I am looking forward to the API. I am much more likely to continually use Beeminder if it can be automatically updated or, failing that, updated easily from a mobile device. The site is actually OK (not great) to navigate with a phone, but typing updates is not that easy.
Thanks for the hard work. Beeminder looks like a great tool.
This idea sounds awesome. Congrats for having made it happen!
(I don't think I'll be joining myself, preferring to deal with my akrasia issues in a different way, but it sounds like something that could be really useful for someone with a slightly different mindset or in a somewhat different situation.)
I just have to say thanks for a great tool for managing my akrasia!
It is too early to say that the effects will last long-term, but Beeminder has genuinely given me a boost towards doing the things I want-to-do-but-keep-putting-aside-just-for-the-moment in a way that nothing else has for a long time.
It has also made very clear which things I want to do but put off (on which activity is rapidly diverging from the yellow brick road in a positive direction) and the things I don't want to do but have to (which are still in the safe zone, but are not running away from the YBR at all...).
I have been trying (off and on, without much focus) to figure out how to express "I want to spend less money on eating out for lunch, either by skipping it (bringing lunch from home or going home for lunch) or by spending less when I do" - anyone have any tips for how to wedge this into the system?
Clearing up more confusion about how to actually get a commitment contract started: You go off your road and then you have to commit in order to reset it, i.e. the first try is free. More info: http://beeminder.com/money
Clearing up some confusion that has come up: (and holy crap, thanks so much for the flood of interest since this hit the frontpage!)
What if you just want a flat yellow brick road to force yourself to do, say, a minimum of 60 minutes of studying per day?
The answer is that that's not a flat yellow brick road, that's a yellow brick road that slopes up at the rate of 60 minutes per day. In other words, you'll have a graph with total cumulative number of minutes of studying on the y-axis and time on the x-axis.
Also, if you literally want to force yourself to d...
Reading the site it seems like it's mostly aimed at weight loss, but I didn't see anywhere where it came out and said it directly. You could officially brand yourselves as a weight loss site. But it probably makes sense to just emphasize other goals more in your examples.
Looking just at the main page it wasn't at all clear what you do. I think your graphs are awesome, but it took me a lot of looking through your site to understand them. Some introductory text and images would help more than bring able to see all 20 graphs. Potentially a smaller number of well chosen, well named, larger graphs.
Thanks so much to everyone checking it out already! This would be a fine place to ask questions if anything is confusing about it or anything. Or if you want to rip the whole idea to shreds, by all means, bring it on! :)
I'm going to take this opportunity to publicly announce the following goals:
Have fasted for 48 hours at least once by this time next year.
Lose 7 pounds by Burning Man.
Send two OKCupid messages every week.
Do seven Project Euler problems per week.
I set myself up to track how much time I spend actually working, using tagtime. The documentation for setting up tagtime to work with beeminder is pretty limited: it says to use a particular perl script, and then if you run that script (or look at the top comment) you can mostly figure it out. On beeminder, my graph would tell me that my time was being tracked automatically using tagtime, even before I'd set it up.
I had a hard time setting it up because I kept looking for how to get an api key, assuming that it wouldn't let me update an arbitrary user's graph, and that I must be missing something.
I created two goals:
https://www.beeminder.com/greenmarine
Both goals have perfectly tight roads. Is this correct? I would like to give myself some variance, since I'll probably not ever do exactly 180 minutes in a day. To start, I fudged the first day's value at the goal value.
Based on how you describe the system, it looks like I should expect to pay $5 if I practice 179 min...
How well does this work for variables that are not entirely under your control? I'm specifically thinking for weight gain contracts. I'd like to motivate myself to gain weight, but past history teaches me that being sick will crater my weight.
Basically, you're asking me to possibly give you money, in a way and an amount that helps me. The point is that there's no supply/demand curve here, so I have no way of knowing that this money is being effectively used once I give it to you. I will sign up if:
You include a charity option, where some significant % (probably 10%-50%) of the money I give you goes to a charity of my choice. If the charity happened to be tax-deductible, it would be a deduction for you, not for me. But things like political donations should be allowed, I think. I think you sho
We'd love to hear more thoughts on this, like are we in fantasyland with the above rationalizations for being the beneficiary?
Nope. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that anybody telling you that you shouldn't get paid is full of.. it. Blow the money on whatever you want.
Even with exponential growth, people will spend a LOT more money to fail under normal circumstances. If you measure the actual value you're providing to people's lives, the amount of that value you'll actually be capturing is a negligible percentage, except for pathological Bruces (who will find a way to lose that money anyway).
