Tag: rationality

Remember Fractional Beeminding? We’ve been putting it to great use for such goals as Our meta goal to keep churning out autodata integrations Project Euler, and Workerbee-Visible Improvements. A key clarification before reviewing how it works: fractional beeminding doesn’t mean beeminding something with...

Question from the internet: What do we mean by calling Beeminder hyperrational goal tracking? Before I give my answer, here’s a recent example from the inventor of Ruby on Rails using “hyperrational” in the context of sociopathic companies: [Fines on tech companies] put a price on criminal behavior,...

Beeminder as the nuclear option means beeminding something as an insurance policy. You have a nice graph of your progress but you maintain enough safety buffer that you’re not in danger of derailing and getting stung (being charged money for going off track on your goal, for those just tuning in). In...

Being a smidge embarrassed by the term “user-squeaming”, we sat on this draft for years. But when we used it again this morning we decided the concept handle had officially stuck and figured it was time to give it the imprimatur of a blog post. User-squeaming means being excessively squeamish about what...

This blog post started its life during the pandemic, as part of a series in the daily beemail called Madhack Mondays. Here’s a highly beemindable workout idea for the dead of winter if you have stairs in your house. Put 100 marbles or legos or whatever in a bowl at the bottom of your stairs. Then...

Grayson Bray Morris has been a bright spot in the Beeminder community almost since the beginning. She’s currently taking a break from the internet, but before she peaced out she gave us permission to canonize this classic 2015 (!) post from her old blog, by publishing it here on Beeminder’s blog. The...

We have two excuses to blog about this. First, we’re using our new group goals feature to experiment with something we’re calling Book Brigades. To quote myself from the forum post about it: A book brigade is a very small group of very like-minded

Group goals are alive! Multiple people can all commit to a single goal! Find it in the Settings tab below your graph: Backing up, this has been in private beta for over a year. Then this past weekend I was at Manifest (which was pretty amazing, btw, highly recommended, and tons of Beeminder fans) where...

The Beeminder YNAB integration is officially launched! YNAB is, certainly for the kind of people who read this blog, the best tool for budgeting. Beeminder is the best tool for getting you to use your budget. It’s a match made in money heaven. (YNAB is short for You Need A Budget and is pronounced “why-nab”.)...

WakaTime bills itself as “dashboards for developers”. It tracks various productivity metrics as you code, which it tracks via a plugin for your editor of choice. Yes but I use QuackPad Pro++: The Duck-Typed Editor You’re in luck! Well not you, weirdo. But if your editor of choice actually exists then...

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...

It’s funny how often advice seeking takes the form, “Oh man, I don’t know how to convey XYZ,” and the person you’re asking replies, “How about literally ‘XYZ’?” And you’re like, “Huh. Yeah, wow, I am a genius, thanks!” There’s probably a lesson there for relationships but I mention it because it happened...

Some people don’t need Beeminder, and our hats are off to them. Some people are psychologically incompatible with Beeminder, which is fine, there are other techniques they can use. And then there are the people who create DIY Beeminders. For example, you can share a spreadsheet with a friend and send...

Do you know about Pigouvian taxes? I’m sad that normal humans don’t know about this. There are so many things that liberals and conservatives argue about that Pigouvian taxes just magically resolve into the best of both worlds! But googling it yields a sea of impenetrable economics jargon, so let me...

Happy Solstice! We have a meta-gift for you: Honeygrams! Meta-gift? Yes, you can now gift your honey money (FKA premium credit), even to people who don’t yet have a Beeminder account (give the gift of Beeminder?). It looks like this: If you put an email address in the “To” field instead of a Beeminder...

Thanks to Stephen Covey (of “7 habits” fame) for popularizing if not inventing this metaphor / concept handle, and to David Ernst (of Secure Internet Voting fame) for pointing that out. Also to Scott Alexander for the concept handle concept handle. If you’re failing to carve out time for something...

Here’s an obvious principle of personal finance: If you can spend $100 now to prevent spending $200 next year, definitely do that. But in startup finance, it can totally make sense to decide to pay the $200 next year. Because your business is growing exponentially and $200 next year may easily be less...

