Tag: PSA

A new feature of Beeminder is that when you create a goal you can choose to start in Feet-Wetting Mode, meaning the goal initially has no money at risk but after a week it bumps itself to the standard initial stakes of $5 (and exponentially up from there). And we said last time that we weren’t tampering...

Well, everyone, Happy New Year! 2023 is gone and 2024 is ticking, and it’s the traditional time of year to be RESOLUTE. We’ve written about the science of this stuff before. Katy Milkman calls it the Fresh Start Effect, and I am absolutely not immune. You can find my New Year’s Resolution: Ride...

Readwise Reader is a powerful tool for “power readers”. It’s like a supercharged read-it-later app, with first-class support for notes and highlights and tags. Now, you can keep track of your Readwise Reader items using Beeminder. You save things like web pages, PDFs, YouTube videos, Twitter threads, or aim it at an RSS feed or an

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

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

The Beeminder Lichess integration is officially launched! Lichess is basically the cool kids version of Chess.com. As yet more evidence of what huge nerds Beeminder users are, a chess playing website got voted up towards the top of our list of candidate autodata integrations. And not just voted up....

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 just not failing. It’s actively succeeding. Or, since obviously it still needs to rhyme, “Derailing It...

Once upon a time, I had a prescheduled one-day break on all my Beeminder goals. I’d had something on my calendar that day and, thanks to my calendialing meta goal, I’d planned ahead to be free of beemergencies. Or much fewer beemergencies than normal at least. But then it turned out that whatever that...

It’s official! The Beeminder StoryGraph integration! The StoryGraph is basically a better, nerdier version of GoodReads. I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I really (really really really) love books and reading. I’ve talked about it on the blog before, I talk about it in the forum, I have umpteen...

Hej venner! We (Danny and Bee, that is) are on the right (as in “dexter”, not necessarily “correct”) side of the Atlantic Ocean for a bit. Come meet up with us and discuss Beemindery things, like group goals, commitment devices, auctions, and algorithms for participatory democracy? Meet me in Copenhagen?...

We’re pretty enamored with integrating with learn-to-code tools. Most recently CodeCombat and Project Euler. Before that was Code School, back when that was a thing. And of course we have our GitHub integration, aka Gitminder. Today we’re excited to announce our partnership with freeCodeCamp! As...

Last time we talked about the control systems approach to backlogs. Quick recap: make a manual do-more goal where you add a +1 for completing something and keep adjusting the slope of the bright red line such that the backlog keeps steadily shrinking. This works not just for clearing a backlog but for winning the red queen race — dispatching things at roughly the rate they're coming in at and preventing another backlog from accumulating.

Saying “control system” makes this sound fancier than it is. We mean it in the simplest sense, like how your thermostat is a control system. The temperature dropping makes your heater turn on, which makes the temperature rise, which makes your heater turn off. Slightly fancier is if the heater dials...

Announcement! Beeminder and Focusmate are officially integration partners! Beeminder’s Support Czar, Nicky, is here to tell you about it! See also the announcement on Focusmate’s blog as well as the Beeminder Community group on Focusmate. Being a big fan of both Beeminder (obviously!) and Focusmate,...

This is adapted from a forum post which was adapted from a daily beemail which was adapted from a fiftieth of Brent Yorgey’s brilliant, classic guest post. Do you have a meta goal that makes you schedule breaks every week for what’s coming up on your calendar? You should! Unless you like the stress...

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...

Fun fact that is not remotely a coincidence: The founder and CEO of CodeCombat is a friend and Beeminder superfan and previous guest blogger here on the Beeminder blog! In fact, Nick Winter is the first person to create more than one of the apps/services/devices in our autodata integrations gallery — the...

There are a lot of Pocket fans in Beeminderland. Me personally included. I find it a powerful anti-procrastination strategy to save an article to Pocket when it threatens to suck me in during the workday. But that strategy really depends on my having some confidence that saving to Pocket isn’t tantamount...

Bethany previously described this basic idea at the end of my old Bucketminding post. Malcolm Ocean of Complice invented it. Here’s what we mean by fractional beeminding: If your metric for your Beeminder graph is a big chunky thing — say, number of blog posts — you can set your graph’s precision (number...

“I eagerly anticipate how you’re going to write a blog post about an infohazard.” — User in the Beeminder community Discord This is going to sound funny but we’ve toyed with having a rule in the Beeminder community against even mentioning the concept of fake data. Especially funny is that instead we’re...

I believe this is our first blog post with a theme song. Remember last year when we replaced Beeminder’s Yellow Brick Road with a so-called Yellow Brick Half-Plane? The idea was that instead of a line on your graph to your goal and a band on either side of the line to keep your datapoints on, we instead...

The other day year doing support, we ran into someone with a goal named “studying_4_out_of_the_8_first_hours_of_the_day”. We were so offended by this that we’re writing a whole blog post about how not-ok that goalname is. Beeminder is highly opinionated software and our opinion is that, in addition...

“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...

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...

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 a much better screed when she wrote it, because Beeminder was way worse then than it is today. (Yay!) So we modernized...

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...

Are you somehow stumbling upon this blog post without knowing anything about Beeminder? Hoo-boy are you in the wrong place. But here’s a frenzied attempt to catch you up in time: Beeminder graphs your progress toward goals by drawing a bright line, called the Yellow Brick Road, that you commit to having...

