This is embarrassingly out of date, but since it’s literally about Time Bridges, that makes it all the more apropos, right? (If you’re wondering how we even dug up something this old, you might like our recent series on backlogs and freshenable collections.) The Future of Life Podcast is mostly about...| blog.beeminder.com
A couple weeks ago we had close to 9 hours of downtime. Some kind of meltdown in the datacenter in Newark where our servers live. A lot of websites/apps were affected, which I guess lessens the shame of it, though it’s embarrassing we’re not more robust to this kind of thing. Anyway, check out status.beeminder.com...| blog.beeminder.com
People often complain about Beeminder’s perverse incentives. We started to address that at the end of our recent blog post comparing ourselves to GymPact: It seems that from the perspective of those paying us, Beeminder is providing a ton of value and a ton of motivation and the occasional cost of derailment...| blog.beeminder.com
One of the main things we’re working on right now is making Beeminder more comprehensible to newbees. We’ve even hired a web designer, Josh Pitzalis, to help us with a big redesign. Writing blog posts explaining (sometimes obscure) things about Beeminder is very much not furthering that objective. But...| blog.beeminder.com
Prof Michele Gregoire Gill is back! In her previous post she mentioned that Beeminder, in large part, motivates her via negative reinforcement. If you think that makes her sound like a masochist, or that she must set scary high monetary penalties on her goals, then you’re probably under a very common...| blog.beeminder.com
As of last week, our esteemed competitor, Pact, is officially shut down. We’re genuinely sad about that but were very touched that they endorsed us in their announcement to their users. Which is why many of you are reading this now, so… Welcome Pact users! The title of this post isn’t exactly true but...| blog.beeminder.com
We have a new competitor about to launch: Lift! Their (meta) goal is the same as ours. They want to “eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals”. Our approaches, however, are quite opposite. Or at least they have opposite sign. Lift emphasizes in their pre-announcement blog post today that they...| blog.beeminder.com
This is part 2 of our two-part series on loss aversion. Previously we explained loss aversion and how it’s distinct from the endowment effect. Here we (as Beeminder) disavow loss aversion as a tool for behavior change. This isn’t like “Ego Depletion Depletion” or other debunking posts we’ve done. We...| blog.beeminder.com
Beeminder is goal-tracking with teeth. We plot your progress on a graph with a Bright Red Line (formerly Yellow Brick Road). If your datapoints cross that line, we take your money. The Beeminder blog is a hodgepodge of productivity nerdery and behavioral economics written by the founders and various friends.| blog.beeminder.com
We’ve talked before about how paying is not punishment because derailing is not failing, but fellow workerbee Clive pointed out that we could flip that negative formulation around. Derailing isn’t just not failing. It’s actively succeeding. Or, since obviously it still needs to rhyme, “Derailing It...| blog.beeminder.com
Since we like letting you all peek behind the curtain of Beeminder, let’s dive in with this internal strategy memo that our beeloved Queen Bee sent to the team last month, reproduced here verbatim: Howdy my sweet bee people, We’ve subjected you to a lot of polarized ideas about Beeminder pricing over...| blog.beeminder.com
We keep raising the price of Beemium (currently $64/month as I write this). When we do, we grandfather existing users for a year. Most businesses warn everyone when they raise prices. It’s a classic Act Now inducement: lock in the old price before it’s too late. We don’t do that for the Beemium price...| blog.beeminder.com
Welcome to the Dreevpeeve of the day. I’ve actually seen “deprecate” misused so often that I was worried that, as usual, the prescriptivists would soon have to concede defeat. But so far all the dictionaries are holding firm. This is merely in the category of Common Misconception and so I’m doing my...| blog.beeminder.com
Welcome to the next post in our Freshening Series. Before we get to that, let’s review our related posts on clearing and preventing backlogs: Redqueening, Inbox Zero, Backlogs, and Fluid Dynamics describes Mark Forster’s Backlog Method — “isolate and redqueen” — using lots of analogies. Control Systems...| blog.beeminder.com