Today I would like to pick a fight with WordPress. I’m still a huge fan of the company (Automattic). They’ve done a lot for us over the years and I have good friends who work there. But blog posts work better as beefs so forget all that. Let’s talk about what a wrongy-wrongpants WordPress is with their...

Probably no Manifold users have a gambling problem (maybe just that one guy?) but, just in case, now Manifold can say it has what casinos call a self-exclusion program. Kind of? Mostly we expect this to be useful the other way around. Maybe Scott Alexander

We’re slightly behind for the traditional September start date, but it’s not too late! The semester at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine started on 2nd October, and (thanks to Beeminder!) I got started back on my studies toward my distance learning MSc already. I don’t know about any of you, but whenever the new school year starts it feels like

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

A fun fact about predicting your own behavior, particularly publicly, is that the act of predicting it changes the prediction. “I’m 75% likely to maintain my Duolingo streak all year, but now that I’ve said so I’m actually 90% likely, but now that I’ve said that, …” Or what happens when the probability starts very low but you add a wager? It’s like this self-describing xkcd

Here are two facts about elite athletes that sound contradictory at first blush but aren't: 1. Elite athletes, being more efficient at propelling themselves, burn fewer calories per mile than muggles. 2. Elite athletes, being better at turning calories into motion, burn more calories per hour than muggles. It all makes

There are a lot of things in the category of “nerd tendencies I’ve had to unlearn”. I often turn them into capital-P Principles as a way to drill them into my head. Eventually I intend to collect them all into a meta post but here are a few random examples in the meantime: the Anti-Magic Principle, the Anti-Settings Principle, the Shirk-n-Turk Principle, and the Anti-Robustness

Here 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

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

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...

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) where there’s a soup...

“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 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 2013 blog post about beeminding outside the box: I especially love beeminding hobbies because it is both an enforcement and an excuse....

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...

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...

As you likely know if you’ve ever beeminded your weight, you can add a moving average line on top of your data on your Beeminder graph. You can also add a so-called aura around your datapoints. The idea is to see trends in your data without being distracted by daily fluctuations, particularly when data...

It’s official! Beemind anything with an RSS feed! This is a slightly nerd-oriented integration but copying and pasting URLs around is really the only skill you need to set this up. And then once it’s set up, you don’t need to do anything at all ever (except for the thing you’re beeminding of course)....

Beeminder is very good at keeping you on the wagon but it’s still possible to fall off. When that happens, why does it? We’ve asked people that a lot over the years and thought we’d collect the reasons. 1. Bugs or other technical issues with Beeminder From our perspective, there are still plenty of bugs...

Beeminder is not just for the productivity-über-alles types who try polyphasic sleep and whatnot. I mean, it can definitely accommodate that, if that’s what you’re into. Stress can be valuable, we get it. But what if you already have too much stress? Should you avoid Beeminder? We are very biased but...

The 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...

Nathan 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...

Today’s post (content warning: weight loss) was inspired by Jacob Falkovich and David B. Clear. First, an update on my previous weight loss post from back in April, Alliterative Alimentation. I’d only been doing that for a couple months then and it’s now been over 6 months and it continues to go swimmingly....

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...

Huge thanks to Geoff Hubbard (aka insti) for a delightful meetup in Copenhagen, including board games and nerding out about Beeminder and other topics. We just got home and Beeminder wants us to publish a blog post. Since we’re jetlagged, and since World War II has been on our minds, here’s something...

Beeminder 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...

Let us start by saving you a lot of time: No. Beeminder does not need to or want to be on the blockchain. Are you still here? We figured we’d write about this now because a new Beeminder competitor called STEPN has been getting lots of buzz lately. The idea with STEPN is that you ante some hundreds...

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...

Want to hear my latest weirdo approach to diet? Probably you do, out of morbid curiosity at least. My goal in concocting this was to implement something a bit like intermittent fasting as a weight management strategy, and also to nudge my eating in a healthier direction. Also I like alliteration. More...

This is a sequel to the previous post on Backlog Freshening. It’s been gratifying to hear testimonials from you all about how valuable you’ve found this — for tasks in TaskWarrior, songs in one’s piano repertoire, and of course issues in GitHub. By popular demand, here’s Support Czar Nicky with the...

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...

Previously 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...

UPDATE: 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...

