Tag Archive
akrasia
akrasia horizon
api
bee-all
best-of
bugs
buzz
case studies
commitment contracts
commitment devices
competition
dog food
economics
FAQ
fitness
food
force majeure
get everything done
guest posts
integrations
lifehacks
mark forster
meta
money
navel-gazing
nerdery
new features
press
productivity porn
PSA
psychology
quantified self
rationality
resolutions
road dial
science
self-binding
soup nazi
startups
stickk
tagtime
tips
trello
weight loss
yellow brick road
Beemind What You Buy
Friday, March 12th, 2021
“It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, before Beeminder existed Are you about to buy something that requires ongoing time or energy? Some things don’t. A meal,... »
What Not To Beemind
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021
What appalling apostasy is this? It’s not like that! Beeminder just isn’t quite perfect for absolutely everything. It’s *practically* perfect for absolutely everything. Practically perfect for a surprising breadth of things? This post just happens to be about the exceptions. It’s a sequel to both the previous post, about how “never do this thing ever” goals... »
Do-Zero Goals Considered Harmful
Wednesday, February 17th, 2021
Look what we found in the attic! Our original Support Czar, Chelsea — known for such classics as “Beemind Easy Things” and “Weasel Heart-To-Heart” — wrote this screed in 2017. It was... »
The Burgle Bug Fairness Principle
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021
Beeminder’s bug classification system is like so: Bitty Bugs are barely bothersome. Baneful Bugs make Beeminder blatantly wrong, but not in any breach-of-contract way, unlike… Bum-steer Bugs which may make you derail by leading you astray about the state of your graph, or, worse: Bamboozle Bugs making our marketing mendacious... »
Strategy Memo: Beeminder Is Pledge-Focused
Friday, January 22nd, 2021
Since we like letting you all peek behind the curtain of Beeminder, let’s dive in with this internal strategy memo that our beeloved Queen Bee sent to the team last month, reproduced here verbatim: Howdy my sweet bee people, We’ve subjected you to a lot of polarized ideas about Beeminder pricing over the last month. Whee! I’m... »
How To Beemind Nebulous Goals
Tuesday, December 29th, 2020
Beeminder works brilliantly for quantifiable, graphable goals. What about nebulous projects like remodeling your kitchen or finding a therapist? It doesn’t really work for those things. Unless! Unless you find a clever metric to mind. Like the word count in a log of your progress. Here’s what I recommend: Create a... »
Beeminder’s Achilles Heel
Tuesday, December 15th, 2020
Beeminder’s Achilles heel is that you need a meta-Beeminder to get yourself to create a Beeminder goal in the first place. (We sometimes call it Beeminder’s bootstrap problem.) Here’s a trick to mitigate that problem: Create a goal as soon as you think of it, but with an initial flat spot of a week or a month or... »
Ice Cream Truck Loopholes
Thursday, December 3rd, 2020
Sometimes Beeminder goals have loopholes, like you could dehydrate yourself to get your datapoint below the bright line on your weight-loss graph (please don’t!). There are plenty of things like that and I probably shouldn’t think too hard about more examples. Sometimes loopholes like that can ruin a goal. But other times, ironically, such loopholes... »
The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: A Retrospective
Saturday, October 3rd, 2020
