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The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon
2011-09-01 • by dreevesPreviously on the Beeminder Blog… How can we set up a commitment contract with minimal risk that we’ll regret it? It’s a tricky balancing act. You want something solid enough that you’ve truly committed yourself to your goal and can’t weasel out whenever a friend bakes some brownies (or whatever). But...
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Buzzing BeeBot
2011-09-22 • by guestThere’s an old saying that the only person who ever changes you is your mother because she does two things: she always has a simple message (eat your vegetables, brush your teeth) and she keeps repeating that message over and over. When we set out with Beeminder to help people modify their behavior, we...
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Beeminder Dashboard Widget
2011-12-01 • by dreevesWe’ve been using a simple Mac dashboard widget that esteemed co-founder Bethany hacked up to keep an eye on our Beeminder goals since before Beeminder was Beeminder. Here’s what it looks like on Dreeves’s computer: We mostly use it for TagTime-based goals, where the data is added automatically. For other...
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Getting Back On The Wagon
2012-05-25 • by Philip HellyerThis is a guest post by Philip Hellyer who can walk on water and outrun bullets, with the help of Beeminder. He eloquently describes what we think is currently the single biggest pain point (though there are many) with Beeminder right now — how to keep from procrastinating indefinitely on getting back...
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Birds and the Bees: Chirpify and Beeminder Shack Up
2012-06-03 • by dreevesUPDATE 2014: Sadly (for us), Chirpify pivoted away from Twitter-based payments so this post is now obsolete. We will add Paypal support at some point for people who need that payment option (keep bugging us if that’s you!) and we’ve now added direct Twitter integration. We’re often advised that Beeminder...
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Beeminder ♥ Trello
2012-10-29 • by Andy BrettLately at Beeminder we’ve been using Trello for just about everything. We use it to stage blog posts and track bugs and new features on the Beeminder API and website. The Beeminder iPhone and Android apps each have their own board too. “We automatically track the number of cards in your Done list.”...
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Beemind Your NaNoWriMo Progress
2012-11-01 • by dreevesNational Novel Writing Month starts today! Over a quarter of a million people participated last year, logging over 3 billion words! Here’s how the NaNoWriMo site describes it: NaNoWriMo is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write...
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Beeminder ♥ Fitbit
2012-11-13 • by Andy BrettBy popular demand, we’ve now added Fitbit to our growing list of integrations. We’ve had a lot of people ask for this integration, and even a few who have already started automatically sending their Fitbit data to Beeminder with our API
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Pledge Short-Circuiting
2012-12-09 • by dreevesUntil now you haven’t had much choice about how much to pledge (put at risk) on your Beeminder commitment contracts. It starts out free, then $5, then each subsequent time you derail from your yellow brick road you’re encouraged (though not forced) to jump to the next pledge level for your next attempt:...
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Precommit to Recommit: The Third Great Beeminder Epiphany
2013-02-13 • by dreevesUPDATE 2013 August: We decided this was so ingenious that we made it fundamental to Beeminder. There’s no longer such a thing as not precommiting to recommit. In other words, goals no longer freeze when you derail. Below is the post in its original form for posterity. The First Great Beeminder Epiphany...
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Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper
2013-04-12 • by dreeves[Prescript: Yes, we paid someone $270 because this post was late (see blog.beeminder.com/blogdog). We think it was worth it and hope you’ll agree!] UPDATE 2014-07-17: This post now reflects the current prices. When it was published the prices were: Bee Lite $5/mo, Plan Bee $10/mo, Beemium $25/mo, Beekeeper...
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Todas as línguas! Beeminder ama Duolingo
2013-05-24 • by Andy BrettIf you asked 100 people to fill in the following blank, Family-Feud-style, what would be the most popular answer? “I’ve always wanted to learn ______” In an informal poll of authors of this blog post, the runaway winner was “a new language.” It’s pretty easy to get through “ciao” and “auf wiedersehen,”...
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Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts
2013-05-13 • by dreevesYou know how a lot of services offer things like one month free if you pay yearly? We were nerding out over the math of that and thought, why not generalize to compute the perfectly fair discount for paying at any frequency you like, including every infinity years, i.e., paying once for a lifetime subscription?...
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Zeno Polling
2013-06-24 • by dreevesIt’s been six months since our last crash of ineptitude so it’s time to disabuse you of the notion that we may have gotten our act together since then! The backstory is that we’ve been fortunate enough to have some scaling challenges — mostly due to our ridiculous architecture — so we decided we could...