This is still pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing but it makes me very happy. Not just because I love pie-in-the-sky philosophical navel-gazing (we could say Product Vision if we wanted to sound more respectable) but because a couple years ago this sounded preposterously theoretical and fantastical...

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,...

Earlier 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...

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...

We are overdue for a blog post about using Beeminder for school and studying. In the very early days of Beeminder, we had a brilliant guest post from Gandalf Saxe when he was a wee undergrad. Now he’s an engineer at Apple, working on Siri. We’re going to go ahead and take a chunk of credit for that. His...

This is part 2 of our two-part series on loss aversion. Previously we explained loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. Here we (as Beeminder) disavow loss aversion as a tool for behavior change. This isn’t like “Ego Depletion Depletion” or other debunking posts we’ve done. We...

This is part 1 of a two-part series. First we explain loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. (Spoiler: loss aversion is a generalization of the endowment effect.) Asking Google how those things are different currently yields a fog of opaque logorrhea, so we hope this is enlightening....

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...

This is a revised and slightly expanded version of something we originally wrote as part of our post on Bayesian Willpower. Immediate incentives are inordinately powerful. Beeminder’s philosophy is to find ways to make your immediate incentives match your long-term incentives such that willpower needn’t...

Beeminder 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...

A couple weeks ago, Scott Alexander wrote “Toward a Bayesian Theory of Willpower”. This is my recap of the theory, my tentative verdict, and what I think it means for Beeminder and motivation hacking more generally. Let’s start with defining terms! Akrasia means failing to do something you rationally...

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...

“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...

Beeminder’s bug classification system is like so: Bitty Bugs are barely bothersome. Baneful Bugs make Beeminder blatantly wrong, but not in any breach-of-contract way, unlike… Bum-steer Bugs which may make you derail by leading you astray about the state of your graph, or, worse: Bamboozle Bugs making...

Announcement! 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...

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:...

Sometimes Beeminder goals have loopholes, like you could dehydrate yourself to get your datapoint below the bright line on your weight-loss graph (please don’t!). There are plenty of things like that and I probably shouldn’t think too hard about more examples. Sometimes loopholes like that can ruin...

By popular demand… (I.e., thank you to our fantabulous community for the impetus to write this post!) This is crossposted at essay.dev. Not to brag but our users are constantly telling us that Beeminder’s customer support is shockingly good. The best they’ve ever seen, even. Long ago we wrote about...

For years we’ve gotten advice to widen our appeal. We shall now explain why you’re all wrong. Let’s start with an intuition-shaping factoid: GitHub is focused 100% on developers even though writers and designers and many other categories of people could be — ought to be! — using version control. (Additional...

I want to read more books. I already read a lot of books, but I want to read more! It sounds like that should be a simple thing to beemind. Do-more graph, set the rate to however many books I want to read per day/month/year, go! It has turned out that it’s a lot more complicated than that, and because...

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...

By 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...

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...

Writing software involves a lot of backing yourself into corners. For even the simplest-seeming program, you find yourself adding duct tape and chewing gum to satisfy different requirements and logic bugs that come up. Then you gradually whittle it back down and end up with a few simple lines and it’s...

This is crossposted on essay.dev. It seems like every time I talk about principles of software engineering to you all I get jaw-droppingly insightful replies. No pressure. Ok, if you google “documentation-driven development”, it seems to be a lot of people saying that documentation is so important that...

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...

What’s the most absurdly provocative way I can put this? Never imagine what your users will want! Apps must only ever do one single thing! If-statements considered harmful! Yes, this is all pretty rich coming from the people who built a goal-tracking app with, if I’m doing this math right, multiplying...

This is another tech nerd post. Normal humans seek cover!   Abstract: Fail loudly and immediately.   (I sure hope all the normal humans took cover already because that sentence sure would sound different to them than to us! I also hope this isn’t all too obvious for actual programmers but I predict you’ll...

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...

Being a fan of overly provocative titles, I was tempted to title this “If-Statements Considered Harmful”. Meaning that it’s so tempting to add little bits of intelligence to your app to make it do the sensible thing in different circumstances. And that’s usually perfectly correct but the Anti-Magic Principle...

For background on the Yellow Brick Half-Plane that a normal human could conceivably care about, see our previous post on how we’re killing the custom lane widths feature. This post is strictly for abnormal humans, and/or, more realistically, for ourselves, because math is fun, and for our future selves,...

