2018

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...

We have what sounds like bad news for Beeminder supernerds who use fanciness like exponential roads, but hear us out! We’re getting rid of exponential roads. I know, gasp! We’ve already migrated the small number of exponential roads that were out there in the wild. If you had one, it should be approximately...

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...

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...

We’ve written a lot about weaseling and cheating (combatting it, recovering from it) in Beeminderland, and about how we approach customer support. Today we thought we’d share some of our standard responses to weaselly things we hear occasionally when people go off track on their goals. “Not legit!”...

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)....

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...

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...

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”,...

Guess who’s covered in the Wall Street Journal again! You’re very good at guessing. It may not count as the front page this time (unlike last time) since this front page article doesn’t start talking about Beeminder until after the jump. Also we’re about to demonstrate how little sense of humor we have...

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....

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...

By coincidence the global Quantified Self conference is in our own hometown of Portland this year, September 22-23. Some of you will recall it was in Amsterdam last year and San Francisco before that. As announced on the Quantified Self blog, Beeminder is proud to once again support the Quantified...

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth and derailing on a Beeminder goal meant getting a week of respite. That is still in fact the default. After derailing you get a week of safety buffer. It gives you time to re-evaluate how the goal is working, and time to adjust your Yellow Brick...

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...

We mean literal birds this time, because the Beeminder meetup is going to be at Chapman school on the evening of Saturday, September 22 from 6pm to 8pm, when a massive swarm of swifts fly into the enormous chimney of a school building. It’s a weird Portland thing, ok? Also it’s walking distance (sort...

It’s finally official! Strava activities can now be automatically tracked with Beeminder! So, first of all, welcome Strava users! Beeminder takes a large goal, such as training for a marathon, and breaks it down into daily deadlines. Not by providing any insight into marathon training schedules (we...

Nicky Walters is Beeminder’s new Support Czar! The Support Czar (a position previously held by such luminaries as Alice Monday and Chelsea Miller) is in charge of answering most of the email you send to [email protected] and coordinating us other workerbees to answer the rest of it. And I guess...

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’re excited to officially announce our newest integration partner: Clozemaster! We’ve even got the Clozemaster folks themselves here guest-blogging for us to tell you what Clozemaster is all about! If you want to hear us talk about it, head over to the Clozemaster blog for our own guest post. Hi Beeminder...

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...