Tag: productivity porn

A lot of people are at one extreme or the other when it comes to organizing papers on their desk. Either it’s an unmitigated disaster or it’s a model of anal retention that they seem to spend far too much energy on. For years I’ve been achieving a reasonable middle ground by sticking to three categories:...

Beeminder makes pretty graphs of your progress. But if that’s your only reason to use Beeminder you might find it frustrating when your graph freezes because you deviated a bit from your Yellow Brick Road. More than the tracking — though that’s fundamental to it as well — we view Beeminder’s core feature...

If you’re a connoisseur of productivity porn then you probably already know about Mark Forster and his Get Everything Done blog. Or you might know his various time management books, the most well-known being “Do It Tomorrow”. He’s also the inventor of the AutoFocus system, which has been featured more...

[The Beeminder founders, Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves, presented at the Portland Quantified Self Meetup on April 10. This is what they said.] We’re excited to be here! We used to go to Quantified Self meetups in New York and we just moved here, to pursue the Portlandian Dream of working a couple hours a week in a coffee shop and going to clown school. [They hate it when you say that.]

UPDATE 2015: Big improvements to GmailZero!UPDATE 2019: More changes to GmailZero! Two years ago, when I still had a day job and Beeminder was just a side project, I wrote about my epic struggle with email: My email is dysfunctional. I keep things in my inbox because I can’t afford for them to go out...

This is a guest post by Alice Harris. It is crossposted on Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done blog which we’re long time fans of.   UPDATE 2020: This post has aged amazingly but if you’re here for a quick refresher, maybe you’ll like this handy quick start reference: Add an initial datapoint of 0...

“I’m akratic about how little TV I watch.” I might be the single most bizarre akratic on earth but I’ve noticed that I waste tons of time on stupid little distractions, yet rarely watch movies or TV. Sitting down to do so seems like such an extravagant use of time! I’ve already wasted so much of it!...

Lately 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.”...

This is a guest post by Philip Hellyer, who has done more in 2012 than he thought possible, with the help of Beeminder. He’s going to get a head start on 2013, and so could you. Here’s how. It’s approaching that time of year again. People will ask you about your resolutions for the new year. They might...

UPDATE: A revised and updated version of this article is now on Messy Matters. It’s amazing where one trivial user-visible improvement per day will eventually get you to. We’ve made 1000 user-visible improvements (UVIs) to Beeminder in the last 1000 days. We had to or we’d have owed one of our users...

It’s that season again. This time last year, Philip Hellyer urged us to get a jump on our resolutions. This year, we’re proud to have him officially part of the Beeminder team. New Years Resolutions are ridiculous. Your current delusionally euphoric self dictates something for your future self to do....

Our esteemed cofounder, Bethany Soule, gave a talk at the 2013 Global Quantified Self conference in San Francisco. We just got the video of it and wanted to share it with you, along with a transcript and the slides. See also our previous Quantified Self interview from 2011 and our previous Quantified...

At 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...

Here’s a perennial topic on Akratics Anonymous: How do you keep from feeling overwhelmed by all the myriad things things you’re beeminding? I'm going to repeat my advice buried in a previous blog post, which is actually to

Last week Danny took our children to Canada while I attempted a Nick Winter style maniac week. It was delightful, though less epic than its namesake. Nonetheless it was a massively productive work week for me compared to my average. Here’s a time-lapse video of me working. So fascinating! Look how...

When I first introduce people to Beeminder, they either recoil in horror or they want to dive right in. But the easiest way to defeat a new system is to overload it [1], so if you read this blog post and then immediately create a bunch of goals, I’ve probably failed. There are two obvious ways to overload a system: volume and intensity. In Beeminder terms, volume is creating more goals than you’re able to keep current, and intensity is setting too aggressive a slope. You might want to lose

We use the word “goal” a lot but, ironically, we agree with Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) who argues that goals are for losers. He points out that the most amazing people he knows tend not to just have goals that they achieve and then are done with, but systems for constantly improving. This is the biggest...

HabitRPG 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

If you’re reading the Beeminder blog there’s a 95% chance you know about the Pomodoro Technique. The idea is to decide a task, do focused work on it for 25 minutes, and then get up and take a 5-minute break. Rinse and repeat. Apparently it was invented in the 1980s but Danny independently invented...

Last week Bee talked about Tocks. That’s our neologism for 45-minute pomodoros, as well as our characteristically over-engineered system for minding them. She listed some gamification-y tips for effective tocking and assured everyone that all our other ideas involved money. That of course included beeminding tocks, as discussed last time, and certainly includes

Hello, I’m Tadeusz — tkadlubo on Beeminder and elsewhere. I’m a fairly regular middle class nerd. Early 30s. An engineering job in some corporate niche. A family. By many metrics I’m doing well: I’m basically healthy, I make a good living, I’m lucky enough to live in politically stable times (by Central European standards), and I face no immediate crises in my life. You can say all is well — or, depending on your perspective, that I’m coasting, and I’m ready to

This is a guest post by chipmanaged. We often describe guest post authors as “avid Beeminder users” but @chipmanaged takes the cake. Not only does she have 67 active Beeminder graphs, she’s written a custom dashboard for them, along with various tools using the Beeminder API that implement new features....

