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How To Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding
2011-01-24 • by dreeves[A version of this article was originally published at Messy Matters by Daniel Reeves.] Many of us have a problem following through on our intentions. And it’s more than just a difficulty in predicting our future desires. It’s not like “Gee, I thought I wanted to get in shape but it turned out there was...
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The Want-Can-Will Test for Akrasia
2011-10-24 • by dreevesFailing to live a healthy lifestyle is or would be, for most of us, a classic failure of rationality — not acting in our own overall best interests. There certainly are people (including the terminally ill, but others as well) who are exceptions, for whom an unhealthy lifestyle is rational. For example,...
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Monkey Brains and Multiple Selves
2012-04-24 • by guestOur bodies and minds have evolved to enjoy life right here and now because it could be gone tomorrow. We crave fatty foods because they gave us extra padding in case we couldn’t eat next week. We crave sweets because they gave us energy to keep ourselves alive. Then came all the conveniences of the modern world.
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Hammers and Chisels
2012-06-20 • by dreevesWe have a new competitor about to launch: Lift! Their (meta) goal is the same as ours. They want to “eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals”. Our approaches, however, are quite opposite. Or at least they have opposite sign. Lift emphasizes in their pre-announcement blog post today that they...
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Synonyms for Self-Binding
2012-07-21 • by dreevesWe’ve been collecting a list of synonyms for the crazy lifehack that sites like Beeminder facilitate. In addition to us being shameless SEO-whores, it seems like this list could be genuinely useful for humans, especially the kind of humans who read the Beeminder Blog. Here’s how a co-founder of StickK...
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Beeminder is S.M.A.R.T., Overcomes Bias
2012-08-23 • by dreevesKatja Grace, long praised by economists and now collaborating with one since joining Robin Hanson’s OvercomingBias blog, just wrote a pretty amazing article about how much Beeminder improves her life. She made several important points, one of which is particularly reblogworthy, especially if we take...
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Everything is Amazing, Even Gratitude Journaling
2013-01-24 • by dreevesMy first reaction to the idea of gratitude journaling — which I didn’t realize was a thing, until people started beeminding it — was, well, I’ll spare you my snark. Then I tried to articulate my knee-jerkery and came up with this: It seems to have a protesteth-too-much vibe. I mean, what’s not to be grateful for? Everything is amazing! Even the
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Catch-up Unmustered; or, Easier is Harder
2013-06-14 • by bsouleRule #1 of Beeminder: Things that make staying on the yellow brick road easier make reaching your overall goal harder. There’s no free lunch. Any leniency today will get paid for down the (wait for it) Road. (Update from the future: Our switch from “Yellow Brick Road” to “Bright Red Line” kind of...
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Beeminding Sin
2013-07-03 • by Wolf TivyFor a long time I found that I was spending too much time on certain unproductive things and struggled with getting myself to do what I actually wanted to do with my time. The big break came one morning when I noticed that there was a very tight correlation between the things I wanted to stop doing and the traditional Christian concept of
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Spiraling Into Control
2013-07-24 • by Nick WinterThis is a guest post by Nick Winter, cofounder of Skritter and CodeCombat and author of The Motivation Hacker. He also works on Quantified Mind. We’ve mentioned Nick Winter and The Motivation Hacker before, in particular because we were so enamored with Nick’s beeminding of romantic gestures to his...
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Combatting Cheating
2013-08-24 • by dreevesThe second most puzzling thing about Beeminder, for those who don’t use it, is why people don’t lie to avoid paying us. Here’s why! Beeminder is foremost a Quantified Self tool, so it feels really wrong and counterproductive to falsify your data. People take a lot of pride in their graphs since it’s...
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Be Nice To Yourself
2014-01-13 • by bsouleI originally wrote this as a beemail and everyone seemed to love it, so I’ve blogged it for the rest of the world to see. I do realize how vaguely self-serving this advice is. And perhaps hard to generalize to people who are not founders of Beeminder. But it works for me! With the new year, and bunch...
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Beeminding Your Way Out of Your Comfort Zone
2014-05-14 • by Jess WhittlestoneRecently, I’ve been trying to get myself out of my comfort zone more often. I’ve been finding it… uncomfortable. One thing I’ve been trying to do is talk to strangers more frequently. I genuinely want to get better at this. I think it will make me more comfortable socially as well as being a valuable skill generally. But every time I
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Beating Beeminder Burnout
2014-06-04 • by dreevesHere’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
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The Type Bee Personality
2014-07-29 • by dreevesPeople often ask, sometimes incredulously, what kind of person uses Beeminder. We’ve found that the following personality traits are required: 1. Akratic (obviously), 2. Ambitious/motivated (ironically), 3. Self-aware (knowing the limits of one’s motivation), 4. High-integrity (to not spoil the whole point by
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Monkeys Are Afraid of Bees
2015-04-09 • by Mary RenaudThis 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....
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Cranial Silicosis and Paths of Least Resistance
2015-07-16 • by dreevesFor those just tuning in, let’s review the Three Great Beeminder Epiphanies. The Yellow Brick Road — bringing long-term consequences near (and using the graphs as the basis for commitment contracts) The Road Dial and the Akrasia Horizon — flexible self-control (getting the most out of commitment contracts...
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Ego Depletion Depletion
2016-03-09 • by dreevesThis is crossposted on Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done blog. The big news in psychology this week is that Baumeister’s Ego Depletion model is bunk. At least it has failed to replicate. I’m trying not to gloat too much but I’ve been pooh-poohing Ego Depletion for years. My take has been, based on...
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What Is Willpower?