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...

The startup egg-basket principle is: put all your eggs in one basket. Be laser-focused on the one thing you’re best at. If you’re scrambling for survival, focus only on the one most promising thing for making the startup sustainable. For example, most startups should focus exclusively on their premium...

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...

We 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...

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...

UPDATE 2021:We’re pausing (most of) these dogfood bounties! We still like them in theory but it turns out we all derail often enough that the logistics of getting money from us to users is more than we can keep up with! We do personally enter our personal credit cards in Beeminder and get charged money...

Ok, there’s “technically” and there’s “technically”. If your definition of a vegetarian is “someone who never eats meat” then I’m pretty stuck on making good on this title. But someone who ate meat in the past and doesn’t anymore counts, of course. So maybe there’s wiggle room here? Someone who eats meat...

Which 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...

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...

This is part 2 in a 3-part series. Part 1 defined Pareto dominance and Pareto-efficient software. Part 3 is a case study.   I have some advice that now feels (to me, subjectively) too obvious to bother to tell you. But it was once pretty contentious here in the beehive. So I predict you’ll either find...

Content note: I started writing a post announcing a (Pareto-inefficient) change to the pledge cap interface and realized I first needed a post about what we call the Pareto Dominance Principle. But before that we needed a post about Pareto dominance. So, hooray, a whole mini blog series! Stay tuned...

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...

It’s funny how universal it is for users (including programmers, including myself) to gravitate so strongly to “it’s probably just me / my crappy phone / my timezone / me not reading the webcopy / me not being deserving of love or working software / etc”. It might be an impulse to be kind and not blame...

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”....

Lawrence Evalyn has been beeminding for almost 7 years and we’re very proud to have him guest posting for us. If this whets your appetite, check out his professional blog where he’s written about beeminding his comprehensive exams. (Graphs and charts and spreadsheets oh my!) And if you like spreadsheets...

“Potentially Paying Customers” We ended the last blog post with what you might think is an unfortunate epithet for new Beeminder users. Being buried at the end of a bunch of nitty-gritty about business reasons for the timing of collecting payment info, approximately zero percent of people noticed it,...

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...

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...

January 1st being a culturally significant temporal landmark, it’s not as silly as it may seem to focus on it as a natural time to make New Year’s resolutions, or to set general goals for 2019. We’d go so far as to say it’s those pooh-poohing New Year’s resolutions (including our past selves!) who...

Zachary Jacobi has been beeminding since 2015, when he started using Beeminder (on the recommendation of Malcolm Ocean of Complice fame) to help him stick to his writing goals. He’s been at it ever since, with 19 active goals now. Today he’s here to tell us about how he set up his nifty Beeminder-branded...

We 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...

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...

Huge thanks to David Howell (see also his impressive Beeminder gallery) for valiantly coming to our defense after we were ruthlessly (not very ruthlessly) mocked in the Wall Street Journal. Two weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman investigated daily streak tracking among modern meditators....

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”,...

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...

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...

Ivana 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)....

First, this guest post is an absolute inspiration and we implore you to read it. We’ve talked about Brent Yorgey before in press roundups but we’ll assume you don’t read those and repeat our gushing in this introduction. If you don’t know him, Professor Yorgey is well-known in the Haskell community and...

This is going to start out sounding super common-sensical but will leap to a characteristically preposterous-sounding conclusion that I, characteristically, actually believe. Not as preposterous-sounding as, say, beeminding bites, but still. The obvious part is that if you have food left on your plate...

Prof 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...

Special guest post by Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex! This was originally published on LessWrong in 2012 but was in want of a better home. So it may be an exaggeration to call it a guest post when all Scott did was give us his blessing to resurrect it. But we figure he’s started down a slippery...

We’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...

We know this is going to read like an April Fool’s joke to plenty of you. [UPDATE: To clarify, “bites” means mouthfuls, not like up-and-down motions of your jaw! Hopefully that makes this all slightly less bonkers sounding.] Like, how is it not impossibly tedious to keep track of how many bites of food...

“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...

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...

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....

