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!
Great questions! Here are answers!
Giving yourself variance: Yes. It should become obvious as you add datapoints. The real nitty gritty about the width of the yellow brick road is here: http://blog.beeminder.com/roadwidth (In short: The width of the road is constructed so that if you're in the correct lane today then you're guaranteed not to lose tomorrow.)
Paying $5: Note that the first attempt is free. You only put money at risk if you go off the road and want to reset. Gory details at http://beeminder.com/money (note especially the part about the exponential fee schedule).
We've hesitated to expose that option since we're not sure how to handle the case of someone deleting a goal they have a contract on. The option does appear if you delete the only datapoint though.
The goal value is the y-value of the end of your yellow brick road. For weight loss it's obvious -- your goal weight. But for many kinds of goals, like "work out 20 minutes a day" for which the y-axis is the total (cumulative) amount reported, the goal value is probably not what you care about. This is confusing and we're scrambling to find a way to make it less so.
That works beautifully with beeminder! Just specify your rate as 5*X per week.
Well said. And yes, just use the road dial below your graph to flatten your road for the vacation. If it's a weight loss goal and you're going on an all-you-can-eat-buffet-hopping vacation, you can even make the road slope up for a while. Always with that one-week delay of course.
Damn straight: http://beeminder.com/meta
I think harshness/mildness is the wrong question here. It's just trying to help you find the order of magnitude that the punishment needs to be to get you to treat it as a hard commitment. In some sense the steeper the curve the less harsh since it means wasting less money on punishments that were insufficiently punishing before hitting your Motivation Point. We went with, roughly, 3^x.
You answered this one yourself, but, yes, we're fellow data nerds and we want import/export to always be easy.
Oh my, that sounds like a terrible, terrible idea! :) Very likely my lack of imagination though. Want to add it on http://uservoice.beeminder.com and see if it gets any upvotes?
Just remember Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Thanks so much for asking these questions. One of our biggest problems right now is conveying how this all works to someone just dropping in, so answering these helps us a lot.
PS: Anyone who read all this might also find our commitment contract template interesting: http://beeminder.com/contract
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
I rebuilt my guitar thing and added today's datapoint and now it seems to be predicting my path properly. Makes more sense now. I think I was confused at first because I had made a custom graph instead of using the "Do More" prefab.
Neat software!