Comment by poppingtonic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poppingtonic | Hacker News Reader

Use this perl project called TagTime <https://github.com/dreeves/TagTime> to track your own time. Description from GitHub: To determine how you spend your time, TagTime literally randomly samples you. At random times it pops up and asks what you're doing right at that moment. You answer with tags.

Use Beeminder <beeminder.com>, a commitment device with a sting. Make a commitment, and give them a price (in USD) for failing to meet that commitment. They take your money if you don't do what you said you'd do. They have APIs for many services such as RescueTime and TagTime, and an Android app.

Note: If you're the kind of smart person who always finds a way out of doing the things you claim to care about, then if these two tools don't get you to do those things, you'll at least think deeply about, and know if you really cared about them.

You either get value (success in the things you care about), or information (learn what you don't care about, that you thought you cared about). Then you can use the value of that information to reorder your preferences in an optimal way.

Beeminder sounds like a great idea, but there's something stopping me from using it. Every time I try to set a new goal on Beeminder just before I set the dollar amount I hear myself say "this is really stupid" and promptly cancel.

I know that if I feel guilty about paying those $5 per transgression I can just lie to the app, which makes the whole thing pointless.

I understand that the whole idea is to be honest to yourself. But because I have been frugal/cheap my entire life, it feels stupid to waste $5 when I could easily avoid it.

Push the responsibility one step away from yourself. Since the goal needs data from you, then you can connect the goal to something like github, RescueTime, TagTime, Complice, etc. Or design your own service for your own personal needs [please do this if nothing exists]. Example with GitHub: if, to lie to Beeminder through GitHub, you have to make a fake commit, push and pull request, then you're already part of the way to doing what you want! Just s/"fake commit"/"what you actually want to accomplish", and as they say, Bob's your uncle.

Ha, you said this much better than me! Thanks!

(I'm a Beeminder cofounder) This is good feedback; thank you! We're mostly ok with targeting the particular psychology that this kind of thing works for (our very self-serving characterization thereof: http://blog.beeminder.com/typebee ) but what about adding enough social accountability that you wouldn't cheat? We don't have many social features but you can just point some friends/family at the url of your Beeminder graph.

Or maybe a better answer is to automate the data entry (we have dozens of integrations -- GitHub, Trello, Fitbit, RescueTime, etc) so that you'd have to do more than lie to the app. With enough effort you could still cheat, of course.

Would love to hear if this is overcomeable or a dealbreaker!

Hi, dreeves! The Complice integration is the best thing yet! I'm wondering how many other kinds of such services can be added like this.

We're working on making it nice and streamlined to add them! So, lots, we hope! Let us know what you think we should add next.

Thank you for your reply.

I think social accountability would only work if (1) someone else could tell whether I'm cheating (that's not happening in a personal project) and (2) cares enough to check my graph.

Maybe my cheapness trumps my integrity. Or more positively, I reframe the meaning of the price: what does $5 buy me in Beeminder? an accurate data point. Is $5 worth an accurate data point? depends on what I'm planning on doing with the data later. And because I don't know what I want to do with the data, an accurate data point doesn't seem very valuable.

That's really unfair, though. I know that losing those $5 eventually will coax me into complying, but my inner Hyde will convince me to lie. Sigh.

I guess I just don't fall into the target niche (although it really looks like I do—except for the cheapness-trumping-integrity issue).

It's not just $5 for an accurate data point; it's $5 to convince yourself that the commitment to the goal is really real. Betting for free is very different to betting for real money.

You can use Day One as well for the "random sampling". I've got it setup so that it pops up from the menu bar each X time and prompts me to add what I'm doing.

Some months are almost full, some months have only a handful of info. But it is quite stable since all the way back to 2014 for me.

You could add both tags and paragraphs of what you're doing.

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