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New World Order: Goals No Longer Freeze
2013-08-13 • by dreevesWe’ve been referring to this internally as Beeminder’s New World Order but in fact it’s a natural consequence of The Third Great Beeminder Epiphany: Ever-increasing awesomeness should always be the path of least resistance. Namely, if you derail on a goal, the goal no longer freezes and waits around...
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Beeminder ♥ RunKeeper
2013-09-03 • by bsouleRunKeeper! Now with more running! and cycling! and walking! Beemind all the RunKeeper things! Get it while it is hot! Actually, we’ve had an integration with RunKeeper for over a year now — it was the third autodata source to land on our front page. We’re up to eight now. TagTime was the zeroth , Withings...
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Scheduled Breaks!
2013-09-13 • by bsouleWe have once again knocked off what was the highest voted item from our feedback forum: you can now schedule flat spots in your yellow brick road. In fact, you can schedule any change in your road, between arbitrary dates, as long as it starts outside the akrasia horizon. Even more flexible self-control!...
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Do-Less Goals with Pessimistic Presumptive Reports
2013-09-23 • by dreevesUPDATE TEN YEARS LATER: Oh my goodness this is all so ancient now. The things below are still true but probably you’re looking for our help doc on do-less goals, which we keep up to date. First, a point of nominology: We’ve renamed the Set-A-Limit goal type to Do Less. The names “do more” and “do less”...
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More Schwag, Less Beeminding
2013-10-03 • by dreevesThis post is a random assortment of items and announcements. Normally we use the beemails for that, but (a) it’s an emergency blog post day and (b) we wanted to let you blog readers know that we’re actually sending regular beemails, so if you want more of this kind of thing, bump up your beemail frequency...
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Beeminder <3 Jawbone
2013-10-23 • by Andy BrettSAD TROMBONE UPDATE 2021: Jawbone up and died in 2017 and shut down fully in 2018. This blog post is now of historical interest only. The Jawbone UP was at the top of our list for the next device to add to our ever growing list of integrations. Jawbone recently released the second generation of their...
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Year-Round NaNoWriMo with Beeminder and Draft
2013-11-01 • by dreevesTomorrow is the beginning of November, which kicks off National Novel Writing Month. Last year we put together some tools for NaNoWriMo and blogged about it: Beemind Your NaNoWriMo Progress. This year we have some new tools to support beeminding writers. The biggie that we’re really excited about is
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After adding Jawbone last month, I realized that we could be approaching an asymptote in Beeminder’s coverage for integrations. We’ve covered some of the most popular apps and devices, but their numbers are exploding, and there’s no way we could hope to keep up. Even by beeminding them — it doesn’t pass...
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Android and Beeminder and Tasker
2013-12-03 • by dreevesWe released a 2.x version of the Android App in the last couple weeks, and we’re so excited that we just cannot hide it! Things have improved immensely since we officially released our smartphone apps over a year ago and we figured that not only is this latest release worthy of some considerable...
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The Beekeeper Program: Beeminder-Based Lifecoaching
2014-01-01 • by Erica EdelmanThis post is by Erica Edelman, our very first employee! She’s been knocking our socks off since we met her a couple months ago, and apparently the feeling was mutual because last week she moved to Portland from Columbus, Ohio to start with us full-time. The main excuse to hire her was that she’ll be...
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Beeminder ♥ Code School
2014-02-11 • by dreevesWe’re pretty over the moon for Code School and very proud to announce this partnership. The Code School folks are announcing it simultaneously on the Code School blog as well. Since many or most of you are here directly from Code School with no previous exposure to Beeminder, we’re starting with a...
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Get Things Done (Or Else!) With Beeminder and GTBee
2014-04-03 • by Andy BrettAt its core, Beeminder is a tool for getting yourself to do things using money as an incentive. Most goals on Beeminder focus on making steady progress over time. But some goals, and some people, work better with a different model. Let’s say you have to call someone by the end of the day today, and...
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New Feature: Supporters
2014-05-04 • by dreevesTechnically we deployed this feature over two months ago, but not very well so we didn’t have much fanfare. It was one of our daily UVIs (@beemuvi) and we mentioned it in a beemail. The feature itself is pretty self-explanatory: In the Settings for a goal you can add supporters — friends, family, enemies — who...
