Tag: bee-all

Users have been lobbying for this feature for years. Finally we threw in the towel and implemented it. Hitting the Uncle Button (crying uncle) means accepting a derailment before the clock runs out. This is actually kind of critical to let users do and it’s silly it took us so long. I mean, for starters,...

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...

Once again, we’re releasing an integration I’m enthusiastic about right around my birthday, and this time it wasn’t even planned that way! So what is Oura? They make wearable health trackers in the form of rings, which are super wearable and maybe even a little bit stylish. (Uh, don’t take any style...

In a recent poll of most annoying things about Beeminder graphs there was a surprise winner. People really want to specify the plot range of their graphs using relative dates. Like always showing just the most recent month of data on the graph. Well, your wish is (sometimes, when we feel like it) our...

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

I’ve kept a Beeminder journal in the forum for over five years now. I don’t remember who initially inspired me to do it, but it’s a practice I’ve faithfully kept up every week since February 2019. You can check out all my Beeminder journals still — they’ve been separated into threads by year, of late,...

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”.)...

A new feature of Beeminder is that when you create a goal you can choose to start in Feet-Wetting Mode, meaning the goal initially has no money at risk but after a week it bumps itself to the standard initial stakes of $5 (and exponentially up from there). And we said last time that we weren’t tampering...

First, we’d like to present a foresight award to Beeminder (and Manifold) user ianminds, who predicted we’d do this almost a year ago. Cutting to the chase, here’s how things work now. As ever, when creating a goal, you can choose to have it start at $0 or to put $5 at stake from the get-go. The interface...

Last month we announced a handful of new features and we’d like to start by adding one more to the list. Namely, if you fail to enter data on a do-less goal and Beeminder enters a pessimistic presumptive report (PPR) for you, that goal will sort to the top of your dashboard until you add the missing...

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...

You know what we heard people like? Listicles! Here are the top 5 new Beeminder features and updates we randomly want to tell you about! If your favorite isn’t here, check the full list of 4,812 of them. (You read that right — Beeminder’s over-a-decade-long changelog has close to 5,000 entries and...

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...

Well, everyone, Happy New Year! 2023 is gone and 2024 is ticking, and it’s the traditional time of year to be RESOLUTE. We’ve written about the science of this stuff before. Katy Milkman calls it the Fresh Start Effect, and I am absolutely not immune. You can find my New Year’s Resolution: Ride...

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

This is another X-Treme Nerd Interlude post. Last time we announced, mercifully briefly, our shiny new blog redesign and if you’re a normal human you should read that, nod thoughtfully, say “looks lovely”, and be on your merry way. The rest of you can frolic deep in the weeds here with

This is our first official post on our shiny new WordPress-free blog. Confetti-emoji! For well over a decade the Beeminder blog was on WordPress, hosted by WP Engine. That was...

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....

You know how it used to be that you only got three goals on Beeminder’s free plan? Well stop the presses! Now you get three goals on Beeminder’s free plan, and you earn extra goals by derailing existing goals. Does that still sound kind of restrictive? Dare I say… stingy? (The bee puns, in addition to...

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...

Circa 2019 or so Stripe released a big update to their Checkout product, the previous iteration of which we’ve been using to collect your payment info on Beeminder for over 11 years now. This is the tale of how it took us four years to migrate to that new version. Alright, it did not literally take four...

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...

Imagine if signing up for Beeminder meant committing to use Beeminder. As part of signing up, you’d create a meta goal measuring the number of total datapoints added on all your other goals. Now the clock would be ticking to get an object-level goal created and to start adding data to it! That vision...

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...

It’s official! The Beeminder StoryGraph integration! The StoryGraph is basically a better, nerdier version of GoodReads. I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I really (really really really) love books and reading. I’ve talked about it on the blog before, I talk about it in the forum, I have umpteen...

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...

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...

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...

Way back in 2014 we blogged about how people who wanted to mind both sides of the red line (called the Yellow Brick Road in those days) were all wrong to want that. We’re still pretty opiniated and still aren’t adding this as a feature, but we thought we’d give a more nuanced answer and some more practical...

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....

Sorry 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...

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...

I believe this is our first blog post with a theme song. Remember last year when we replaced Beeminder’s Yellow Brick Road with a so-called Yellow Brick Half-Plane? The idea was that instead of a line on your graph to your goal and a band on either side of the line to keep your datapoints on, we instead...

