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All of Eshvy's Comments + Replies

My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia
Eshvy122

Hey Josh!

I would like to ask a couple questions regarding user retention, if you don't mind:

On average how long do people use the app before they stop/drop-off? 

On average how many users get past the first week of use? 

Thanks!

Reply
-3Josh Mitchell
Hey Eshvy! Retention is a really tough one to answer questions on, sadly - it very much depends on where the user came from (ie, a TikTok ad vs an organic intentional search). Happy to answer any other questions though!
My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia
Eshvy33

This is completely speculation on my part and I think the general model regarding subagents is correct but I don't think that using apps like this is purely coercion. Are you averse to this because it feels like putting yourself in a skinner box? 

I have no evidence to back this up (my experience is based on doing IFS therapy) but I think a lot subagents have their blind spots and these app help alleviate these blind spots and actually spare the subagent from future pain. 

Let's say your exploratory subagent is not on board with a boring admin task... (read more)

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My experience using financial commitments to overcome akrasia
Eshvy*50

Thanks for sharing, very helpful (I lurk and almost never post)! 

Reading the rave reviews on the app site also reinforces how effective the app can be for people with your (our) disposition. 

Have you tried using focusmate? It is the one app the that has helped me deal with similar issues of procrastination but of course I have repeatedly failed the meta-game of applying it consistently. Using forfeit for this problem seems like an obvious solution. 

EDIT: I registered on forfeit and see that it has pomodoro forfeits in the app, so using it fo... (read more)

Reply
3William Howard
Glad to be of help! I was almost put off by the overly rave reviews when I first tried it lol but now I can imagine myself writing one. I haven't tried Focusmate, although I do do timed work sessions (and did before I used the app) and now use the app to enforce a certain amount of time per day, so this achieves a similar effect. It might be redundant, although one thing that is really great about it is that because screenshots are the universal interface you can keep using the apps you already use and just use Forfeit to submit evidence. This is why I still use Habitica even though I could equally put the same tasks in Forfeit directly, there is just no particular reason to do so. I've looked through at the ones I have failed and it looks like "reply to X person" and "publish blog post" are the categories that stand out. For replying to people I deliberately set the penalty low to begin with (and increase it if I fail the first time) so this is by design. For publishing blog posts, there aren't that many instances but I have failed >50% of them, here I was generally underestimating the effort it takes. I actually rarely fail the twitter one because the penalty is quite high (and I block it via Freedom for the rest of the day if I'm getting close to the limit).
How I use Google Forms in my Workflow
Eshvy10

I registered here to say that your idea seems very exciting and I'm eager to try it! Also, I would like to ask for a of copy your templates too.

Would you mind elaborating on whether (and if so, how) you use airtable to aggregate your forms into information (eg how many tasks you completed in week, how much a recurring task takes you on average)?

When I first saw your post I assumed you would be aggregating your forms in excel or google sheets. How is airtable different?

Reply
0Harri Besceli
Happy to hear - this link should enable you to duplicate the base, if you click the dropdown menu next to 'Form Examples' at the top (it might ask you to sign up to airtable first). If that doesn't work I can dm you a different link. One of the main reasons I prefer airtable to eg. google sheets is that I find it much easier to categorise and analyse the data. A lot of the functionality is fairly intuitive, and requires a lot less formula knowledge than eg. google sheets. For example with my time tracking data it's fairly easy to create different views that organise the records by date, by project, by duration etc. The airtable template gallery gives lots of examples of how the bases can be structured for stuff like that.