We’re so excited to announce Beeminder’s Even More Official partnership with Boss as a Service, of which we are big fans! Some of us on the Beeminder team use it every day, in fact. In the past, Beeminder actually attempted to provide this service itself. We called it The Beekeeper Program and it almost...

Nathan Arthur (narthur) has been beeminding for over two years now, brilliantly and prolifically. He’s also no small part of what makes the Beeminder forum the wonderful place that it is. And now he’s built an app of his own that complements Beeminder beautifully, which he’s about to tell you about (and...

Until today Beeminder had a fundamental design flaw that was baked in from literally day one. The first line of code for what would become Beeminder was to draw a line on a graph in Mathematica from a target weight to a goal weight. But weight fluctuates, I thought to myself. Or maybe I said it out...

This is the next phase in our elaborate evil plan codenamed Yellow Brick Half-Plane. Benevolent plan, I meant to say. The previous phase was killing off auto-widening yellow brick roads. Background: Yellow Brick Whatnow? To start at the very beginning… The Yellow Brick Road is the path on your graph...

Your beloved Support Czar Nikki (AKA shanaqui) is next in our trapped-in-our-apartments blog series (previously: Mary on creating challenges) and gives some inspiring examples of how they’re beeminding their health, happiness, and higher education (like learning more about COVID-19!). Everything’s...

Welcome to our new trapped-in-our-apartments blog series, where we tell you how we workerbees are coping with our coronavirus confinements. Mary Renaud is kicking it off with her strategy of challenging herself to finish fun or difficult feats before we’re released from captivity. She’s got some great...

We’re assuming here that you’re already conceptually on board with writing specs. If you’re skeptical, Joel Spolsky will set you straight! Here’s my own mini-pitch for specs: Writing software involves a lot of backing yourself into corners. For even the simplest-seeming program, you find yourself adding...

In which we explain how a big feature of early Beeminder, auto-widening yellow brick roads, was wrong-headed and what we’re doing now instead. This is Part 1 with Just The Facts and the probably-very-safe-assumption that you don’t care about the convoluted history and just want to know how your graphs...

We mean literal birds this time, because the Beeminder meetup is going to be at Chapman school on the evening of Saturday, September 22 from 6pm to 8pm, when a massive swarm of swifts fly into the enormous chimney of a school building. It’s a weird Portland thing, ok? Also it’s walking distance (sort...

UPDATE for webdev nerds: We realized we meant “403 Forbidden” rather than “401 Not Authorized”. Here’s a little information leak we noticed and fixed some months (ok, the better part of a year — blush!) after we publicly launched in late 2011: Say our user Alice has two goals. One is her book reading...

We have what sounds like bad news for Beeminder supernerds who use fanciness like exponential roads, but hear us out! We’re getting rid of exponential roads. I know, gasp! We’ve already migrated the small number of exponential roads that were out there in the wild. If you had one, it should be approximately...

Hallo onze vrienden! The Beeminder founders and Lillian and the founders’ kids, and other Beeminder friends from Portland will all be converging on Amsterdam next week, from June 15 through June 21st, for Quantified Self 2017. Beeminder, as usual, is a minor sponsor. Meet up with us We’re co-hosting...

If you have a minute to add a rating or review for the new versions we’d be really grateful! Releasing a new version wipes out the previous ratings, so we’re starting from scratch. The Beeminder iOS app just got a long-overdue update, and it includes two sorta-huge new features! Apple Health integration...

It’s almost New Year’s Day! Since I am both an eternal optimist and obsessed with productivity tips / planner Instagram / life improvement stories, this is my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE holiday of the year. For the last week or so, I’ve spent a decent amount of time fantasizing about how I will turn into a better...

Today marks the beginning of the 17th annual NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated that’s NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. For 17 years folks have been joining together on the internet over the month of November to pen their own 50,000 word novels. This year they expect half a million participants. That’s a lot...

Last week (or however often we have Beeminder force us to get blog posts out the door) we announced our big Revamped Reminders feature. Today I want to explain my favorite thing about this feature: setting up Beeminder waterfalls. I’ll explain that momentarily. First let me quote myself from a year ago,...

Today is the first day of the Quantified Self conference! And Beeminder is a minor sponsor. How excited are we about this? My cofounder and I are each giving a talk, we’re leading a breakout session, and holding Beeminder “office hours”. And we’re presenting Beeminder at the Expo on Saturday. But wait,...

How Beeminder works is you tell us your goal and we map out a Yellow Brick Road for you to stay on. As long as you stay on the road you're safe, but if you fall off we'll charge you money! We give you seven goals to play around with at the beginning. These start at $0, so if you fall off once

Today is one week before Thanksgiving in the US. One week is also Beeminder’s akrasia horizon. That means if you would like to stuff yourself silly a week from today, or slack off, or otherwise make your bright red line do the opposite of what it normally does, then now is the time to adjust your commitment...

This is a friendly reminder about our friendly mass of incandescent gas. For beemindees in the northern hemisphere (i.e., all but one or two of you, I believe), this is a reminder that the days are as long as they are going to get right now and are getting shorter from here on out. So if you’re beeminding...