bsoule

I'm terribly old-fashioned and use vim for development. My monolithic window is iTerm2 which allows for split panes. It is pretty nice with my laptop screen below for reference material.

Maniac on building maniac tools! I guess it's kind of Catch-22 isn't it :P

Thank you!! My eyes are not great -- it was a 30" monitor.

It's iTerm2: http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home

I'm pretty sure that's Strunk and White approved,yo.

I ended up spending an embarrassing amount of time on the post processing because I didn't spend enough time on setup ahead of time :)

I used https://github.com/nwinter/telepath-logger to take screenshots. I meant to have it take a screenshot of my top monitor only, and do anything sensitive on my laptop screen, but I didn't configure it correctly, and wound up with screenshots of my active window only, so I had to do some censoring, e.g. when I needed to edit our keys file, or when I blurred out the screenshot when I had to do some customer support.

This was a ton of fun and I'd love to do it, or a modified shorter version of it again. It's hard to shut down the rest of my life for an entire week, but maybe a long weekend. Or I could do a week where the computer is taking screenshots 9-5 and I pre-commit to post the video as soon as it is over.

I think you can still commit to one change per day, whether or not you deploy them in batches. It'd be exciting to see the growing list of stuff to look forward to, rather than wait in a void of information. Better for the team building it too. You could note in your changelog which ones are live and which are being alpha tested.

Even if you personally don't need the commitment device because you never get discouraged and always do what you say you will do, I'm pretty sure that the signaling value of this to users is immense. Startups die a lot and it is super discouraging as a user when your new favorite thing goes away. Promise them you won't go away.

But there's a slider!

Slightly more seriously: for us, the premium plans are directed more to the hardcore users who are already committed and love the service, so more choice is maybe less daunting?

You actually have to have entered data on Beeminder in the last month to be considered active. If you haven't, we suppress the charge. So we just do that check every time before charging. Simply logging in isn't enough. And thanks everyone for the kind words about this!

Also, we just implemented this slightly over a month ago, so no numbers yet on how it is working out.

Http://Beeminder.com takes it a step further and takes your lunch money too if you give up...

We've got an integration with Rescuetime as well so that you can mind productive or unproductive time. If weaseling on commits is an issue you could also just increase the number of commits you're committing to. Arms race between current you and future you!

I'm the Bee in Beeminder. I think that beeminding your github account is going to be amazing for hackers/founders -- a way to force yourself to always be making forward momentum. We've been tracking how much code we write for over a year now -- though in a bit more structured way. We track user visible improvements (it has to be something worthy of tweeting @beemuvi for the hardcore fans of beeminder). We've been doing one-per-day for 733 days now and if we ever fall behind we pay a user $1000. It's been invaluable in keeping us going!

by popular demand: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50476194/bee_push_01.mov

Ooh! One use we didn't describe in the post is TallyBee -- I added Beeminder integration to a super simple android tally app (it increments a counter every time you touch the screen). Put it on the floor, do pushups. Your nose increments the count at the nadir, and your Beeminder graph is instantly updated. Awesomepants!

nerd attempt at social skills. you don't maximize toothpaste usage with friends!

you use the "makeitso" button under the graph to change your rate.

Gmail is a bit inconsistent about that by default: it shows you the number of individual unread messages, and then the total number of threads, so you can't use subtraction to get an accurate read count. GmailZero gives the number of fully read threads (unless you have a really huge inbox, in which case it counts the bare read msgs until you get down) -- so if a thread has an unread msg it goes back to an unread thread and doesn't count against you.

The problem with leaving things in my inbox is that if I don't deal with it immediately, it quickly disappears in the stream of incoming stuff. So in theory I could "just develop the discipline" to deal with important / worthy items at the time of reading, but expecting myself to manufacture that discipline out of thin air actually stresses me out way more than a commitment device.

Paul Graham has written a couple things related to the subject of akrasia, namely the acceleration of addictiveness: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

and disconnecting distraction: http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html

This is similar to how stores of the same type cluster together. But the sushi analogy may not map to web services, because with sushi you might explicitly seek variety. With a web service of this sort, you get drawn in. They have your contract, your data, etc, and there's a cost to switching.

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 think that's kind of the point of the article: When you can afford the worst case, there really isn't any value in certainty.

There's a huge difference between insurance and buying stuff from a store -- at a store I buy things when I have a higher utility for the item than the cost to the manufacturer to produce and sell it to me. Insurance is a zero-sum game. Actually, the article addresses that:

    "The difference is quite fundamental. It’s that insurance is fundamentally
    zero-sum — the only transaction is money going back and forth. When you 
    buy a refrigerator, say, your value for it is huge. (If refrigerators cost
    $50k you’d probably suck it up and buy one — how the hell are you going to
    live without a refrigerator?) So you come out way ahead when you get it for
    [I haven’t actually the faintest clue what a refrigerator costs]. And
    Maytag or whoever does too. Win-win! Insurance is fundamentally either 
    win-lose or lose-win."

In summary: Instead of trying to decide if a piece of paper is important enough to warrant keeping, just toss it in a box. By the time the box fills up time has decided that question for the bottom half of the stack.