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...

The 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...

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...

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...

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...

Since we like letting you all peek behind the curtain of Beeminder, let’s dive in with this internal strategy memo that our beeloved Queen Bee sent to the team last month, reproduced here verbatim: Howdy my sweet bee people, We’ve subjected you to a lot of polarized ideas about Beeminder pricing over...

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:...

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...

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...

Until today Beeminder had a fundamental design flaw that was baked in from literally day one. The first line of code for what would become Beeminder was to draw a line on a graph in Mathematica from a target weight to a goal weight. But weight fluctuates, I thought to myself. Or maybe I said it out...

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,...

This is the next phase in our elaborate evil plan codenamed Yellow Brick Half-Plane. Benevolent plan, I meant to say. The previous phase was killing off auto-widening yellow brick roads. Background: Yellow Brick Whatnow? To start at the very beginning… The Yellow Brick Road is the path on your graph...

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...

Your 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...

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...

If you’re just tuning in, and if you care about this for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons, you’ll want to start with (or stick with) our announcement that we have fully killed off auto-widening yellow brick roads. This is the part where we philosophize about why this is a good idea. Equivalently:...

In which we explain how a big feature of early Beeminder, auto-widening yellow brick roads, was wrong-headed and what we’re doing now instead. This is Part 1 with Just The Facts and the probably-very-safe-assumption that you don’t care about the convoluted history and just want to know how your graphs...

This is our 14th press roundup! The internet seems to just keep on loving us. We’re very touched! Our last one was a year ago, making this one pretty much a 2019 year-in-review, Beeminder-buzz-wise. (Speaking of years-in-review, we also collected a list of things Beeminder did in 2019 on the forum.)...

Announcement! We’ve reworked Gmail goals to use a label instead of an arbitrary search query, because Google is making us. (Not just us. Any app wanting access to things like arbitrary search queries has to go through a $10k+ security audit now!) If you need to do something about your Gmail goal to keep...

Here’s a thing users really hated about Beeminder until today: when Beeminder told them they needed to floss their teeth 0.23 times or archive 6.8 emails or whatever nonsensical / physically impossible thing. I personally shrugged that off for years. Obviously you just mentally take the ceiling of...

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...

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 3 of a 3-part blog series! Previously we defined Pareto dominance and what that means for software, and then we made our case for and committed to the Pareto Dominance Principle. This post demonstrates what we have in mind when we say we’re committing to publicly justifying every non-Pareto-dominant...

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...

In case you missed our previous 12 press roundups (starting all the way back in 2012!), here they are: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. Now that you’ve clicked on each of those and read each article, blog post, blurb, and podcast, we can fill you in on...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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)....

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!”...

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...

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...

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 honored to have sci-fi/fantasy author (and years-long Beeminder fan) Kara Timmins guest-blogging for us today about her secret to getting novels published. Ok, it’s not a secret. I mean, if we had our way it would be the diametric opposite of a secret. In case you haven’t guessed, it’s Beeminder....

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...

The last year has flown by like a swarm of bees. We do one of these blog posts every year and they’re kind of a mix between a family Christmas letter and a state of the union address. We’ll spend a while congratulating ourselves on the charming new babies we made this last year, we’ll show you some...

Brennan 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....

Brennan 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...

The time has come (the fandom said) to talk of many things. Of books, podcasts, and articles. Of victories and stings. With little further ado other than to point you to our collection of the last 10 press roundups we’ve done, here are all the nice things people have been saying about Beeminder since...

“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...

As of last week, our esteemed competitor, Pact, is officially shut down. We’re genuinely sad about that but were very touched that they endorsed us in their announcement to their users. Which is why many of you are reading this now, so… Welcome Pact users! The title of this post isn’t exactly true but...

Guess what? This is not actually the most buzzworthy Beeminder-related news right now. There’s some even bigger (and entirely unrelated) news that we can’t share yet. How’s that for an infuriatingly vague teaser? But to hold you over, we thought we’d let everyone know that as of this week we finally officially...

If you have a minute to add a rating or review for the new versions we’d be really grateful! Releasing a new version wipes out the previous ratings, so we’re starting from scratch. The Beeminder iOS app just got a long-overdue update, and it includes two sorta-huge new features! Apple Health integration...

