Tag: self-binding

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....

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...

Working 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

Beeminder is four years old! We’d liiike to get this blog post started by telling you what we’ve been working on this last year (revamped reminders! so many new integrations! new versions of smartphone apps! meetups and Quantified Self!), buuut you’re probably more interested in the question of whether...

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...

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...

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 official integration: Misfit! Look at us, all featured in their gallery and everything! This is an especially exciting integration for us personally -- our esteemed CEO has been wearing his Misfit Shine literally 24/7 for a year and a half now. As a welcome to Misfit users new to Beeminder, we'll start with a recap of what Beeminder is all about. For the full story, start at the very beginning. If you're just eager

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

In which Danny dispenses advice on beeminding your bucket list. This first came up in the context of maniac weeks but don’t stop reading if you think those are idiotic! It’s about how to make sure you do something you intend to do but which isn’t amenable to just putting on your calendar or otherwise...

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...

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...

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...

This post is by Erica Edelman, our very first employee! She’s been knocking our socks off since we met her a couple months ago, and apparently the feeling was mutual because last week she moved to Portland from Columbus, Ohio to start with us full-time. The main excuse to hire her was that she’ll be...

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...

After adding Jawbone last month, I realized that we could be approaching an asymptote in Beeminder’s coverage for integrations. We’ve covered some of the most popular apps and devices, but their numbers are exploding, and there’s no way we could hope to keep up. Even by beeminding them — it doesn’t pass...

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...

This 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...

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...

This is crossposted on AndyBrett.com. The third James Bond movie, Goldfinger, opens with an amphibious mission to destroy an illicit chemical processing facility. After emerging from the water and planting the explosives, Bond strips off his drysuit to reveal a perfectly pressed white tuxedo and calmly...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This is a guest post by Josh Jordan. While waiting for a Beeminder beta account, I tried using StickK to help me lose some fat. StickK is a brilliant concept and I hope they succeed in a big way, but I don’t like their weekly weigh-ins, for two reasons: It’s way too easy to temporarily and unhealthfully...

We hate to promote our competition but TimeCarrot.com is an interesting idea (albeit rough around the edges) that some of you will be interested in. Most of you know about StickK.com, which facilitates commitment contracts on arbitrary goals (but no visualization or automatic daily accountability, like...

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?...

This is an interesting case study. Martin put $5k at risk on a very conservative goal — spending at least 8 hours a week on a house renovation project for a total of 249 hours by May 5. He actually signed the contract on Oct 21, right before he started shooting up above his yellow brick road. He maintained...

This is a guest post by Beeminder user Jill Renaud. I hate my current gym. It is a budget gym with no classes, machines in disrepair, and the other members can be downright rude. I can be patiently waiting for a machine and be cut off by a gym rat. A literal rat. (Kidding. It’s not quite that bad.) So...

[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...