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dreeveson How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

Sounds highly beemindable! Likely relevant: Gitminder, our GitHub integration for committing to pushing more commits or closing more issues. beeminder.com/gitminder

(I'm worried that I'm turning the comments into Beeminder Evangelism Hour here but I can't seem to help myself. I guess Hacker News of all places will be forgiving of that...)

dreeveson How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

I don't think the incentives are quite right that way. What motivates you to keep money out of the swear jar?

(It's possible that the tracking alone will be motivating. Some people, for some goals, find that to be the case.)

I'd love to hear how it goes for anyone who sets up a DIY Beeminder!

dreeveson How to Do What You Want: Akrasia and Self-Binding (2011)

Awww, it's the inaugural post on the Beeminder blog! I'd be delighted to answer questions about this.

I think the summary is that hyperbolic discounting is the cause of procrastination (and other forms of akrasia) and the solution is commitment devices. Beeminder takes a quantified-self approach to commitment devices which we think is especially powerful and flexible.

dreeveson Ask HN: How do you stay focused when learning or working on something?

Ooh, can I hear why Beeminder didn't feel sustainable? (I'm a cofounder.)

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Beeminder does have a charity option but it's a premium feature in the most expensive premium plan.

Also when we / Beeminder derail on our own goals we pay our users.

Not sure if either of those things make it feel ok. I guess we're keen for you to feel like we're any other SaaS that you're happy to pay for. Beeminder makes you awesomer and you pay for that, just at random times, or when you most need a kick in the pants, instead of a fixed monthly amount (though that too if you want a premium plan). If Beeminder isn't worth it overall then you'll stop using it; it's not really the perverse "make money when your users fail" that it seems prima facie. There's a myopic sense in which that's true but overall it's quite the opposite! As must be the case for us to have stuck around for 9 years.

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

> Do you guys still stick to "one user-visible improvement per day"?

We do! http://beeminder.com/changelog -- 3485 UVIs and counting...

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Dang, this is extremely valuable feedback and a beautifully balanced review. Thank you!

As for the friction of adding data, we have smartphone apps and an email and SMS bot to try to help with that. But ideally you automate it. There are dozens of apps and gadgets we integrate with (RescueTime, Fitbit, Trello, Garmin, GitHub, etc etc) and we have an API, or you can make an IFTTT or Zapier recipe/applet/zap/whatever.

Oh yeah, and I should point out https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating

Finally, good point about being careful what you beemind. We try to minimize the danger of that with our one-week "akrasia horizon". You're never on the hook for more a week into the future, i.e., you can stop or change a goal at any time, with a one-week delay. So you haven't lost much if you realize you're beeminding the wrong things.

Or if it's just that more important things are getting crowded out, our self-serving advice is to just beemind those things as well!

Thanks again for this comment!

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Voila:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-mil...

https://xkcd.com/1053/

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Holy cow it feels good to hear that! Thank you!

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Yeah, it's surprisingly controversial but I agree, your long-term self is usually the rational one. Commitment devices are all about forcing/incentivizing your short-term self to do what your long-term self deems best. Sometimes people are too extreme with that, like intentionally living in near poverty their whole life in order to save as much as humanly possible for retirement, or suffering through a PhD program they hate because they think it will eventually be worth it.

But those are the exceptions. Mostly it's the other way around, as you say. People undermine their own long-term interests with procrastination or impetuousness.

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Thanks, yes! Here are all the other commitment device apps we know of: https://blog.beeminder.com/competitors/

But as I said to Maneesh above, I think anti-charities are anti-good. https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Hi Maneesh! I'm actually opposed to anti-charities because I think they're bad for the world and not necessary -- you can get equal motivation with a neutral (non-evil) 3rd party, as long as you make the amount at risk high enough. More at https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/

PS: As you know I'm a huge fan of Pavlok -- https://pavlok.com/ -- and definitely don't think that my arguments against anti-charities apply to it even though they're both very punishment focused. Pavlok (obviously I'm saying this for others, not Maneesh, founder of Pavlok!) is more about classical conditioning while Beeminder is more operant conditioning.

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Oops, yes, I should've mentioned what Beeminder is! Thanks!

We get that a lot ("where does the money go? wait, you do _what_ with it??") but I'm surprised to hear that pushback on Hacker News. Is the existence of Beeminder not "something positive"?

More at https://blog.beeminder.com/defail/

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

To elaborate on that: one interpretation of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is that learning to trust adults is a key predictor for success in life.

Recall the experiment: kids who resisted gobbling the marshmallow in order to earn 2 marshmallows went on to be awesomer adults. The original explanation is that kids with the ability to delay gratification (or who come up with beeminder-y tricks to distract themselves from the tempting marshmallow) will be served well by that skill the rest of their lives.

But another explanation – https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121011090655.h... – is that those seemingly impulsive kids are just the kids who don’t trust the adults who promise the 2nd marshmallow. They’re like “yeah, I’ve heard that before” and gobble while the gobbling’s good. In other words, they’re not failing to delay gratification, they’re responding to the situation perfectly rationally based on their past interactions with adults. To put it overly dramatically: flaking out on your kids ruins their lives!

(I’m not sure how much credence to give that interpretation, and suspect that there’s truth in the original interpretation too. But it kind of feels right to me. Flaking out on anyone is really bad. But kids especially.)

PS: More recent partial replication of the Marshmallow Test: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618761661

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Agreed. I wouldn't say any of these astute points argue against commitment devices (as it sounds like you're implying but I could be misreading you).

A commitment device provides an incentive, including the incentive to eliminate distractions by going somewhere quiet or whatever else you need to do to follow through on what you've committed to.

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Ah, I don't agree but that's an interesting point that I could see being true for some people.

