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Fractionally Beeminding the Blog, and Other Stories
2024-10-30 • by dreevesRemember 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...
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The Five Beeminder Goals I Wish I'd Had In College
2023-10-18 • by shanaquiWe’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
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What Should Elite Athletes Beemind?
2023-08-09 • by dreevesHere 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
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The Anti-Ontology Principle
2023-07-27 • by dreevesThere 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
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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
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Smithing Your Habits
2023-05-11 • by Melissa SmithThis 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
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Beeminder Making You Do Self-Indulgent Things
2023-01-27 • by dreevesThis 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....
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When Beeminder Fails
2022-10-27 • by dreevesBeeminder 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...
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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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Primum Non Amplifico
2022-09-01 • by dreevesToday’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....
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Orange Is The New Red
2022-08-18 • by dreevesOnce 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...
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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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Alliterative Alimentation
2022-04-14 • by dreevesWant 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...
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Backlog Freshening For Humans
2022-03-31 • by shanaquiThis 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...
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Backlog Freshening
2022-03-18 • by dreevesLast 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.
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Control Systems For Backlogs
2022-03-05 • by dreevesSaying “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...
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Beeminder ♥ Focusmate
2021-12-27 • by shanaquiAnnouncement! 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,...
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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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Calendialing
2021-12-02 • by dreevesThis 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...
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Nicky's Secret To Beeminding Studying: It's About Time
2021-11-12 • by shanaquiWe 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...
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Nicky's Ultimate Support Secret: Dogfood
2021-09-08 • by shanaquiSorry to spoil the suspense with the title there. (Unless you don’t know the term “dogfood” but we’ve blogged about dogfooding so much that probably you do.) We recently took a poll of daily and weekly beemail subscribers and (tied for) most popular was hearing more from Support Czar Nicky on how we’re...
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Fractional Beeminding
2021-07-02 • by dreevesBethany 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...
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Fake Data Is The Devil
2021-06-10 • by dreeves“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...
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How To Name Your Goals
2021-05-04 • by dreevesThe other day year doing support, we ran into someone with a goal named “studying_4_out_of_the_8_first_hours_of_the_day”. We were so offended by this that we’re writing a whole blog post about how not-ok that goalname is. Beeminder is highly opinionated software and our opinion is that, in addition...
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Beemind What You Buy
2021-03-13 • by dreeves“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...
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What Not To Beemind
2021-03-02 • by Chelsea MillerWhat 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...
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Do-Zero Goals Considered Harmful
2021-02-17 • by Chelsea MillerLook 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...
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How To Beemind Nebulous Goals
2020-12-29 • by dreevesBeeminder 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:...
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Beeminder's Achilles Heel
2020-12-16 • by dreevesBeeminder’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...
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Beeminding the Right Thing: A Bookcase Study
2020-10-27 • by shanaquiI 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...
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How To Write Functional Specs II: The Spec-List
2020-09-05 • by dreevesWriting 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...
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Beeminder ♥ Boss as a Service
2020-08-10 • by Manasvini KrishnaWe’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...
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Choices are Bad: The Anti-Settings Principle
2020-07-30 • by dreevesWhat’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...
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The Anti-Robustness Principle
2020-07-16 • by dreevesThis 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...
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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...
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The Anti-Magic Principle
2020-05-27 • by dreevesBeing 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...
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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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Self-Isolation Strategies: Mary On Creating Challenges To Make Time Pass
2020-03-25 • by Mary RenaudWelcome 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...
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How To Write Functional Specs
2020-03-12 • by dreevesWe’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...
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The Startup Egg-Basket Principle
2020-02-29 • by dreevesThe 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...
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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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Redqueening, Inbox Zero, Backlogs, and Fluid Dynamics
2019-10-23 • by dreevesIf 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...
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How To Technically Count As A Vegetarian While Eating Animals
2019-09-27 • by dreevesOk, 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...
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Beeminder, With The Power Of Reading!
2019-03-20 • by Lawrence EvalynLawrence 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...
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The Fifty Goals of Brent Yorgey
2018-05-29 • by Brent YorgeyWe 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”,...
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Beeminding And All That Jazz
2018-04-25 • by Kim HarrisonSpecial 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...
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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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Beeminding All The Things
2018-03-03 • by Brent YorgeyFirst, 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...
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The Dirty Plate Club
2018-02-15 • by dreevesThis 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...
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Beemind Bites
2017-11-04 • by Braden ShepherdsonWe 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...
