Tag Archive

Common Reactions To Beeminder

Thursday, June 8th, 2023
Common Reactions To Beeminder

Did you just hear about Beeminder (“get charged money if you go off track on your goals, what?”) and have one of the Four Canonical Dismissive Reactions, prompting the person you heard about Beeminder from to point you to this post? Great! Pick your reaction and let’s dive in. 1. “That’s (evil) genius, I would... »

Beeminder ♥ trydeepwork.com

Thursday, May 25th, 2023
Beeminder ♥ trydeepwork.com

We’re excited to announce our official integration with trydeepwork.com! See also the announcement on the trydeepwork blog which is also a pretty brilliant introduction to Beeminder’s philosophy. Cal Newport’s classic book Deep Work is quite popular with Beeminder users [1], so we predict a lot of you will... »

Smithing Your Habits

Wednesday, May 10th, 2023
Smithing Your Habits

This is a guest post by Melissa Smith of Datasmithing! If you like Beeminder and other Beeminder-adjacent things like BaaS or Complice, but want more troubleshooting and guidance, you might like Datasmithing. (You might also like her blog which includes such gems as the graph paper... »

Beeminder ♥ Lichess

Thursday, April 27th, 2023
Beeminder ♥ Lichess

The Beeminder Lichess integration is officially launched! Lichess is basically the cool kids version of Chess.com. As yet more evidence of what huge »

Derailing It Is Nailing It

Friday, March 24th, 2023
Derailing It Is Nailing It

We’ve talked before about how paying is not punishment because derailing is not failing, but fellow workerbee Clive pointed out that we could flip that negative formulation around. Derailing isn’t... »

Announcement: Signing Up For Beeminder Requires Hard-Committing To Use Beeminder

Friday, March 10th, 2023
Announcement: Signing Up For Beeminder Requires Hard-Committing To Use Beeminder

That’s right my little bees: we put a commitment device in our commitment device to bring out the commitment flavor of the commitment device. Does everyone know the soup nazi from Seinfeld? Basically it’s an interesting episode in Seinfeldnomics (and boy howdy do we like economics)... »

Beeminder’s Plans To Take Over The World

Thursday, February 23rd, 2023
Beeminder’s Plans To Take Over The World

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.” — Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality I came across this draft from 2010 or 2011, before we’d publicly launched and with just a smattering of beta users we’d recruited one by one. It had a note-to-self: “rewrite this to sound... »

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 »

Dumbest Hill To Die On: Automating Your Copyright Year is Lies

Thursday, January 12th, 2023
Dumbest Hill To Die On: Automating Your Copyright Year is Lies

I’ve been railing against automated copyright dates for years but just learned Serine Molecule scooped me in Copyright Notices Are Not Clocks: You should update the copyright year whenever you make nontrivial, copyrightable changes to your work. Not every year, and definitely not automatically. If you do it automatically, you... »

Kavka’s Toxin Puzzle and the Superpower of Commitment Devices

Friday, December 16th, 2022
Kavka’s Toxin Puzzle and the Superpower of Commitment Devices

There’s a famous philosophy thought experiment about how the concept of forming an intention might not be as coherent as it seems. Suppose some magic mind-reading aliens (you know the type) offer you a million dollars to drink a nasty but ultimately harmless toxin. Let’s say it makes you puke your guts out for a... »