Putting Bounties on My Goals | Hacker News Reader

Putting Bounties on My Goals

krayorn.com

31 pointskrayorn27 comments

It is also possible that blogging is just not a good thing for this person to be doing right now, if they don't want to do it, it can be an informed conclusion of the brain. Setting up an authoritarian system to force blogging might just be that, an imposition, and not an aid to the life process.

Shoutout https://www.beeminder.com

I think the only issue is on some things, rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation... external rewards work for tasks where extrinsic motivation works well

I think this mainly comes down to how good you are at systematic thinking. For example it's really hard to build a habit without some form of reward mechanism, but once that habit is built the reward comes from the consistency of keeping the habit. This type of reward oriented behavior is probably quite good for that initial difficulty most people have in building a habit, but once you have the system in place it becomes second nature to keep doing the task and as a consequence usually introduces some negative association with skipping it. Think the gym for example.

https://suboptimalism.neocities.org/optimalism/posts/shock-c...

I was using the land mine method, but it didn't trigger reliably. Now I use SmartBomb™.

I did this for a year or two when my first kid was born... I assigned penalty dollars with actions that I knew weren't good for me... didn't run for a week (outside of travel) 10$ to the kids account... stopped for fast food as opposed to having a real meal, 10$.

It was surprisingly effective for what was a stressful time and in the end gave some real benefit to their compound interest long term... all because I was being lazy and grabbed a burger for lunch :)

Looks like the blog migration is incomplete -- links still point to the former

https://andysblog.uk/why-blog-if-nobody-reads-it/

https://andysblog.uk/why-your-blog-post-didnt-go-viral/

Which now 404s, with message from Vercel, "Deployment not found", sfo trace ids.

Congratulations on migrating to a new domain -- hope Vercel serves you well. A little disappointing about the lack of easy redirecting so far.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250219111210/https://andysblog...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250214201735/https://andysblog...

Bearblog.dev no less.

Well, simple guesses at migration don't help either.

https://www.krayorn.com/posts/why-blog-if-nobody-reads-it/

https://www.krayorn.com/why-blog-if-nobody-reads-it/

Good luck with the personal blogging infrastructure, hobby horse of many a working developer. Good excuse to play with new systems.

Damn!

I did not migrate anything, these two posts were from someone else's blog and they were up less than a week ago! Web link decay strikes again, I'll check if I can find where this person blog again, thanks for noticing.

How does this interact with Structured Procrastination? Im a huge fan and avid strut-castinator. This is an entirely different approach to accomplishing goals though, as I'm frugal and hate to waste money. https://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

Interestingly enough, this is how I tricked myself into quitting smoking.

I withdrew $100, and told my good friend that I’d give it to him if I used anything with nicotine in it. It worked pretty well since it turns that first cigarette into a $100 cigarette. Not worth it at all.

And I haven’t smoked in 7 years :)

Good job! But I would caution that you probably were just not addicted to nicotine. You may not have the genes for addiction, or it just was not yet activated.

It can often be the habits and routines that are hard to stop than the physical addiction.

Most people aren't addicted to nicotine. They are addicted to the burnt additives.

This is why vaping tends to work really well if you want to quit. It's just water and nicotine.

That's wildly untrue. Many people just end up addicted to vaping instead.

Never used it, but a more aggressive fitbit: https://shop.pavlok.com/

Try the Forfeit App: https://www.forfeit.app

I put "Stab self with fork" on my to-do list.

Every other task gets done first.

This actually sounds like a great idea. I procrastinate a lot. I also play a lot of Raid Shadow Legends. I should totally gate those purchases behind hitting my goals.

Thanks for sharing.

Kinda obvious this was written last minute haha. Basically rewriting this idea we've all heard many times. Good luck though!

Much of blogging (and creation in any form) is often exactly that: an existing idea remixed or reconsidered from someone else’s perspective.

After-all, the telephone wasn’t all that an original idea for a long while before the idea finally reached a salient and effective point.

My take has always been: just because you and I have heard the concept before does not mean everyone has. And if one person finds it helpful to read in this way, that’s a nice thing to have provided the world. :)

You said it well. We all stand on the shoulders of those that came before us.

Enjoyed the blog post and great job getting it done by the 28th.

How did you choose what you were going to penalize yourself with?

I took something easy to do and that my friend would remind me to do => sending him cash, and selected an amount that was not so big that I'd resent him, but big enough that I didn't want to give it away!

Isn't the real hack to offer $30 to anyone who can do the task for you?

> "publicly tweeted that I would send 30€ to a friend of mine if I didn’t have a blog post online by the end of the month."

Publicly tweeted huh? Well geez you're really on the hook now. Call me back when you've finished the app that forces you to place the money in a secure escrow which checks your blog's RSS feed to determine whether or not to return the cash.

On a more "serious" note, there have been quite a few of apps/concepts around a monetary penalty for not doing something - I think going to the gym was a big one. Probably be pretty easy to implement an app where you have to meet a GPS radial condition for X minutes per week.

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