Tag: road dial

Beeminder’s Achilles heel is that you need a meta-Beeminder to get yourself to create a Beeminder goal in the first place. (We sometimes call it Beeminder’s bootstrap problem.) Here’s a trick to mitigate that problem: Create a goal as soon as you think of it, but with an initial flat spot of a week or...

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

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...

There’s a huge irony in us shipping this feature during the coronavirus lockdown. Namely, none of us need it for the foreseeable future! Our calendars are like an infinite Euclidean half-plane covered in fresh snow. (Ok, fine, I floated that claim among some hardcore Beeminder users and they vehemently...

The road dial was one of the first Beeminder features, announced almost 5 years ago when we were still in private beta. It lets you adjust the steepness of your yellow brick road — how much you’ve committed to doing — with a one-week delay. For most people most of the time, that’s all you need. You do...

For 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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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

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...