I think mostly there's plenty of short-term cost to derailing a Beeminder goal and getting the alert "we are now charging you $X". Not as good as handing over cash but still pretty good!

I definitely disagree that surrounding yourself with pictures of your goals is comparable. I mean, it can't hurt and maybe for some people it's enough, but for me personally, for example, things like that just fade into the background for me and lose their effectiveness. A commitment device (monetary or otherwise) doesn't let that happen!

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Back in 2015 we (Beeminder) wrote a blog post praising Scott Adam's "systems vs goals" insight which I still stand by: https://blog.beeminder.com/systems/

Excerpt (quoting Adams):

If you do something every day, it's a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. […] Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

Also related: SMART goals.

dreeveson The best way to exercise self-control is not to exercise it at all

Excerpt:

Here’s what I mean when I say there’s no such thing as willpower, despite having just defined it. Paraphrasing Laplace, I can explain all behavior simply in terms of responding to incentives. You want this whole pie in your body right now, and also you want to be two sizes smaller by next summer. Conflicting preferences are normally no big deal. You just, y’know, weigh them, make your tradeoffs, and reach a decision. But when the preferences apply at different timescales (pie now, thinner later) humans suffer from a massive irrationality which philosophers call akrasia and economists call dynamic inconsistency and normal people call … being stupidly short-sighted, or in the case of time management: procrastination.

Commitment devices are a way to change your own incentives so that willpower is a non-issue. They make your short-term and long-term incentives line up. There are many less drastic things you can do as well.

PS: Also the whole "willpower is like a muscle" theory, known as Ego Depletion, failed to replicate.

dreeveson The Joel Test for Software Teams is 20 years old this weekend

Well said! I guess if some of Joel's points have become common sense then that speaks well of the test. And of our industry. :)

I don't have a strong opinion about buying the best tools money can buy but it seems fair enough to include tool quality as a factor in how good a software team is. You might be right that adequate is adequate but it's not binary. Better is better.

As for your point about hallway testing, I think the point is that that's a bare minimum. Deeper testing with the target audience is even better but it's amazing how common it is to never watch over a real user's shoulder (screencast, whatever) as they try to actually use your thing.

dreeveson The Joel Test for Software Teams is 20 years old this weekend

Oops, thanks! Should be:

  4. Do you have a bug database? [.9 points]

dreeveson The Joel Test for Software Teams is 20 years old this weekend

I thought it could be fun to compare how our own teams do on The Joel Test now. I estimate Beeminder gets a 68%:

  1. Do you use source control? [1 point]
  2. Can you make a build in one step? [.6 points for modernized version of this]
  3. Do you make daily builds? [1 point]
  4. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? [1 point]
  5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? [1 point]
  6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? [0 points]
  7. Do you have a spec? [.9 points]
  8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? [.5 points]
  9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? [.5 points]
  10. Do you have testers? [0 points]
  11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? [1 point]
  12. Do you use hallway usability testing? [.8 points]

Details at https://forum.beeminder.com/t/20th-anniversary-of-the-joel-t...

dreeveson Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?

Ooh, Beeminder fits the bill, I think! (I'm a cofounder.)

dreeveson How to Write Functional Specs; Spec Spectrum: Elevator Pitch to Production Code

I think the thing I'm least sure of in this post is the difference between a functional spec and a technical spec and when and why you'd want one vs the other.

(And whether the whole concept of generalizing those to a whole continuum is useful. I like it conceptually/intellectually but don't know how actually useful it is.)

dreeveson The Startup Egg-Basket Principle

Oh hi I wrote this!

This one might be pretty obvious for the Hacker News crowd and is along the lines of Paul Graham's "dig a deep well" advice. Be laser-focused on the one thing you're best at, don't try to hedge bets or diversify your revenue stream or anything like that.

It also has anecdotes about how Beeminder almost died by violating the egg-basket principle. Yay for getting gradually smarter!

dreeveson Show HN: A Firefox extension to add latency to distracting webpages

Brilliant! As far as I know, this idea was first proposed by Randall Munroe in the hovertext of https://xkcd.com/862/ (2011-02-18):

"After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished -- and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected."

dreeveson Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them (2009)

This is (mostly) wrong. Sivers himself seems to have regretted how his talk was interpreted and posted this semi-retraction: https://sivers.org/zipit2

But identity-based goal or not, the conclusion that you make yourself less likely to achieve a goal by telling people about it defies common sense. I mean, here's the peer-reviewed science saying my common sense is wrong -- http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Se... -- but this is a psychology paper from 2009 so I'm willing to bet real money on common sense, despite seeing no obvious flaw with the paper.

dreeveson Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)

Ooh, any way we could entice you to describe that in the TagTime forum? https://forum.beeminder.com/c/tagtime

dreeveson Tell HN: Pluralsight and the dark-pattern of auto-renewals

It's true! http://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel

dreeveson How You Talk Yourself Out of Reporting a Bug

Irony Of The Day: I realized a critical problem in the post about bug reports. We originally listed the three pieces of a Proper Bug Report as "what you did", "what you expected", and "what you saw" but that misses the most important point of a Proper Bug Report. It's not just the list of steps you took, past tense. The idea is to start from scratch and see if you can make the bug happen on command, writing down each thing you do along the way.

(Blog post now updated, including even the Latin inscription in the title image.)

dreeveson You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014)

I believe the definitions you get by googling "define $WORD" are especially horrible. In fact I have a whole diatribe about this...

http://doc.dreev.es/dicked

As a teaser, here are some of the google definitions I've come across that I believe are all wrong:

  mitzvah
  mercenary
  bemused
  waif
  ancillary
  hinky
  quiescent
  commentariat
  poignant
  orthogonal
  dibs
  come out in the wash
  kibitz
  cull
  elide
  gird
  comport
  confabulate