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The Sting of Work: How I Use Beeminder, Part Two
2017-09-29 • by Brennan K. BrownBrennan K. Brown is back with the sequel to his previous article. It’s a wonderful collection of advice and insight about creating Beeminder goals. Recommended reading for newbees and veterans alike! In my previous article, I talked about Beeminder’s unique way of thinking about goal-setting and self-accountability....
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The Tao of Bees: How I Use Beeminder
2017-09-12 • by Brennan K. BrownBrennan K. Brown has been using Beeminder for two years this week and is our new favorite user. (Don’t worry, we have a lot of favorite users. Mathematical fun fact: superlativity doesn’t imply uniqueness!) He achieved this coveted status (haha, but it does involve us mailing you stickers) by writing...
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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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Newbee Corner: What Happens When I Email Support?
2017-02-10 • by Chelsea MillerAt some point in your Beeminder experience, you may find yourself needing to contact support. Usually this is because your goal has derailed — but you actually did your goal and just forgot to tell Beeminder about it! A fair amount of people apologize for this and ask if it’s an approved excuse. Let’s...
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Beemind Easy Things
2016-12-22 • by Chelsea MillerIt’s almost New Year’s Day! Since I am both an eternal optimist and obsessed with productivity tips / planner Instagram / life improvement stories, this is my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE holiday of the year. For the last week or so, I’ve spent a decent amount of time fantasizing about how I will turn into a better...
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The Shirk & Turk Principle
2016-12-06 • by dreevesThe 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....
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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 Cockroach Principle
2016-07-24 • by dreevesIf 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...
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16 Obscure Beeminder Features
2016-04-26 • by dreevesIt’s our first ever listicle! We tried these out in a daily and weekly beemail and even among those most hardcore users, many didn’t know about many of these features. For the average feature in this list, 30% of daily subscribers and 40% of weekly subscribers weren’t aware of it. So here they are, listed...
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Frictionless Tracking with Beeminder Autodata (QS 2015)
2016-01-23 • by dreevesThis 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...
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Hard-Committing To Do Something "Soon"
2015-10-22 • by bsouleDeadlines 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...
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Chasing Waterfalls
2015-10-12 • by dreevesLast 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,...
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Bee on Extreme Productivity (QS 2015)
2015-09-08 • by bsouleOnce 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...
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I Resolve Not To Resolve; Or, The Anti-Resolution Resolution
2015-08-29 • by dreevesAs 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...
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Nine Greens
2015-08-07 • by Mirabai KnightThis is a guest post by Mirabai Knight, who beeminds many aspects of her life, in many creative ways. She’s been a proponent of Beeminder in the popular press as well as writing about it on her blog. Here she discusses — along with her latest Beeminder goals — an unanticipated (at least by us!) source...
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Weasel Heart-To-Heart
2015-07-27 • by Chelsea MillerChelsea Miller is Beeminder’s Support Czar, meaning she’s in charge of making sure the rest of us at the beehive stay on top of all the email you send to support@beeminder.com. And in fact she answers a huge amount of it personally. Pretty much everything she writes to users puts a huge smile on my face....
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The Seinfeld Hack; or, Don't Break The Chain
2015-06-29 • by dreevesConnoisseurs 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...
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Dealing with Beemergencies in an Emergency
2015-04-19 • by Philip HellyerI recently had a highly disruptive event in my life. Overnight my priorities rapidly changed, and not all of my Beeminder goals made sense anymore. This is the story of how I dealt with my commitments during a period of stress. When real life changes suddenly, you deal with it. Your beemergency days are no longer relevant. When the first derailment happened, I
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Should You Beemind The Moving Average?
2015-03-20 • by dreevesThis 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,...
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Triangular Beeminding; Or, Drink Less, Using the Power of Triangles
2015-02-27 • by David R. MacIverOne 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
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Bucketminding
2015-02-03 • by dreevesIn 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...
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Pomodoro Poker
2015-01-20 • by dreevesLast 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
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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...
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Beeminder ♥ Zapier: Hundreds of New Integrations in One
2014-11-19 • by dreevesWe’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
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New Discourse Forum!
2014-10-15 • by dreevesWe committed in a beemail recently to announcing a series of things that we’ve been brewing, culminating in our 3rd anniversary blog post, coming this month. This is one such thing. Drumroll… Beeminder has a new Discourse forum! It lives at forum.beeminder.com and all of the following are fair game...
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What To Mind: Picking a Metric
2014-09-14 • by dreevesWe 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...
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Don't Be a Smarmbot
2014-08-25 • by dreevesIn which the CEO of Beeminder quibbles with Patrick McKenzie, aka patio11, about what we call smarmbot emails, while noting how much we adore Patrick McKenzie (else we wouldn’t bother quibbling with him). Humans of the internet! This post isn’t really for you, but if you’re curious what we’re talking...