We’re thrilled and honored to welcome back to the blog the esteemed Mary Renaud, PhD. Though for now, only iPhone people can reap what Mary has sown… I’m excited to officially announce my first iOS app: Time Stream! What is Time Stream? Time Stream is a routine management app that adapts when your day...| blog.beeminder.com
We have a pair of blog posts from 2022 called “Backlog Freshening” and “Backlog Freshening For Humans” that we’re still very pleased with. To recap, say you have a backlog of something — tasks, emails, blog post drafts, bugs, you name it — that it’s not realistic to clear. (If you do need to clear it,...| blog.beeminder.com
The golden mean of Beeminder: If you never derail, dial up your bright red lines — if you’re derailing all the time, dial them down. Thanks to felixm and others in the forum for inspiring this post. The previous blog post in our series on how derailing is good-actually (see the sidebar for a review)...| blog.beeminder.com
We’re excited to officially announce our newest integration partner: Maayot! We’ve even got the Maayot folks here in their own words to tell you about it. Want an extra push to stay consistent with your Chinese reading? We (Maayot) are thrilled to announce our new integration with Beeminder, a powerful...| Beeminder Blog
This is a sequel to “The Power of Rearticulating Insights in Your Own Words.” If that post convinced you, this post is a way to turn all that up to eleven. Also conceivably related is our latest autodata integration, Postminder, for beeminding forum posts. The extremely curious can check out the forum...| Beeminder Blog
Tada! You can now beemind posting to the Beeminder forum, or any forum that uses the same forum software. Which is a lot of other fora. All the cool kids use it. It’s called Discourse. Not to be confused with Discord (more on this below), the instant messaging platform. Which, we suppose, is what the...| Beeminder Blog
This is a slightly more polished version of something I posted in the Beeminder forum. The forum is also the place for ongoing discussion about this. OpenAI’s Deep Research tool was made available to premium users the other day and I tried it out with the following prompt: “What does the science say...| Beeminder Blog
This is part 4 of our Melzaminder Series. Previously we introduced the Mindful Munching with Metrics program, talked about scale weight as a metric, and talked about proxy metrics more generally. Here we talk about how the Metrics part of Mindful Munching with Metrics work. Alright, any non-nerds who...| Beeminder Blog
That’s Fatebook with a T. Made by the impressive folks at Sage. What is Fatebook for? It’s for predicting things. Specifically, it’s for publicly or privately logging your estimates of the likelihood of certain future events. Which events? It’s totally up to you. You can predict the course of history,...| Beeminder Blog
This is part 3 of our Melzaminder Series. Previously we introduced the Mindful Munching with Metrics program followed by To Weigh Or Not To Weigh, in which we argue in favor of poor maligned scale weight as a useful getting-in-shape metric. Here, we generalize the idea of metrics that aren’t quite the...| Beeminder Blog
This is part 2 of our Melzaminder Series. Last time we introduced the Mindful Munching with Metrics program, which is now at capacity and going amazingly. We’ve already started a wait list for the next one. The very first step of the program is choosing a suitable gauge of one’s progress. We discussed...| Beeminder Blog
Happy New Year! Starting today, for the first 9 weeks of the year, Beeminder and MelzaFit.com are teaming up for a group accountability coaching program. If you want to try intuitive eating as a weight control strategy, dump the diet mindset, and also try out some nerdtasticness with Beeminder graphs...| Beeminder Blog
Welcome one and all to this announcement of our latest Beeminder integration: Curlminder. This one’s for the nerds. The idea is that you give us a URL and a regular expression, and we fetch the contents of the webpage, match it on the regex, and pull out a number. In theory you can use this to beemind...| Beeminder Blog
Users have been lobbying for this feature for years. Finally we threw in the towel and implemented it. Hitting the Uncle Button (crying uncle) means accepting a derailment before the clock runs out. This is actually kind of critical to let users do and it’s silly it took us so long. I mean, for starters,...| Beeminder Blog
