dreeves

Beeminder taking this to characteristic extremes: https://blog.beeminder.com/waisted

Ha! Can we use that footnote in our marketing copy? :)

This looks beautiful! Here's a related tool my friends made: http://partifi.org

Even more relevant: The Beeminder Android app has a tally counter built in. :)

(I use it mainly to count pushups by putting my phone on the floor and touching my nose to the phone with each pushup.)

Ha, thanks for saying that. My mother had the same reaction and I assumed she was just being obtuse but now that a commenter on Hacker News has said it I'm going to assume there's genuine ambiguity there and add a little prescript to the post to clarify! ... and done. Thanks again!

Highly relevant: https://blog.beeminder.com/bites/ (about tracking bites of food and committing to a max number per day)

disapprobatory throat-clearing noises http://forum.beeminder.com/t/natrium/4122

On Twitter they just said it was a power outage in Newark:

https://twitter.com/linode/status/1019731939501096961

I hear that. But followup question! What do you think of commitment devices (like Beeminder!) for imposing discipline on oneself?

2633 User-Visible Improvements and counting! We've averaged exactly 1 per day for over 7 years. :) We also tweet them all to http://twitter.com/beemuvi

Thanks for the plug! In theory being poor just makes Beeminder all the more effective. :) You can cap the amount at risk at $5 and have it be plenty motivating to stay on track.

Actually the first derailment is $0 so if you're extra poor then you'll be very motivated to not derail even once, in order to prevent having to ever risk actual money.

And it can't hurt to try because if you do derail with the initial $0 at stake you'll have a chance to abort before there's any danger of losing your first $5.

Thanks for the awesome Beeminder plug! Anxious to hear if it continues to work for months and years.

There's a great discussion of Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies in the Beeminder forum: http://forum.beeminder.com/t/which-habit-tendency-are-you/16...

(Apparently I too am an Obliger.)

Ooh, I hadn't known about that one! Here's a similar one whose founder I can vouch for: https://bossasaservice.life/

At risk of meta-overload, our startup wouldn't exist but for doing this!

http://messymatters.com/uvi/

Ah, yes, my assumption is that you can derive the same amount of motivation with a non-evil beneficiary by just jacking up the amount at risk. Like donating $1 to the KKK is extremely aversive but you're equally motivated to avoid giving, say, $1k to a neutral 3rd party.

Exactly zero harm befalls the world in the latter case.

I'd even go so far as to say you could achieve the same effect with a true charity by risking an amount that you really couldn't afford. But, as I point out in the blog post I linked to above, no one ever has the guts to actually do that.

Btw, on Beeminder we very occasionally have people who risk thousands of dollars. I think they tend to be really hardcore fans who may in fact view it as improving the world by giving us money. Hence them shrugging off smaller amounts and needing to risk something ridiculous to stay motivated to stay on track. But it's still super win-win (because they do stay on track overall -- and sometimes staying on track means things like finishing a PhD!).

You know how the customers who pay the least are the most work? Well this idea creates customers who literally pay a negative amount. My sense from the erstwhile GymPact -- https://blog.beeminder.com/gympact/ -- is that those "customers" tended to be a nightmare.

Hence Beeminder rationalizing just keeping all the money! :)

Good points, but I don't think we need assumptions that strong. For example, if democrats donate to the republican party as an anti-charity and republicans donate an equal total to the democratic party, then probably democrats and republicans would all agree that that's strictly worse than nobody donating at all.

But more to the point, I'm just viewing it from the individual user's perspective. From your point of view, you're actively harming the world by donating to an anti-charity. It doesn't matter that those other wrong-on-the-internet people think your donation is doing good. :)

Here are all the other similar such apps we know of: http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors

Our (Beeminder's) counterargument: https://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity/

Excerpt:

Take my thoughts on this with a huge grain of salt, given my conflict of interest, but I really dislike commitment devices that destroy things — either information or other forms of value. StickK’s anti-charities seem the most egregious, actively harming the world. I’m certainly motivated to not allow the world to become a worse place, so it’s not that it would be ineffective as a commitment contract. Just that I’m also motivated to prevent things that don’t make the world worse in any way, like paying money to a third party (who’s not evil).