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Birds and The Bees: Beeminder Has Twitter Integration
2014-08-05 • by Chris GoodmanWe are exceedingly proud to debut the work of our intern, Chris Goodman, in this blog post. Chris has joined us this summer through Saturday Academy’s ASE Internship program. Both Chris and Saturday Academy have knocked our socks off. Chris had not written a line of Ruby when he started, and now, well,...
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New Feature: Pledge Caps
2014-09-24 • by dreevesThe exponential pledge schedule is a key part of the, dare we say it, genius of Beeminder. It means you quickly reach a pledge that’s highly motivating and keeps you on track for a long time. But one more exponential step beyond “highly motivating” was often “OMG too scary I quit”. That outcome is...
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Freebees: Not Actually Free
2014-10-04 • by dreeves[UPDATE 2016-03-25: This whole post is completely obsolete! That’s a wonderful thing. We made everything simpler and better. In short, all goals can now start at $0 pledged and there’s no need for a concept of freebees at all. So don’t read on except out of historical interest!] So many changes lately...
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New Discourse Forum!
2014-10-15 • by dreevesWe committed in a beemail recently to announcing a series of things that we’ve been brewing, culminating in our 3rd anniversary blog post, coming this month. This is one such thing. Drumroll… Beeminder has a new Discourse forum! It lives at forum.beeminder.com and all of the following are fair game...
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Beeminder ♥ HabitRPG
2014-10-25 • by dreevesHabitRPG and Beeminder have a remarkably similar history and remarkably similar users. We consider this a match made in heaven. In fact, we and the HabitRPG folks have been talking about this for literally years now, so we’re very excited to finally be shipping it, thanks to the hacking skills of our own Alice Monday, and with assistance from Alice Harris. As a welcome to HabitRPG users new to Beeminder, we’re starting with a
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New Feature and Veritable Paradigm Shift: Arbitrary Deadlines
2014-10-28 • by dreevesA simple-seeming feature is now live: You can set custom deadlines on goals! Until now, you’ve had till midnight every day to make sure you’re safely on Beeminder’s yellow brick road. (Or for non-autodata goals you’ve had a grace period till 3am to get your data entered.) As fanatic and highly akratic...
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Beeminder ♥ Zapier: Hundreds of New Integrations in One
2014-11-19 • by dreevesWe’re beaming with pride at being the latest official Zapier integration. See also Zapier’s announcement. This is arguably our biggest announcement since the Beeminder API two years ago. In case you don’t already know about Zapier, it’s a more
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Beeminder ♥ Sleep as Android
2014-12-31 • by bsouleAnother integration! And one that I personally use daily (well, nightly). Sleep as Android is a popular sleep tracking app that’s delightfully nerdy and quantified-self focused. (Much like Beeminder!) As a welcome to Sleep as Android users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. For Beeminder...
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Triangular Beeminding; Or, Drink Less, Using the Power of Triangles
2015-02-27 • by David R. MacIverOne of my vices is that I drink a bit too much. Not to the level where I have a problem, but it would be strictly better if I cut out about 2 or 3 of the drinks I have in a typical week. This seems like an obvious use case for Beeminder. I’ve previously beeminded units of alcohol consumption and concluded that, measured as a total number of units per week, I’m completely
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Beeminder ♥ Garmin
2015-03-10 • by bsouleAnother official integration! We’re so excited to be integrating with Garmin, one of the biggest and oldest names in wearable computey things! As a welcome to Garmin users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. If you’re just eager to get your beloved Garmin device connected to Beeminder,...
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If This MIND That: Beeminder ♥ IFTTT
2015-05-08 • by bsouleAnnouncement! There is now an official Beeminder Channel on IFTTT! This is a big day for us. Our users have been begging for this for a very long time, and we in turn have been bugging IFTTT. In fact, Danny even wrote this Ode to IFTTT two years ago and included it in our application to be a channel...
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GmailZero: Not Just For Your Inbox Anymore
2015-04-29 • by bsouleUPDATE 2019: Changes to GmailZero! Google recently stopped supporting their very old OAuth1 authentication strategy, which is what we’d been using to access all y’all’s Gmail accounts. We’ve talked about our Gmail integration, GmailZero before. (Actually we talk about email a lot, including recently...
