Review my startup: A tool to force yourself to waste less time on HN | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup: A tool to force yourself to waste less time on HN

29 pointsdreeves5 comments

Beeminder (the me-binder!)

This is by me and Bethany Soule (bsoule on HN). It started as a side project to help friends and family track goals like weight loss. A year ago we quit our day jobs, finally launching publicly in October, and yesterday redesigned the front page so that you can actually tell what it's about. (Hopefully. Hence this soliciting of feedback.)

If you already know about StickK ("put a contract out on yourself") then you should adore us. By having the commitment contracts tied to your data you can be far more flexible about what you're committing to.

If you don't know about StickK (and things like akrasia and commitment devices) then it's going to sound like the most ridiculous business plan ever:

You define your goal as a Yellow Brick Road on a graph and report your data every day to the Beeminder bot. If you ever deviate from your yellow brick road, we freeze your graph and you have to pledge (by which we mean pledge actual money) to stay on track on your next attempt. If you go off track again, we charge your credit card. Each additional reset requires an exponentially greater pledge. The idea is that you'll soon reach a motivating amount and actually stay on your yellow brick road from then on.

This post on LessWrong explains why we think we're better than StickK: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7z1/antiakrasia_tool_like_stickkcom_...

Excerpt:

StickK is just about the contracts -- Beeminder links it to your data. That has some big advantages:

1. You don't have to know what you're committing to when you commit, which sounds completely (oxy)moronic but what we mean is that you're committing to keeping your datapoints on a "yellow brick road" which you have control over as you go. You commit to something general like "work out more" or "lose weight" and then decide as you go what that means based on your data.

2. You have the flexibility to change your contract in light of new information (like, 40 hours of actual focused work per week is damn hard!). ...

Link: http://beeminder.com

For more on the background philosophy, check out our inaugural blog post, "How to do what you want: Akrasia and self-binding": http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia

I like it, really. I just want to give you some feedback from my experience. When I was a lot younger, I used to keep track of a lot data points to reach goals. It usually worked well. but at some point I stopped because most of these goals were not critical and the time spent tracking them would have been better invested doing those things. (But all of this was with pen and paper).

What I'd like would be to know that such a service would be in autopilot mode and how it take care of itself (ideally in a short video) before I sign up,

Hope it helps !!

Yeah, I personally really love the graphs that I don't have to manually enter data for, like my weight (we integrate with the Withings scale) or any time-based goal [http://tagti.me] or pushups (sort of, thanks to an Android app that Bethany wrote [1]).

Thanks so much for the feedback!

[1] It counts pushups by touching your nose to your phone. You still have to enter on Beeminder but it's an odometer-style goal so no need to enter every day. It would actually be pretty easy to connect it to Beeminder so no data entry is needed at all, if there's demand for that...

I just wanted to say I think what you guys are doing is great.

I've found that attaching monetary pledges to my goals is extremely motivating. Even when they're small ($5).

Daniel and Bethany have taken a hard look at the problem of akrasia (failing to do what you want to do) and have created an elegant life-hack to overcome it.

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