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...

In case you’re not a programmer and the title didn’t already scare you off, we’ll start by explaining why this matters for end users. Until now, anyone who wrote a 3rd-party autodata integration — automatically sending data to Beeminder — had to implement their own strategy for how often to check for...

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....

This is a guest post by Alex Strick van Linschoten, an ultra hardcore Beeminder fan since 2012. Alex has said he that almost couldn’t have gotten his PhD without Beeminder (which we’re delighted to say isn’t the only time we’ve heard that) and has blogged more than once about Beeminder as the secret...

META-UPDATE August 2020: All the updates were cluttering this up so we moved them to a changelog section at the end. UPDATE 2018 Mar: We made some changes! Like changing “REQ” for “feature request” to the semi-standard “RFE” for “request for enhancement” (because the former looked too much like “required”...

At 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...

Last week we had a reporter contact us looking for examples of commitment contracts involving Donald Trump. She was wondering if anyone uses anything Trump-related as an anti-charity or “as motivation to, say, give more to charity”. The piece didn’t end up happening, but it inspired us to do a press...

Picking the right way to organize your to-do’s is a big decision. Paper & pencil, smartphone app, calendar, blank playing cards, or the old “in your head” method. A lot of folks use Todoist. While Todoist is fantastic for keeping track of your to-dos, if you combine it with Beeminder, you can use...

It’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...

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....

It’s hard to believe it’s been 5 whole years since we were slamming red bull on dirty couches in a college-town garage, with our friends Sergei and Mark, moving fast and breaking things on our scrappy little startup, dreaming big about how we were going to change the world(wide web) with … Oh wait. I...

It’s been a few weeks since we launched the Big Beeminder Redesign of 2016. For those of you who are web design nerds or just can’t get enough peeking inside the beehive, we’re proud to have the creative force behind the redesign, Josh Pitzalis, tell us how it all went down. In April this year I began...

Today marks the beginning of the 17th annual NaNoWriMo. For the uninitiated that’s NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. For 17 years folks have been joining together on the internet over the month of November to pen their own 50,000 word novels. This year they expect half a million participants. That’s a lot...

Remember back in the day (yesterday) when Beeminder’s interface was all cluttered and intimidating and looked like it was made in 2011, by kernel hackers and accountants? Or computer scientists and behavioral econ nerds who gradually agglomerated a multiheaded beast of a system to implement their crazy...

Big news today: we have grown! We’ll leave it to Lillian to tell the backstory but we are pretty over the moon about this. We’ve been courting Lillian forever, even before it was financially realistic, since it seemed pretty clear she’d be able to whip our marketing and advertising and social media-ing...

First off, what do we mean by derailing? We mean you pass your deadline — midnight by default — with today’s datapoint in the red. Here’s an example of a goal right at the end of the day. The countdown has run out, and I still haven’t done my flossing: (Hover or long-press the graphs for more commentary.)...

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...

UPDATE 2018 July: We raised the price of the Infinibee plan from $4/mo to $8/mo.UPDATE 2021 January 1: We raised the price of Beemium from $32/mo to $40/mo.UPDATE 2021 November 26: We raised the price of Beemium again, to $50/mo. Turns out we don’t really want people to get Beemium! To paraphrase Teen...

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....

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...

Beeple of the world want to take their weekends off, and for a long time the best answer we’ve had is “well, if you just make sure to get green by Friday night, then you can safely take Saturday and Sunday off”, which is highly unsatisfying to the truly akratic. Because if I had the discipline to “just...

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...

One of the main things we’re working on right now is making Beeminder more comprehensible to newbees. We’ve even hired a web designer, Josh Pitzalis, to help us with a big redesign. Writing blog posts explaining (sometimes obscure) things about Beeminder is very much not furthering that objective. But...

It’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...

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...

News! We scrapped the overcomplicated concept of Freebees. But don’t panic! By scrapping it we mean that you don’t need to know the term “freebees” or worry about buying them: All goals can now be created with an initial pledge of $0. Can we get a hallelujah? (If you want to cap your pledge at $0, you...

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...

Anyone remember our old blog post from 2012 about accidentally running a query that started deleting our whole database? It’s pretty entertaining and helpfully demarcates the parts that non-nerds should skip. If you’re a non-nerd I’d stick with (the non-nerd parts of) that post. The executive summary...