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Misfit and Bee-fit: Beeminder ♥ Misfit
2015-05-29 • by bsouleAnother official integration: Misfit! Look at us, all featured in their gallery and everything! This is an especially exciting integration for us personally -- our esteemed CEO has been wearing his Misfit Shine literally 24/7 for a year and a half now. As a welcome to Misfit users new to Beeminder, we'll start with a recap of what Beeminder is all about. For the full story, start at the very beginning. If you're just eager
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Beeminder ♥ Skritter
2015-06-09 • by bsouleAnother integration, hot off the presses: Skritter! There is a funny back story with this one. Last winter our charmingly optimistic CEO, imagining we could have this integration done “like in a month”, got slightly telephone-gamed into committing to launch it in January. When we noticed what we’d gotten ourselves into we offered a
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Revamped Reminders
2015-10-01 • by bsouleIf your name is “Beeminder” then reminders really need to be part of your core competency. Alerts and nudges about your goal are fundamental to our contract with you, the user, to do our very best to help you meet the goals you’ve set, and only take your money as a last resort. So much so that if...
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Death To Freebees; Or, Freebees Für Alles
2016-04-02 • by dreevesNews! We scrapped the overcomplicated concept of Freebees. But don’t panic! By scrapping it we mean that you don’t need to know the term “freebees” or worry about buying them: All goals can now be created with an initial pledge of $0. Can we get a hallelujah? (If you want to cap your pledge at $0, you...
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New Premium Feature: Weekends Off
2016-05-28 • by bsouleBeeple of the world want to take their weekends off, and for a long time the best answer we’ve had is “well, if you just make sure to get green by Friday night, then you can safely take Saturday and Sunday off”, which is highly unsatisfying to the truly akratic. Because if I had the discipline to “just...
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New Premium Feature: Rudimentary Road Editor
2016-06-17 • by dreevesThe road dial was one of the first Beeminder features, announced almost 5 years ago when we were still in private beta. It lets you adjust the steepness of your yellow brick road — how much you’ve committed to doing — with a one-week delay. For most people most of the time, that’s all you need. You do...
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Beeminder and Complice Make It Official
2016-06-29 • by dreeves[UPDATE: Complice is now Intend!] Remember back in November when we first wrote about Complice on the blog? We described how nicely Beeminder and Complice complement each other for different goals and different aspects of goals, and described the new ways Complice could automatically send data to Beeminder....
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Beemind Arbitrary Tasks Automatically with Complice
2016-07-11 • by Malcolm OceanThis is part two of our announcement of the official Beeminder + Complice integration. It is also the second guest post by Malcolm Ocean. As you’ll see, this is powerful stuff for serious productivity nerds! The Beeminder + Complice integration gets better and better. I’m really excited to announce...
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Announcing the Infinibee Plan and Other Premium Changes
2016-08-09 • by dreevesUPDATE 2018 July: We raised the price of the Infinibee plan from $4/mo to $8/mo.UPDATE 2021 January 1: We raised the price of Beemium from $32/mo to $40/mo.UPDATE 2021 November 26: We raised the price of Beemium again, to $50/mo. Turns out we don’t really want people to get Beemium! To paraphrase Teen...
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Unveiling the Big Beeminder Redesign of 2016
2016-10-14 • by dreevesRemember back in the day (yesterday) when Beeminder’s interface was all cluttered and intimidating and looked like it was made in 2011, by kernel hackers and accountants? Or computer scientists and behavioral econ nerds who gradually agglomerated a multiheaded beast of a system to implement their crazy...
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New Official URLminder Integration
2016-11-02 • by bsouleToday 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...
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Beeminder ♥ Todoist
2017-01-06 • by Lillian KarabaicPicking the right way to organize your to-do’s is a big decision. Paper & pencil, smartphone app, calendar, blank playing cards, or the old “in your head” method. A lot of folks use Todoist. While Todoist is fantastic for keeping track of your to-dos, if you combine it with Beeminder, you can use...
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For the last National Novel Writing Month we announced our new official URLminder integration. Well it’s been several months now and that integration has come a long way. So we wanted to both tell you about how much better it is and also give a fully newbee-friendly guide to beeminding your writing....
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In case you’re not a programmer and the title didn’t already scare you off, we’ll start by explaining why this matters for end users. Until now, anyone who wrote a 3rd-party autodata integration — automatically sending data to Beeminder — had to implement their own strategy for how often to check for...
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Announcement: Beeminder Adds PayPal as a Payment Option
2017-07-06 • by dreevesGuess what? This is not actually the most buzzworthy Beeminder-related news right now. There’s some even bigger (and entirely unrelated) news that we can’t share yet. How’s that for an infuriatingly vague teaser? But to hold you over, we thought we’d let everyone know that as of this week we finally officially...
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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...
