Tag Archive

Beeminder Making You Do Self-Indulgent Things

Thursday, January 26th, 2023
Beeminder Making You Do Self-Indulgent Things

This isn’t a new idea but I keep noticing how great it is to have Beeminder make you do something fun. Ahh, Beeminder… hearteyes-emoji! Here’s how Bee put it in a »

Make A Plan To Forget

Thursday, August 26th, 2021
Make A Plan To Forget

This is going to sound painfully obvious at first — “Don’t assume you’ll remember things! Create reminders!” — but bear with me. There are two useful, nonobvious things here: Sometimes you think of something you need to remember while, say, driving, or talking to someone. You can’t always email yourself or write something down but you can still do something like... »

Beemind What You Buy

Friday, March 12th, 2021
Beemind What You Buy

“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,... »

Quantified Self Talk: Tracking My Personal Reliability

Friday, April 12th, 2019
Quantified Self Talk: Tracking My Personal Reliability

On 2018-09-22 I gave a talk at the Quantified Self conference. This is that talk. You can also see an actual recording of it. I got a lot of encouragement afterwards... »

Beeminding With A Physical Button

Thursday, November 15th, 2018
Beeminding With A Physical Button

Zachary Jacobi has been beeminding since 2015, when he started using Beeminder (on the recommendation of... »

Beeminding And All That Jazz

Wednesday, April 25th, 2018
Beeminding And All That Jazz

Special guest post by Beeminder superfan and real-life friend, Kim Harrison, the Director of Education at PDX Jazz. We’re glowing with pride to read how one of our dear... »

The Dirty Plate Club

Thursday, February 15th, 2018
The Dirty Plate Club

This is going to start out sounding super common-sensical but will leap to a characteristically preposterous-sounding conclusion that I, characteristically, actually believe. Not as preposterous-sounding as, say, beeminding bites, but still. The obvious part is that if you have food left on your plate but are full, it’s more wasteful (waistful,... »

The Tao of Bees: How I use Beeminder

Monday, September 11th, 2017
The Tao of Bees: How I use Beeminder

Brennan K. Brown has been using Beeminder for two years this week and is our new favorite user. (Don’t worry, we have a lot of favorite users. Mathematical fun fact: superlativity doesn’t imply uniqueness!) He achieved this coveted status (haha, but it does involve... »

The “I Will” System

Wednesday, August 9th, 2017
The “I Will” System

“80% of success is showing up.” — Woody Allen “It should be completely implausible to describe a startup’s CEO as a flake.” — Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston’s heuristic for successful startups “Let your ‘yes’ mean yes, and your ‘no’ mean no. Anything more than this comes... »

The Shirk & Turk Principle

Tuesday, December 6th, 2016
The Shirk & Turk Principle

The tagline for Amazon Mechanical Turk is “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”. As in, faking your AI by using humans. Mechanical Turk is named after the contraption in the title image, which was a seeming chess-playing automaton from the late 1700s that was secretly operated by a small human hidden inside. But this post isn’t about Amazon’s nifty service or... »