It's because of our gmailzero.com integration where you can mind your Gmail inbox. But, yes, it's super dumb that we don't separate out those permissions and are freaking people out by asking for them just to sign up...

Thanks so much for pointing this out!

Woo-hoo! Thanks for the Beeminder plug!

Hi Kyle! I'm a fan of Aaron Swartz's timeless advice to avoid news altogether: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

If you can't help yourself and want to find out about a big news event, check Wikipedia. Wikipedia is updated in pretty much real-time for major events, which can defeat the point, but at least it's filtered down to accepted facts rather than endless, time-sucking speculation.

But I don't follow my advice that well. Like I've gotten kind of sucked in by Twitter because I think patio11's tweetstorms are brilliant and don't want to miss any. And pg's tweets about his kids are just delightful. But then I end up sucked in by news.

So, yeah, I could use help too!

Oh yeah, Beeminder+RescueTime is always a good place to start for forcing yourself to spend more or less time on certain things, but that's not quite the same question as how to just make one's newsfeed less self-destructive.

Correct. We have them listed in the graveyard section. (Thanks for pointing out that it looked like a dead link. I shall edit the post more carefully to make that clearer!)

This seems like a good excuse to plug Beeminder but I'll try to be at least slightly less self-promotional and point to our collection of all our competitors who offer commitment device apps of various kinds: http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors

We call this the granddaddy of first-world problems.

I'm a cofounder of the startup being torn to shreds in this piece and delighted to answer questions!

As a cofounder of Beeminder, this makes tons of sense to me! Plenty of room for a less nerd-focused take on this (we're heaving on the Quantified Self side) and other forms of motivation hacking besides commitment contracts based on graphs.

I should mention that we do have a partial charity option in our fancypants premium plan: http://blog.beeminder.com/infinibee (Beemium plan, $32/mo)

And we have a tiny bit of social accountability with this feature: http://blog.beeminder.com/supporters

Btw, I'm not sure about your term "penance" here. I mean, I see how you're using it for monetary commitment contracts, I'm just not sure I agree with the term. To me it implies assuaging guilt after the fact. I think commitment contracts are all about shaping incentives before-the-fact.

Super exciting to see your thinking and progress on this! Let me know when you're ready to be added to http://blog.beeminder.com/competitors

And here are our thoughts on charities: http://blog.beeminder.com/anticharity

Oh yeah, and we have some very old thoughts on Pact (originally GymPact) and the idea of the winners paying the losers here: https://blog.beeminder.com/gympact/

Tons of room for competitors doing commitment devices and other motivation hacking. I chuckled/winced at "Beeminder but for less highly technical people" -- we'll get there! :)

Super valuable feedback; thank you!

I realize your feedback is about the impression it gives, totally separate from how greedy we actually are, but we're still tiny ($22k/mo revenue with 3.5 FTEs). And like enoch_r and mgiannopoulos have averred, paying the penalties to Beeminder generally feels super fair. So that's why we've limited the charity option to the ultra-VIP plan. (We're super open to more feedback about this though. We tend to get a highly biased sample of opinion from our users, i.e., the people who weren't immediately put off by our apparent greed. :))

Thanks! [glow!]

And really excellent point about queue limiting and kanban! Now I'm wondering if there's a hack or plugin or just a convention to make Trello work that way...

Or maybe the answer is Beeminder's Trello integration, to enforce limits on Trello cards. :)

Oh man, we really need to bump this to the top of our FAQ :)

https://www.beeminder.com/faq#qcoi

But maybe the best way to refute that is that we've been around 5.5 years and our long-term churn (not counting short-term churn of dabblers which is embarrassingly high cuz Beeminder is super nerdy and intimidating-looking!) is only 2%/month.

PS: Huge thanks to enoch_r for the beautiful testimonial!