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Feature Announcement: General Mercy
2018-08-22 • by bsouleIn the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth and derailing on a Beeminder goal meant getting a week of respite. That is still in fact the default. After derailing you get a week of safety buffer. It gives you time to re-evaluate how the goal is working, and time to adjust your Yellow Brick...
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Beeminder ♥ Toggl
2018-09-07 • by dreevesWe have so many opinions about time tracking! To start, there are three fundamental ways to track your time: Manually Passively Stochastically For passive tracking, you should install RescueTime (and hook it up to Beeminder of course). And, being passive, you might as well set that up in addition to...
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Beeminder ♥ Strava
2018-10-12 • by dreevesIt’s finally official! Strava activities can now be automatically tracked with Beeminder! So, first of all, welcome Strava users! Beeminder takes a large goal, such as training for a marathon, and breaks it down into daily deadlines. Not by providing any insight into marathon training schedules (we...
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Beeminder ♥ Clozemaster
2018-11-30 • by ClozemasterWe’re excited to officially announce our newest integration partner: Clozemaster! We’ve even got the Clozemaster folks themselves here guest-blogging for us to tell you what Clozemaster is all about! If you want to hear us talk about it, head over to the Clozemaster blog for our own guest post. Hi Beeminder...
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If you’re nervous about handing over your credit card number, let us start by solemnly promising that we’re super trustworthy. Wait, that’s exactly what a scammer would say. Ok, getting more specific: We promise you won’t ever be charged due to any kind of technicality, including confusion about how...
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Quantified Self Talk: Tracking My Personal Reliability
2019-04-13 • by dreevesOn 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 about how people had a kind of lightbulb moment from it, which was nice to hear, and prompted me to say “I’ll turn it into a blog post”....
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Beeminder ♥ Project Euler
2019-11-05 • by dreevesWe have a new official integration partner! Except arguably not official, nor a partner. Project Euler is philosophically opposed to any kind of commercialization. So much so that the founder and all volunteers who contribute to it have committed to never profit financially from doing so. Pretty hard...
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Integery Goals, Timey-Wimey Goals, and Conservarounding
2019-11-27 • by dreevesHere’s a thing users really hated about Beeminder until today: when Beeminder told them they needed to floss their teeth 0.23 times or archive 6.8 emails or whatever nonsensical / physically impossible thing. I personally shrugged that off for years. Obviously you just mentally take the ceiling of...
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Meet The New Gmail Zero, Same As The Old Gmail Zero
2019-12-18 • by Adam WolfAnnouncement! We’ve reworked Gmail goals to use a label instead of an arbitrary search query, because Google is making us. (Not just us. Any app wanting access to things like arbitrary search queries has to go through a $10k+ security audit now!) If you need to do something about your Gmail goal to keep...
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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...
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Death to Auto-Widening Yellow Brick Roads, Part 2
2020-02-18 • by dreevesIf you’re just tuning in, and if you care about this for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons, you’ll want to start with (or stick with) our announcement that we have fully killed off auto-widening yellow brick roads. This is the part where we philosophize about why this is a good idea. Equivalently:...
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Schedule Breaks On All The Things!
2020-04-20 • by dreevesThere’s a huge irony in us shipping this feature during the coronavirus lockdown. Namely, none of us need it for the foreseeable future! Our calendars are like an infinite Euclidean half-plane covered in fresh snow. (Ok, fine, I floated that claim among some hardcore Beeminder users and they vehemently...
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Feature Unannouncement: Death To Custom Lane Widths
2020-05-01 • by dreevesThis 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...
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Announcement: The Yellow Brick Half-Plane Has Arrived
2020-06-09 • by dreevesUntil 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...
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Road Ratchet Revamp Redresses "Ratcheting Breaks Breaks" Bug
2020-10-14 • by bsouleAre 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...
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Death To Lifetime Plans
2021-01-09 • by dreevesAnnouncement! Beeminder has stopped selling lifetime plans. Obviously if you already have one, we will honor it forever and ever . We’re just not selling new ones. We’ve thought about this hard and have five(ish) reasons: Inability to give lifetime people premium credit Special cases and complexity...
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Death To Weaselproofing; Announcing No-Excuses Mode
2022-02-22 • by dreevesPreviously on the blog, we pitched a particular framing of Beeminder in which paying is not punishment. People seem into it! Which is good because it was setting the stage for this announcement: We’ve killed the old weaselproofing feature and replaced it with something we think is much better: No-Excuses...