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....

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,...

[UPDATE 2021: This is strictly for historical interest. Beeminder premium just costs what it costs now.] Of the roughly 6,000 active Beeminder users, we’re approaching 1,000 who like us so much that they’ve opted in to more frequent beemails. If you love us so much that you want to hear from us daily...

Imagine a world where children grow up with Beeminder as a way of life. Well we created Beeminder when our kids were babies so here in Portland (at least in our house) that world exists, as a reality. Here to tell you about that is Beeminder’s presumably youngest user, Faire Soule-Reeves. Hi! I am Faire...

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?)...

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...

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,...

If your name is “Beeminder” then reminders really need to be part of your core competency. Alerts and nudges about your goal are fundamental to our contract with you, the user, to do our very best to help you meet the goals you’ve set, and only take your money as a last resort. So much so that if...

Remember our press roundups? What’s The Buzz? Beeminder Buzz at 30,000 Feet Front Page of the Wall Street Journal Another Press Roundup Part Deux, Revisited: Return of the Beeminder Buzz Returns Again! Press Roundup 5 Well we got super lazy about them and it’s been a year since the last one. So now we...

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...

This 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...

Chelsea 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 [email protected]. 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....

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...

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...

UPDATE 2019: Changes to GmailZero! Google recently stopped supporting their very old OAuth1 authentication strategy, which is what we’d been using to access all y’all’s Gmail accounts. We’ve talked about our Gmail integration, GmailZero before. (Actually we talk about email a lot, including recently...

I 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

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,...

Another official integration! We’re so excited to be integrating with Garmin, one of the biggest and oldest names in wearable computey things! As a welcome to Garmin users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. If you’re just eager to get your beloved Garmin device connected to Beeminder,...

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

Another official integration! We’re so proud to be one of a handful of launch partners for Epson’s entry into the Quantified Self / wearables market: Runsense and Pulsense. As a welcome to Epson users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. For Beeminder regulars who don’t already know about...

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...

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...

Another integration! And one that I personally use daily (well, nightly). Sleep as Android is a popular sleep tracking app that’s delightfully nerdy and quantified-self focused. (Much like Beeminder!) As a welcome to Sleep as Android users new to Beeminder, we’ll start with our usual recap. For Beeminder...

Last week Leah Libresco blogged about beeminding rituals. This week we’re continuing the Catholic theme with a guest post by veritable Renaissance man, Pedro Paulo Oliveira Jr. Pedro Paulo has a popular iPhone app for praying the rosary and has used the Beeminder API to include beeminding one’s praying...

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 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...

[UPDATE 2016-03-25: This whole post is completely obsolete! That’s a wonderful thing. We made everything simpler and better. In short, all goals can now start at $0 pledged and there’s no need for a concept of freebees at all. So don’t read on except out of historical interest!]   So many changes lately...

The exponential pledge schedule is a key part of the, dare we say it, genius of Beeminder. It means you quickly reach a pledge that’s highly motivating and keeps you on track for a long time. But one more exponential step beyond “highly motivating” was often “OMG too scary I quit”. That outcome is...

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...

We’re such press darlings! This is our fifth big press roundup. For the sake of completeness (and because I’m certain you’re terribly eager to read every word of all our press coverage ever), here are the previous four: Press Roundup: What’s the Buzz? Beeminder Buzz at 30,000 Feet, and other New Year’s...

In 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...

We are exceedingly proud to debut the work of our intern, Chris Goodman, in this blog post. Chris has joined us this summer through Saturday Academy’s ASE Internship program. Both Chris and Saturday Academy have knocked our socks off. Chris had not written a line of Ruby when he started, and now, well,...

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

This is crossposted on the Fat Cyclist blog. Greetings not-so-fat cyclists! We’re pretty much beside ourselves with how the first annual (oh presumption!) Beeminder Fat Cyclist Weight Loss Competition turned out. When we say we’re beside ourselves we mean that literally — Beeminder is a husband-and-wife...

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

Technically we deployed this feature over two months ago, but not very well so we didn’t have much fanfare. It was one of our daily UVIs (@beemuvi) and we mentioned it in a beemail. The feature itself is pretty self-explanatory: In the Settings for a goal you can add supporters — friends, family, enemies — who...