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How I Use Beeminder
2014-07-18 • by Philip HellyerWhen 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
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Bethany's Maniac Week
2014-06-07 • by bsouleLast 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...
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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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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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Get Things Done (Or Else!) With Beeminder and GTBee
2014-04-03 • by Andy BrettAt 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...
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Bee's Guide To Beeminding Weight Loss
2014-03-25 • by bsouleI’ve been thinking about beeminding weight loss a lot lately and the thing is, beeminding weight loss sucks! But not any more than losing weight in general sucks. Even for people who really like the whole commitment device craziness, Beeminder sometimes feels aversive. I believe that happens when you...
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Eat Your Vegetables
2014-03-15 • by bsouleWith the Fat Cyclist weight loss competition underway, we're thinking about weight loss a lot. We've got some useful posts planned. In the meantime, we have Bethany hating on
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Beeminder: A User's Guide for New Bees
2014-02-22 • by dreevesHow 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
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Android and Beeminder and Tasker
2013-12-03 • by dreevesWe released a 2.x version of the Android App in the last couple weeks, and we’re so excited that we just cannot hide it! Things have improved immensely since we officially released our smartphone apps over a year ago and we figured that not only is this latest release worthy of some considerable...
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1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements
2013-11-21 • by dreevesUPDATE: 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...
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More Schwag, Less Beeminding
2013-10-03 • by dreevesThis post is a random assortment of items and announcements. Normally we use the beemails for that, but (a) it’s an emergency blog post day and (b) we wanted to let you blog readers know that we’re actually sending regular beemails, so if you want more of this kind of thing, bump up your beemail frequency...
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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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Announcing Beeminder Premium Plans: Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper
2013-04-12 • by dreeves[Prescript: Yes, we paid someone $270 because this post was late (see blog.beeminder.com/blogdog). We think it was worth it and hope you’ll agree!] UPDATE 2014-07-17: This post now reflects the current prices. When it was published the prices were: Bee Lite $5/mo, Plan Bee $10/mo, Beemium $25/mo, Beekeeper...
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The One Must-Do Task Each Day
2012-10-03 • by alysThis 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...
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Why Weigh (Daily)?
2012-03-19 • by melzaIf you’re fitness savvy you know that you should be gaining muscle as you lose fat. So isn’t focusing on body weight silly, since muscle is denser than fat and ultimately we all want to be svelte and strong and lean, like a jungle cat? Maybe you have a fancy scale that tells you what really matters
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Backfiring Workouts
2011-07-27 • by dreevesHere’s a question from a user: “Sometimes it seems like a hard workout makes me gain weight. My question is: WTF?” Melanie, Beeminder’s resident fitness expert, has an answer: Temporary weight gain for a day or two after a hard workout is common. Your body is storing glucose — quick energy
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Summer Solstice PSA
2011-06-28 • by dreevesThis is a friendly reminder about our friendly mass of incandescent gas. For beemindees in the northern hemisphere (i.e., all but one or two of you, I believe), this is a reminder that the days are as long as they are going to get right now and are getting shorter from here on out. So if you’re beeminding...
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Here’s a blindingly obvious insight: if you drive blind you’ll probably drive off the road. Less obvious is that that applies almost as certainly to your Beeminder yellow brick road. Michelle, who has very thick skin (figuratively speaking!) and agreed to let us feature her here, illustrates the point...
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Productivity Hack: The Sedimentary Filing System
2011-04-01 • by dreevesA 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:...
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Food Habits
2011-03-01 • by Kevin McGowanContinuing the theme from our last post, this is a guest post by Beeminder beta user Kevin McGowan. I am not an expert of any kind and I have no training. I’m just a guy who used to be pretty uncomfortable (5’10” 230lbs) and now is a much happier 175lbs. Danny thought the lifestyle changes I used to make...
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No Preemptive Eating
2011-02-20 • by dreevesHere’s a simple yet powerful weight loss tip: Don’t eat when you don’t want to. I mean, maybe you shouldn’t always eat even when you do want to but at the very least don’t eat when you don’t want to. Like because it’s there, you’re bored, or to prevent being hungry later. If you have other tips and tricks,...
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Weight Loss: Really Easy, Really Hard
2011-02-02 • by melzaHere’s the bottom line on weight loss: unless more calories are being used than consumed, no weight loss will happen. There’s no magic. There is plenty of confusion and struggle, however. Simply eating less backfires and it’s because of hormones. Your body really doesn’t want your weight to change. Oh,...
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.