If you want to give them a convenience option to also pay money to somebody else, then that's an additional service and should not reduce your fees.
More important: do not listen to people tell you how much you should be paid. Or more precisely, do not listen to people tell you how little you should be paid. That is a status conversation, nothing more. People do not tell the casino that they'll only bet money there if the casino gives the money to charity!
Anybody who makes this argument, you do not want as a customer. They are saying two things:
They could charge for access to the version with the tweak. "Premium Beeminder". With statistics to back up how much more effective it is.
"Congratulations, you've been selected to try a new feature that we're thinking of adding to Premium Beeminder, free for six months!"
How do I link my Withings scale to my Beeminder account? I see that other people have done this, so it should be possible...
Nice idea, but to me that's not the real problem. My main problem is not about doing something once I decided I want to do it (on that part I'm quite ok, far from perfect, but ok), but about choosing what to do.
There are so many things I want to do, and so few time, that it's very common to me to "freeze" on a typical sunday morning, when I've the whole day to do something, but have to decide what to do. I often switch from one task to another not finishing any, or spend lots of time choosing what to do, or just decide to go with something fast ...
Make differently coloured bands corresponding to each task. you're only allowed to work on the task if you're wearing the correctly coloured band. The bands are placed far away from where you do the tasks or in a box with a complicated lock or something like that. You chose which band to wear first using dice.
In 2009 I first described here on LessWrong a tool that Bethany Soule and I made to force ourselves to do things that otherwise fell victim to akrasia ("How a pathological procrastinator can lose weight"). We got an outpouring of encouragement and enthusiasm from the LessWrong community, which helped inspire us to quit our day jobs and turn this into a real startup: Beeminder (the me-binder!).
We've added everyone who got on the waitlist with invite code LESSWRONG and we're getting close to public launch so I wanted to invite any other LessWrong folks to get a beta account first: http://beeminder.com/secretsignup (no wait this time!)
(UPDATE: Beeminder is open to the public.)
It's definitely not for everyone since a big part of it is commitment contracts. But if you like the concept of stickK.com (forcing yourself to reach a goal via a monetary commitment contract) then we think you'll adore Beeminder.
StickK is just about the contracts -- Beeminder links it to your data. That has some big advantages:
1. You don't have to know what you're committing to when you commit, which sounds completely (oxy)moronic but what we mean is that you're committing to keeping your datapoints on a "yellow brick road" which you have control over as you go. You commit to something general like "work out more" or "lose weight" and then decide as you go what that means based on your data.
2. You have the flexibility to change your contract in light of new information (like, 40 hours of actual focused work per week is damn hard!). That also sounds like it defeats the point of a commitment contract, but the key is that you can only make changes starting a week in the future. (Details at blog.beeminder.com/dial which describes the interface of the "road dial" for adjusting the steepness of your yellow brick road.) The point is that akrasia (dynamic inconsistency, hyperbolic discounting) means over-weighting immediate consequences, so to beat akrasia you only need to bind yourself for whatever the horizon on "immediate" is. Based on a study of grocery-buying habits -- when buying groceries online for delivery tomorrow people buy a lot more ice cream and a lot fewer vegetables than when they're ordering for delivery next week -- and raw guesswork (so far), we're taking that Akrasia Horizon to be one week.
So Beeminder as an anti-akrasia tool means committing to keeping all your datapoints on a yellow brick road that you specify and can change the steepness of at any time, with a one-week delay.
You may be wondering how anyone could ever fail to stay on a yellow brick road that's this flexible. Here's how: if you're highly akratic. Such a person may well find it a daily struggle to stay on the road. Yeah, you can always choose to wuss out and flatten the road, but only starting in a week, which you don't want to do. You want to wuss out Right Now, dammit! I mean, just for now, while you eat this pie, and then you'll behave again. No such luck though.
The daily struggle to stay on the road does not induce you to touch that road dial. You always want to make it easier "just for today" -- which the road dial doesn't allow -- and you always think you'll get your act together by next week.
We'd love to hear people's thoughts on this! Perhaps surprisingly, it took a ridiculous number of iterations to get to this point. For the longest time we struggled with different ways to deal with the fact that it's so often hard to decide what to commit to. We tried many variations of having multiple yellow brick roads for a single goal, so that you could specify an ambitious goal as well as a bare minimum. It was always too messy, or would backfire altogether and be paralyzing. We think the road dial with an akrasia horizon is a big leap forward. And it seems so obvious in retrospect!