Here’s a suggestion we hear from time to time: “Let me mind both sides of the Yellow Brick Road!” For example, maybe you want to neither sleep too much nor too little. Conceptually you could do this with a goal that was a combination of Do More and Do Less. You’d be penalized for going off the Yellow...

We’ll start with the non-nerd version. Last week there was a massive security breach in some very standard software used by most sites on the internet, including Beeminder. Let us first quickly reassure you that your credit card info gets secured by our much more savvy payment processor, Stripe, and...

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...

I’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...

With 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

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

We’re pretty over the moon for Code School and very proud to announce this partnership. The Code School folks are announcing it simultaneously on the Code School blog as well. Since many or most of you are here directly from Code School with no previous exposure to Beeminder, we’re starting with a...

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...

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...

It’s that season again. This time last year, Philip Hellyer urged us to get a jump on our resolutions. This year, we’re proud to have him officially part of the Beeminder team. New Years Resolutions are ridiculous. Your current delusionally euphoric self dictates something for your future self to do....

This is a guest post by Henrik Wist, to whom we just paid $1000 for derailing on our own meta Beeminder commitment to announce one User-Visible Improvement (UVI) to Beeminder per day. For our version of how this went down, see the addendum to our recent “1000 Days of User-Visible Improvements” article....

We 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...

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...

Tomorrow is the beginning of November, which kicks off National Novel Writing Month. Last year we put together some tools for NaNoWriMo and blogged about it: Beemind Your NaNoWriMo Progress. This year we have some new tools to support beeminding writers. The biggie that we’re really excited about is

SAD TROMBONE UPDATE 2021: Jawbone up and died in 2017 and shut down fully in 2018. This blog post is now of historical interest only. The Jawbone UP was at the top of our list for the next device to add to our ever growing list of integrations. Jawbone recently released the second generation of their...

Yo-yo-yo! We’re two! So perhaps we should say yo-yo? Remember two years ago when we launched? You almost surely don't! (If you do, let us know because we have

UPDATE TEN YEARS LATER: Oh my goodness this is all so ancient now. The things below are still true but probably you’re looking for our help doc on do-less goals, which we keep up to date. First, a point of nominology: We’ve renamed the Set-A-Limit goal type to Do Less. The names “do more” and “do less”...

We have once again knocked off what was the highest voted item from our feedback forum: you can now schedule flat spots in your yellow brick road. In fact, you can schedule any change in your road, between arbitrary dates, as long as it starts outside the akrasia horizon. Even more flexible self-control!...

RunKeeper! Now with more running! and cycling! and walking! Beemind all the RunKeeper things! Get it while it is hot! Actually, we’ve had an integration with RunKeeper for over a year now — it was the third autodata source to land on our front page. We’re up to eight now. TagTime was the zeroth , Withings...

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...

We’ve been referring to this internally as Beeminder’s New World Order but in fact it’s a natural consequence of The Third Great Beeminder Epiphany: Ever-increasing awesomeness should always be the path of least resistance. Namely, if you derail on a goal, the goal no longer freezes and waits around...

We’re often praised for our stellar customer support. For the possible benefit of other startups, or anyone else who’s curious, here are our secrets! First, all the usual “customer is always right” stuff is just common sense if you’re genuinely excited about promoting your company and having your users...

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...

By popular demand, we’ve created a jargon file! We don’t expect this to be the permanent home of this glossary (maybe it belongs with our FAQ) but it’s on the internet now so from now on you can google things like “beeminder flatlining” and hopefully be sent here to learn what we’re

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

It’s been six months since our last crash of ineptitude so it’s time to disabuse you of the notion that we may have gotten our act together since then! The backstory is that we’ve been fortunate enough to have some scaling challenges — mostly due to our ridiculous architecture — so we decided we could...

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...

If you asked 100 people to fill in the following blank, Family-Feud-style, what would be the most popular answer? “I’ve always wanted to learn ______” In an informal poll of authors of this blog post, the runaway winner was “a new language.” It’s pretty easy to get through “ciao” and “auf wiedersehen,”...

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...

You know how a lot of services offer things like one month free if you pay yearly? We were nerding out over the math of that and thought, why not generalize to compute the perfectly fair discount for paying at any frequency you like, including every infinity years, i.e., paying once for a lifetime subscription?...