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Beeminder ♥ Beeminder: Introducing the Meta Integration
2022-12-30 • by dreevesImagine if signing up for Beeminder meant committing to use Beeminder. As part of signing up, you’d create a meta goal measuring the number of total datapoints added on all your other goals. Now the clock would be ticking to get an object-level goal created and to start adding data to it! That vision...
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X-Treme Nerd Interlude: How To Upgrade Your Stripe Checkout Integration In Just Four Easy Years!
2023-02-10 • by bsouleCirca 2019 or so Stripe released a big update to their Checkout product, the previous iteration of which we’ve been using to collect your payment info on Beeminder for over 11 years now. This is the tale of how it took us four years to migrate to that new version. Alright, it did not literally take four...
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Announcement: Signing Up For Beeminder Requires Hard-Committing To Use Beeminder
2023-03-10 • by bsouleThat’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) where there’s a soup...
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Feature Announcement: Parceling Out Goals Sting-ily
2023-04-13 • by dreevesYou know how it used to be that you only got three goals on Beeminder’s free plan? Well stop the presses! Now you get three goals on Beeminder’s free plan, and you earn extra goals by derailing existing goals. Does that still sound kind of restrictive? Dare I say… stingy? (The bee puns, in addition to...
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The Rainbow Dashboard And Other New Features
2024-03-13 • by dreevesYou know what we heard people like? Listicles! Here are the top 5 new Beeminder features and updates we randomly want to tell you about! If your favorite isn’t here, check the full list of 4,812 of them. (You read that right — Beeminder’s over-a-decade-long changelog has close to 5,000 entries and...
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Sort By Urgency
2024-04-17 • by dreevesLast month we announced a handful of new features and we’d like to start by adding one more to the list. Namely, if you fail to enter data on a do-less goal and Beeminder enters a pessimistic presumptive report (PPR) for you, that goal will sort to the top of your dashboard until you add the missing...
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Death To Zero Dollar Goals, Birth To Feet-Wetting Mode
2024-05-01 • by bsouleFirst, we’d like to present a foresight award to Beeminder (and Manifold) user ianminds, who predicted we’d do this almost a year ago. Cutting to the chase, here’s how things work now. As ever, when creating a goal, you can choose to have it start at $0 or to put $5 at stake from the get-go. The interface...
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Wetter Feet, The Reckoning
2024-05-15 • by dreevesA 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...
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Feature Announcement: Relative X-min
2024-08-21 • by dreevesIn a recent poll of most annoying things about Beeminder graphs there was a surprise winner. People really want to specify the plot range of their graphs using relative dates. Like always showing just the most recent month of data on the graph. Well, your wish is (sometimes, when we feel like it) our...
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Beeminder ♥ Oura
2024-08-31 • by shanaquiOnce again, we’re releasing an integration I’m enthusiastic about right around my birthday, and this time it wasn’t even planned that way! So what is Oura? They make wearable health trackers in the form of rings, which are super wearable and maybe even a little bit stylish. (Uh, don’t take any style...
About
Beeminder is goal-tracking with teeth. We plot your progress on a graph with a Bright Red Line (formerly Yellow Brick Road). If your datapoints cross that line, we take your money.
The Beeminder blog is a hodgepodge of productivity nerdery and behavioral economics written by the founders and various friends.
Start Here
Does Beeminder sound super crazypants? Just confusing? One of the first things you may want to check out is our User's Guide for New Bees. Check out other posts we're most proud of by clicking the "best-of" tag below. If you're a glutton for honey, the "bee-all" tag has everything we still think is worth reading. Other good ones are the "rationality" and "science" tags, if you're into that.
Tags
- bee-all (360)
- rationality (205)
- akrasia (187)
- navel-gazing (121)
- case studies (109)
- tips (98)
- best-of (92)
- meta (84)
- new features (82)
- FAQ (76)
- startups (70)
- nerdery (64)
- productivity porn (63)
- integrations (58)
- science (57)
- guest posts (51)
- quantified self (49)
- yellow brick road (48)
- PSA (47)
- dog food (46)
- ...and 180 more tags
Beeminder Community
Most of the action is in the Beeminder forum. Or if you want to be slightly social without risking getting distracted arguing on the internet, you can do pomodoros online in sync with other Beeminder users and productivity nerds in the Beeminder coworking room on Complice.
Akrasia
Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command over oneself"; adjective: "akratic") is the state of acting against one's better judgment, not doing what one genuinely wants to do. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.