2016-03-21 • by dreevesOur previous post, “Ego Depletion Depletion,” generated a lot of discussion and I found I was contradicting myself on the question of what willpower is exactly. First a recap, hopefully in plainer English, about what all the fuss is about. A big finding in psychology is that “willpower is like a muscle”....
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Walking On Custard
2016-04-14 • by Neil HughesWhen we were smaller we’d take pains to point out that our guest bloggers weren’t just friends of ours. I mean, they usually are friends of ours, but they’ve generally been Beeminder fans who then became friends. (Turns out hardcore beeminding is a strong predictor for us liking you a lot!) The point...
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Team Black vs Team Yellow: The Two Styles of Beeminding
2016-08-25 • by Oliver MayorThis 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...
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The "I Will" System
2017-08-09 • by dreeves“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...
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Psychoanalyzing Beeminder
2017-11-22 • by Michele Gregoire GillWe’re excited to have Prof Michele Gregoire Gill guest blogging for us! She’s a bonafide expert in what Beeminder is trying to do. Also she personally is a dedicated Beeminder user for the last 3 years. She’s here to tell us about how she came to love Beeminder and why! I’m a research psychologist who...
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Negative Reinforcement ≠ Punishment
2018-01-12 • by Michele Gregoire GillProf Michele Gregoire Gill is back! In her previous post she mentioned that Beeminder, in large part, motivates her via negative reinforcement. If you think that makes her sound like a masochist, or that she must set scary high monetary penalties on her goals, then you’re probably under a very common...
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Does Practice Make Perfect?
2018-04-07 • by Ivana KurecicIvana Kurecic is a PhD student in quantum information theory who beeminds dozens of things. One of her hobbies is translating incomprehensible scientific papers into stuff you should care about, at Happy Turtle Things, and today we’re lucky to get a taste of that (with a Beeminder tie-in, of course)....
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Slytherin 404 Errors
2018-07-19 • by dreevesUPDATE 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...
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Motivational Archetypes
2019-09-11 • by dreevesWhich motivational archetype do you most identify with: Philosopher — better understand the universe, live the life of the mind Hedonist — go on adventures, have wild romances Caregiver — have meaningful relationships, raise children Creator — make beautiful things, make enduring things Politician — lead...
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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...
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Self-Isolation Strategies: Nikki’s Operation Safety Bubble
2020-03-31 • by shanaquiYour 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...
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The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment: A Retrospective
2020-10-03 • by dreevesBy popular demand — specifically, being the winner of our poll — we’re catching you up on the latest research on the marshmallow test! The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment concluded that preschool kids who could resist gobbling a marshmallow for 15+ minutes in order to earn two marshmallows went on...
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Previously on the Beeminder blog: debating negative vs positive reinforcement and, in case you care about using these psychology terms correctly, clarifying that negative reinforcement ≠ punishment. Also “Beeminder: Like Pact Except All We Do Is Take Your Money”. Here’s a common (pointed) question about...
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Is Beeminder A Crutch?
2021-04-21 • by dreevesBeeminder creates a series of intermediate daily deadlines, working towards some desired long-term goal. As you probably know, it does that with real-money commitment devices. It’s common to come down to the wire on those deadlines every dang day. It’s powerful motivation. But is it… too powerful? If...
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Make A Plan To Forget
2021-08-26 • by dreevesThis 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...
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Book Review: How To Change
2021-12-15 • by dreevesEarlier this year we completed a lovely Beeminder book club to read behavioral scientist Katy Milkman’s new book, How To Change. The discussion all happened in the amazing Beeminder forum but as a private group of 18 of us, so we could trash talk the book guilt-free (or just to be able to talk more...
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Paying Is Not Punishment
2022-02-09 • by dreevesUPDATE: See follow-up post announcing No-Excuses Mode. An under-appreciated fact about Beeminder is that it doesn’t force you to do anything. It just puts prices on things and you continue to do whatever you feel like doing, factoring in those prices. Just like you might buy a box of cookies if the...
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Troubleshooting My Toothbrush
2022-06-09 • by shanaquiWorking in Beeminder support, it’s hard to avoid noticing that folks sometimes feel a bit embarrassed about their goals. Or at least of the fact that they need to beemind learning how to juggle goslings when everyone else is born knowing how. So let me put it right out there: my most socially embarrassing...
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Is Beeminder Self-Blackmail?
2022-06-23 • by dreevesBeeminder user Parrhesia recently told us about a failed attempt to proselytize Beeminder. The person he recommended it to said they knew about Beeminder and viewed it as self-blackmail. That it degrades trust in your future self. They advocated behavior change by bringing your present self and future...
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Beeminder vs CBT
2022-09-15 • by Nathan ArthurNathan Arthur (aka narthur, of TaskRatchet fame and who we’re now proud to also have on the Bee Team part-time) had such an amazing response to some Beeminder skepticism in a forum thread about Beeminder vs CBT that we asked him to blog about it. The backstory is that sometimes people accuse Beeminder...
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Psychological Pricing
2022-09-29 • by dreevesThe other day (a Very Other day, because I’ve pulled this from the bottom of Quite A Pile of blog post drafts) we were musing idly amongst ourselves about what the psychological effect would be if Beeminder pledges were amounts like $4.99. The answer is it doesn’t matter because I can’t stand so-called...
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Derailing It Is Nailing It
2023-03-24 • by shanaquiWe’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...
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Wolf vs Harford on The Power of No vs Yes
2023-07-12 • by dreevesHere are two handy wisdom nuggets: (1) Adam Wolf’s trick of committing now to start doing something in 30 days (i.e., create a goal with a 30-day initial buffer) to overcome the mental friction of getting yourself on the hook. (2) Tim Harford’s heuristic of only
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.
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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.