The tagline for Amazon Mechanical Turk is “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”. As in, faking your AI by using humans. Mechanical Turk is named after the contraption in the title image, which was a seeming chess-playing automaton from the late 1700s that was secretly operated by a small human hidden inside....

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...

If you spot one cockroach in your kitchen you can rest assured that there are hordes of them sneaking around not making themselves noticed. Or maybe possibly it was just that one passing through, but if you see another one you’re very probably supporting a colony with the biomass of a blue whale in...

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...

[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....

It’s one thing to see a gushing testimonial from someone in the honeymoon phase of using Beeminder. Professor Brent Yorgey wrote such a post in 2013 (“Beeminder has changed my life”) in which he detailed the myriad ways he was using Beeminder after discovering it 6 months prior. A whole other level...

When 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...

Our 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”....

This 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...

The doctrine of revealed preference — that you can infer someone’s utility function based wholly on what they choose to do — has an illustrious history. John Locke said “the actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.” And Ludwig von Mises said “the scale of values or wants manifests...

Another month (or so), another swarm of Beeminder buzz. Since new year’s resolution season just ended we got included in a lot of lists (resources for succeeding in college, resources for MBA students, apps to stay motivated in 2016, top resolution apps, and more apps to keep your 2016 resolutions). The...

This isn’t exactly new news but a few months ago we posted the video of Beeminder CTO Bethany Soule’s talk at the 2015 Quantified Self conference and we finally got the video for my talk at QS2015 as well so we’re posting that too! I’m including the whole transcript below after the embedded video but...

We’re honored to have Team Habitica here on the Beeminder blog to tell you more about Habitica and about using Habitica and Beeminder together. They’re in some ways very different but also quite compatible! For new year’s eve we wrote a guest post for the Habiticans, introducing them to Beeminderland....

It’s our 7th press roundup! This time we wanted an excuse to show off our coverage in last month’s issue of Discover Magazine. The author (who also covered us in The Washington Post earlier this year) does a good job of making accessible the research on and the underlying causes of akrasia, and defending...

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,...

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?)...

Deadlines are really important. Without them things don’t ever get shipped. But they’re also — if you can hard-commit to them, which you have to or else they’re pointless — kind of awful and arbitrary and stressful. Epiphany: Beeminder gives a way to get the key advantage of a deadline without the stress...

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,...

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...

As I write this, my cofounder (aka the Bee in Beeminder) is off running a 195-mile, 12-person relay race from Mt Hood to the Oregon coast, so tonight’s emergency blog post is up to me. I’m going to tell (part of) the story of how we keep getting ourselves into predicaments like running up and down steep...

This is a post by Philip Hellyer, which he wrote before Chelsea Miller’s recent Weasel Heart-To-Heart but which serves as a sequel, or perhaps a prequel — advice on avoiding those problems in the first place. Maybe you can be counted on to faithfully and unfailingly report true numbers to your own commitment...

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...

Another 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

This is crossposted on Messy Matters. Let’s talk about science! Beehavioral science. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last week has been all over the news. It’s much better than previous studies and statistics I’ve seen on the efficacy of commitment devices. Not because...

Announcement! 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...

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....

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 was tied for the most popular topic for us to write about in a mini straw poll of the daily beemail readers. I decided to blog it instead because a surprising number of people have proposed this over the years (also it’s a blog beemergency day). Beeminder users being, to put it mildly, rather sophisticated,...

One 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

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

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...

There’s something a little weird for me, intuitively, about beeminding parts of my spiritual life. After all, in Romans 12:19, it is written “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” So, if I turn to Beeminder to

Do you have trouble eating an appropriate amount of vegetables? Do you repeatedly buy them, then watch them wither and decay, feeling guilty about the waste of money and the impact on your health? Do you find healthy eating to be overwhelmingly complicated? I was like that for years. But for exactly one thousand days today, I have

We’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

A 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...

Yo Yo Yo and a buckle of gold, Beeminder just turned three years old! This time last year we were sitting in a hotel in San Francisco during the Quantified Self global conference, excited about our year of autodata integrations, exponential revenue growth, and being featured in the Wall Street Journal....

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

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...

People 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

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

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...

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

We were (and are) pretty pleased with our Duolingo integration but in this guest post, software developer and language-learning expert Eric Kidd puts that to shame. It’s seriously impressive. (If you’re a programmer we also highly recommend Eric’s blog, Random Hacks.) I learned to speak French in my...