“Well I’ve already paid for Netflix this month, so I might as well watch another episode of ‘Say Yes To The Dress’. I’ll get around to canceling later. You know, when I’m less busy.” — A slightly caricatured version of me. When you sign up for some subscription services they make

Exciting news about Beeminder today: we’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal! It’s an interesting little write-up about the Quantified Self movement as “digital mother” — capturing Beeminder’s relationship to Quantified Self beautifully —  and features one of our favorite beeminders (Okay,...

[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...

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

Earlier this month some dozens of you got a delightful little email from us like this: this is super embarrassing but there’s a chance you were affected by a bug where we thought we canceled a charge but then it went through anyway. partly as self-punishment we’re just refunding all the charges where that could possibly have happened. so either you’re rightfully getting a refund or you’re getting a random reprieve on a past derailment! either way a refund of $

We’re so proud of our full-page feature in the Southwest Airlines inflight magazine this month that we’re reproducing it here (with permission): ... This new online tool forces you to shape up — or pay up. Here’s how Beeminder co-founder Bethany Soule describes the Web-based, incentivized task tracker:

This is a guest post by Philip Hellyer, who has done more in 2012 than he thought possible, with the help of Beeminder. He’s going to get a head start on 2013, and so could you. Here’s how. It’s approaching that time of year again. People will ask you about your resolutions for the new year. They might...

Until now you haven’t had much choice about how much to pledge (put at risk) on your Beeminder commitment contracts. It starts out free, then $5, then each subsequent time you derail from your yellow brick road you’re encouraged (though not forced) to jump to the next pledge level for your next attempt:...

UPDATE: Check out the announcement of Beeminder integration on the RescueTime blog. A lot of people use RescueTime as a way to keep track of how they spend their working hours. While RescueTime is great for showing you how you currently spend your time, RescueTime combined with Beeminder is great for...

By popular demand, we’ve now added Fitbit to our growing list of integrations. We’ve had a lot of people ask for this integration, and even a few who have already started automatically sending their Fitbit data to Beeminder with our API

National Novel Writing Month starts today! Over a quarter of a million people participated last year, logging over 3 billion words! Here’s how the NaNoWriMo site describes it: NaNoWriMo is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write...

Lately at Beeminder we’ve been using Trello for just about everything. We use it to stage blog posts and track bugs and new features on the Beeminder API and website. The Beeminder iPhone and Android apps each have their own board too. “We automatically track the number of cards in your Done list.”...

We’re excited to announce that starting today, you can stay on top of your Beeminder goals wherever you are. We’ve just released Beeminder apps for both iPhone and Android. Get them here: Beeminder iPhone app on iTunes Beeminder Android app on Google Play Or click/touch one of these screenshots: Here’s...

“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...

Bethany and I woke up at 7am on March 7th to a text message from Jill that some graphs seemed to be fubar. Panic ensued as we hacked away nonstop till 5pm or so, never getting dressed or leaving the house. What was the problem? The night before we had run a seemingly innocuous

UPDATE 2015: Big improvements to GmailZero!UPDATE 2019: More changes to GmailZero! Two years ago, when I still had a day job and Beeminder was just a side project, I wrote about my epic struggle with email: My email is dysfunctional. I keep things in my inbox because I can’t afford for them to go out...

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...

We’re delighted to announce that the Beeminder API is now open to the public! Before you dive into the full documentation, let’s start with a taste of this beeliciousness. First, grab your personal auth token from beeminder.com/api/v1/auth_token.json. Let’s pretend it’s TOOLEGIT. You can now add a data...

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 were interviewed by WeUseThat today. Here’s what we said! We are Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule, co-founders of Beeminder. We make people more awesome via the threat of taking their money. Specifically, we plot

[UPDATE: GymPact (later Pact App) sadly shut down in 2017.] If we were nervous about our competitors — and we’re not — we might be most nervous about GymPact. GymPact is currently an iPhone app (UPDATE: Android as well now) that pays you money for going to the gym, funded by the slackers who failed to...

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...

The Beeminder founders completed the NYC Triathlon yesterday. I was nearly twice as fast as Danny in the swim — 1.5 km down the Hudson — but he took those 15 minutes back out of me on the 40 km bike course. Danny was hilariously lopsided. There were only a few people in his division slower than him in...