Remember Fractional Beeminding? We’ve been putting it to great use for such goals as Our meta goal to keep churning out autodata integrations Project Euler, and Workerbee-Visible Improvements. A key clarification before reviewing how it works: fractional beeminding doesn’t mean beeminding something with...| Beeminder Blog
Question from the internet: What do we mean by calling Beeminder hyperrational goal tracking? Before I give my answer, here’s a recent example from the inventor of Ruby on Rails using “hyperrational” in the context of sociopathic companies: [Fines on tech companies] put a price on criminal behavior,...| Beeminder Blog
Beeminder as the nuclear option means beeminding something as an insurance policy. You have a nice graph of your progress but you maintain enough safety buffer that you’re not in danger of derailing and getting stung (being charged money for going off track on your goal, for those just tuning in). In...| Beeminder Blog
Being a smidge embarrassed by the term “user-squeaming”, we sat on this draft for years. But when we used it again this morning we decided the concept handle had officially stuck and figured it was time to give it the imprimatur of a blog post. User-squeaming means being excessively squeamish about what...| Beeminder Blog
Once again, we’re releasing an integration I’m enthusiastic about right around my birthday, and this time it wasn’t even planned that way! So what is Oura? They make wearable health trackers in the form of rings, which are super wearable and maybe even a little bit stylish. (Uh, don’t take any style...| Beeminder Blog
In a recent poll of most annoying things about Beeminder graphs there was a surprise winner. People really want to specify the plot range of their graphs using relative dates. Like always showing just the most recent month of data on the graph. Well, your wish is (sometimes, when we feel like it) our...| Beeminder Blog
This blog post started its life during the pandemic, as part of a series in the daily beemail called Madhack Mondays. Here’s a highly beemindable workout idea for the dead of winter if you have stairs in your house. Put 100 marbles or legos or whatever in a bowl at the bottom of your stairs. Then...| Beeminder Blog
Grayson Bray Morris has been a bright spot in the Beeminder community almost since the beginning. She’s currently taking a break from the internet, but before she peaced out she gave us permission to canonize this classic 2015 (!) post from her old blog, by publishing it here on Beeminder’s blog. The...| Beeminder Blog
We have two excuses to blog about this. First, we’re using our new group goals feature to experiment with something we’re calling Book Brigades. To quote myself from the forum post about it: A book brigade is a very small group of very like-minded| Beeminder Blog
I’ve kept a Beeminder journal in the forum for over five years now. I don’t remember who initially inspired me to do it, but it’s a practice I’ve faithfully kept up every week since February 2019. You can check out all my Beeminder journals still — they’ve been separated into threads by year, of late,...| Beeminder Blog
Group goals are alive! Multiple people can all commit to a single goal! Find it in the Settings tab below your graph: Backing up, this has been in private beta for over a year. Then this past weekend I was at Manifest (which was pretty amazing, btw, highly recommended, and tons of Beeminder fans) where...| Beeminder Blog
“Potentially Paying Customers” We ended the last blog post with what you might think is an unfortunate epithet for new Beeminder users. Being buried at the end of a bunch of nitty-gritty about business reasons for the timing of collecting payment info, approximately zero percent of people noticed it,...| blog.beeminder.com
Previously on the Beeminder blog: debating negative vs positive reinforcement and, in case you care about using these psychology terms correctly, clarifying that negative reinforcement ≠ punishment. Also “Beeminder: Like Pact Except All We Do Is Take Your Money”. Here’s a common (pointed) question about...| blog.beeminder.com
Happy Solstice! We have a meta-gift for you: Honeygrams! Meta-gift? Yes, you can now gift your honey money (FKA premium credit), even to people who don’t yet have a Beeminder account (give the gift of Beeminder?). It looks like this: If you put an email address in the “To” field instead of a Beeminder...| blog.beeminder.com