Recently, 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

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...

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

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...

I 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...

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...

The 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...

For 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

Rule #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...

Remember our elaborate SOS clause? It describes in excruciating detail what to do if unforeseen circumstances cause you to drive off your yellow brick road. Well, we’ve since realized it suffices to just believe people. If you don’t want us to “just believe you” — it does have the danger of defeating...

My mom recently lost $5,000 to my brother in a commitment contract gone wild. That was started in part as an experiment early in Beeminder’s beta period before we’d thought of things like the exponential pledge schedule. Believe it or not, it was actually a pretty positive outcome: my mom gradually...

Let’s talk about some novel ways to use Beeminder! Whenever we hear about one of these I want to slap up a big smiling picture of the user in our “new favorite Beeminder” frame. First though, this entire post is a thinly veiled excuse to point out that OHMYGODGUYS Fog Creek likes us, they really really...

StickK popularized the idea of the anti-charity as a commitment device. Another [Update: former] Beeminder competitor, Aherk, offers to publish embarrassing photos of you on Facebook to ensure you don’t fall prey to akrasia. Another clever idea — proposed by Jennifer Hamon on Akratics Anonymous — is...

At the risk of launching a thousand rants from the old neckbeard guard, it’s hard to imagine what writing code was like before git and GitHub came along. GitHub has made it really easy for people to collaborate on projects, and gives you some nifty stats to boot. For some people, those shiny graphs are enough (and if that’s you, by all means, try out tenXer). But if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that

UPDATE 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...

My 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

“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!...

Answer: Still super crazy! Before we give a little one-year retrospective, allow us to demonstrate just how crazy we are. One of our long-time Beeminder users — and not someone we know in real life — just paid an $810 contract. That’s a new record and tops even me and Bethany. It sounds so ridiculous,...

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...

This is a guest post by Paul Fenwick (@pjf), founder of Perl Training Australia and internationally acclaimed public speaker and expert on mindhacks. We’re exceedingly proud to have his endorsement, which, belying the title, really is an endorsement! In point of disclosure, Paul is a personal friend...

Katja 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...

People often complain about Beeminder’s perverse incentives. We started to address that at the end of our recent blog post comparing ourselves to GymPact: It seems that from the perspective of those paying us, Beeminder is providing a ton of value and a ton of motivation and the occasional cost of derailment...

We’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...

This 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...

If it's important to you to [exercise / practice an instrument / eat better / you name it] but you find that you never get around to it (a 'round tuit', get it?), well, we have an app for that. Think of Beeminder as your Round Tuit dispenser.

Our 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.

[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.]

The problem of self-control may be a ridiculous first world problem but it's the granddaddy of first world problems and I want to solve it. We live amidst a deluge of opportunities for instant gratification, especially in the form of food and entertainment, and most of us don't handle it well. The general problem, known as akrasia, is this:

[This is a guest post by Gandalf Saxe.] Having been a university student for some years now, I've come to appreciate just how important it is to spread out your studying over the whole semester. It's the single most important aspect of good study technique. I'll even go so far as to advocate the opposite extreme of the typical student's modus operandi

Say you have a hard deadline in a month and you know you’ll end up down to the wire. You check the exact time of the deadline and see that it’s 9am. Groan! That portends a brutal all-nighter. Why (oh why) couldn’t they have made it 9pm the previous night? (Same story for deadlines that are timed so...

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...

[UPDATE: The new place for calling the Beeminder founders out when they derail on their meta goals is in the Beeminder forum.] Half a year ago, with Beeminder in its infancy, we committed to averaging one User-Visible Improvement (UVI) to Beeminder every day for at least the next six months. That contract...

Failing 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,...

Previously 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...

“I did all the right things and it didn’t work” The kind of people who say that, Beeminder is not for them. Beeminder is for goals you know you can achieve, and definitely want to achieve, yet historically have failed at. Some people don’t relate to the psychology there. Apparently you didn’t want it...

David Reiley is an economist and a Beeminder beta user, albeit one who has yet to partake of a commitment contract. He asks the following: For those of you who have given yourselves big incentives to do something, do you ever find that you are shortchanging other important areas of your life as a result?...

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:...

[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...