In the beginning of the year we covered our coverage on Quantified Self and Mark Forster’s Getting Things Done blog. There’s been a lot more since then. Here are the highlights

We have a new competitor about to launch: Lift! Their (meta) goal is the same as ours. They want to “eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals”. Our approaches, however, are quite opposite. Or at least they have opposite sign. Lift emphasizes in their pre-announcement blog post today that they...

Four score and seventeen days ago, we announced our acceptance into the Portland Seed Fund. Today we are proud to announce that we have graduated. To mark the occasion, here for posterity is our demo pitch, verbatim! Jim Huston and Angela Jackson were phenomenal in putting together an amazing demo day,...

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.

I recently won $1000 (sharing a $10k prize) for the following essay on how to solve what people in healthcare call the adherence problem, which costs the healthcare system "billions of dollars in unnecessary hospitalizations and nursing home and rehab costs". My prize-winning essay in its entirety follows. (I gave the actual money to

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:

If 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

Beeminder headquarters is now officially in Portland, Oregon! We’re proud and excited to announce that we’ve been accepted into the Portland Seed Fund’s newest class of startups. We’re in the esteemed company of

[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...

[This is a guest post by Beeminder superfan — and self-quantifier — Jake Jenkins who tells us the story of how Beeminder made all his dreams come true. Well, one particular dream, which will have come true in another year or so of hard work.] When I was 9 years old I went to a beach party. As the sun set and the bonfire was lit a guy broke out his guitar and started playing familiar songs. People gathered close to the fire, but closer to him, and broke into song as the music moved them. At that moment I realized that I wanted to learn how to play guitar.

[UPDATE 2024: We’re continuing to keep this list up to date (see the “On the Horizon” section for the very latest). Let us know in the comments if there are any competitors we’ve missed!] I just blackmailed myself with a silly photo thanks to our competitor [UPDATE: former competitor; see graveyard...

Beeminder makes pretty graphs of your progress. But if that’s your only reason to use Beeminder you might find it frustrating when your graph freezes because you deviated a bit from your Yellow Brick Road. More than the tracking — though that’s fundamental to it as well — we view Beeminder’s core feature...

This is crossposted from the Quantified Self blog. Bethany Soule and Daniel Reeves have presented at New York City QS meetups (here and here) on a couple ideas that came together and turned into Beeminder, which they co-founded in 2010. Through much personal experimentation they’ve developed unique ideas...

We’ve been using a simple Mac dashboard widget that esteemed co-founder Bethany hacked up to keep an eye on our Beeminder goals since before Beeminder was Beeminder. Here’s what it looks like on Dreeves’s computer: We mostly use it for TagTime-based goals, where the data is added automatically. For other...

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...

[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...

Here’s a question that keeps coming up. To paraphrase, Beeminder is great for stuff that needs to happen every day, but for stuff that happens sporadically in large chunks of time, won’t I quickly run off Beeminder’s smooth daily ramp? Au contraire! Beeminder allows brilliantly for chunkiness of time....

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,...

Beeminder is now officially launched and open to the public. Invite all your loser friends who need a kick in the pants! If you’re just tuning in, here’s the three-sentence version of what Beeminder is: Beeminder is like StickK.com (cash commitment contracts to force yourself to lose weight, not procrastinate,...

Beeminder has existed in some form since February of 2008, when we made a rather ad hoc tool for a friend to track her weight. The main feature was automated reminders to reply with your number each day, so we called it Kibotzer, the kibitzing robot. We described it like so: Kibitzer, noun: Someone who...

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...

[UPDATE 2015: We’ve learned that we don’t need to be this uptight or hard-nosed about derailments. Just reply to the email asking if the derailment was legit and say why you don’t consider it to be. We will believe you. If you want something closer to the original vision articulated in this old blog post...

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...

“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?...

You may have noticed the shiny new design of Beeminder. For nerds who know about such things: we switched to Ruby on Rails. For non-nerds: we added buzzwords to our internets! Either way, it was kind of a big deal, even though it doesn’t look like much just yet. Step one was to replicate everything that...

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...

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...

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:...

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...

I’ve had swiss cake rolls on my mind since Kevin McGowan’s delightful guest post last week. Then today I saw a special: four boxes of Little Debbie snacks for $5. So cheap! If only it were possible to buy them and not immediately start shoving them into my maw one after the other until stopped by physical...

[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...