I recently had a highly disruptive event in my life. Overnight my priorities rapidly changed, and not all of my Beeminder goals made sense anymore. This is the story of how I dealt with my commitments during a period of stress. When real life changes suddenly, you deal with it. Your beemergency days are no longer relevant. When the first derailment happened, I

UPDATE 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...

Connoisseurs of productivity porn, which we’re afraid to say this blog may count as, probably know about the Seinfeld Hack, also known as Don’t Break The Chain. The idea’s so simple (in a good way) that you don’t even need to follow the link to LifeHacker [UPDATE: Jerry Seinfeld has disavowed this so...

Once again our esteemed cofounder, Bethany Soule, aka the Bee in Beeminder, gave a talk at the Global Quantified Self conference in San Francisco. But you don’t have to take our word for it. We now have video proof. We’re also sharing the transcript and slides, in case anyone cares that much. It’s based...

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,...

We’re hugely impressed with both Malcolm Ocean and his now two-year-old startup, Complice. We’re especially proud that Malcolm’s been beeminding User-Visible Improvements to Complice since the beginning. Complice is quite beautifully done (maybe thanks in part to the more than 600 improvements logged?)...

My cofounder and I are proud to be featured on the latest Sources & Methods podcast. One of many things we talk about in that episode is Dilbert creator Scott Adams’s claim that goals are for losers. We’ve decided that our response to that needs to be its own blog post. So, for those just tuning in,...

[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....

This 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...

This is a guest post by Oliver Mayor, an avid Beeminder user for going on four years. He’s a software developer who’s interested in human-behavior-shaping technology and often has pretty deep insights related to Beeminder. We were especially impressed with his thoughts on the different modes of beeminding...

Picking 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...

You may have heard the term “Maniac Weekend” around these parts before. It refers to a focused, concentrated 2.5-day period where one tries to cram in as much focused work time as possible. Sometimes these weekends have actually been Maniac Weeks, requiring as much focus as possible over the course of...

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...

“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 from the evil one.” — Matthew...

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 us mailing you stickers) by writing...

Brennan K. Brown is back with the sequel to his previous article. It’s a wonderful collection of advice and insight about creating Beeminder goals. Recommended reading for newbees and veterans alike! In my previous article, I talked about Beeminder’s unique way of thinking about goal-setting and self-accountability....

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 friends values us (well, and Beeminder) so highly! We’re extra verklempt. Especially since Kim is one of the most productive and...

We’re honored to have Marcin Borkowski guest blogging for us today. Dr. Borkowski is a professor and programmer in Poland, and a hardcore Beeminder user for four years now with 39 active goals. This post is highly nerdcentric but starts with some examples of powerful beeminding that should be inspiring...

We called Brent Yorgey’s previous guest post an absolute inspiration, but we misspoke. That post was highly pragmatic advice that everyone should read. It’s this post that’s the pure inspiration. We hope it gives you new ideas for things to beemind! In my previous post, “Beeminding All The Things”,...

Malcolm Ocean has been on both sides of the accountability relationship. Among the many roles he’s played is professional accountability provider: initially as Beeminder’s beekeeper, and now also independently with people who use his app, Complice, and want 1-on-1 help. He also has experience making...

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 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”....

Huge thanks to Malcolm Ocean, Christina Willner, and Sean Fellows for conversations that led to this post. PS: As for the startups used as examples in this post: Beeminder and Complice are BFFs and talk about each other all the time. (Really, allll the time.) Amazing Marvin is the newer kid on the...

We’re delighted to have a guest post today by Thomas Kahn (who we were also fortunate enough to meet last month at the Frankfurt Beeminder meetup). Thomas is trained as a lawyer and studies how productivity techniques can help law students succeed in their exams. In 2015 he founded the Basiskarten...

If you’re a fan of Mark Forster (as we certainly are) then this whole post amounts to giving a name — “redqueening” — to step 2 of his Backlog Method, which I summarize like so: (1) Isolate your backlog, (2) make sure you’re redqueening and not feeding that backlog, and (3) (bee)mind the backlog. There’s...

It’s now been ten years since the publication of Gollwitzer et al’s paper about, as the internet interpreted it, keeping your goals to yourself. I think I’ve heard variants of “did you hear that science shows that you’re more likely to achieve your goals if you don’t tell anyone?” many dozens of times...

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...

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...

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...

Programming note (not that kind of programming; we could call it a doubly meta note?): The blog is now mobile-friendly! You’re welcome. This week we (by which I mean our robotic minions, by which I mean Google Alerts) noticed a Beeminder-relevant blog post out on the internet. It’s very short so I can...

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:...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

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,...

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...

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.

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...

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

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...

We’re excited to be featured in a Humble Bundle! If you’re already familiar with Humble Bundle you might associate them pretty heavily with gaming and therefore be slightly confused right now. So first off, no, we’re not pivoting into games; we’re still leaving that up to Habitica. But when Humble Bundle...