Preamble

Here are two facts about elite athletes that sound contradictory at first blush but aren’t:

1. Elite athletes, being more efficient at propelling themselves, burn fewer calories per mile than muggles.
2. Elite athletes, being better at turning calories into motion, burn more calories per hour than muggles.

It all makes sense when you think about it. Olympians are fuel-efficient, meaning they can do a lot with a little fuel, but also they’re very good at quickly transforming fuel into motion.

As Greg LeMond famously put it, it doesn’t get easier, you just go faster. But if you don’t go faster, then, yeah, it’ll be easier.

Elite athletes simultaneously burn fewer calories per mile and more calories per hour. How? By going many more miles in that hour than a normal human.

Paradox resolved!

The Actual Beeminder Part

So should you beemind miles or hours or miles per hour? Our answer is that hours is safest and simplest. Commit to putting in the time, at whatever level you’re currently capable of. It’s nice and predictable.

Miles is fine too. By which we mean distance. (Sorry for the imperial units but “miles” is a lot easier to say than “kilometers”! Depending on the sport, this could also be laps or vertical meters or steps or strokes or fathoms or furlongs.) Distance may be a more interesting metric than duration and we do think interestingness of the metric is paramount for beeminding.

But what if speed is what’s most interesting and important to you, as it might well be if you’re an aspiring elite athlete? Our answer is that that’s an outcome, not an action. So focus on beeminding the actions that help you get to the outcome. If you really want, go ahead and beemind speed too, just very conservatively. Use a shallow slope and low pledge cap. You don’t want to end up with an expensive beemergency you’re physically incapable of dispatching!

To round this out, and in case it’s a helpful resource, here’s a whole list of athletic metrics that might make for beemindable metrics:

1. Duration
2. Distance (horizontal or vertical)
3. Speed (again, more outcome than action)
4. Calories or kilojoules burned
5. Power aka wattage (or multiply this by time to be more action than outcome, which is just calories or kilojoules)
6. Cadence
7. Hydration
8. Time in heart rate zones
9. Weight and body composition (standard warning about outcomes vs actions)
10. Nutritional intake metrics (macro or micronutrients)
11. Steps
12. Number of intervals for HIIT training
13. Total reps (e.g., pushups or pullups or squats)
14. Volume load (weight lifted multiplied by reps and sets)
15. Binary “showing up” / Tiny Habits goals: putting on running shoes, touching the door of the gym (HT Dan Byler)

If you have a metric you’re minding that we missed, let us know and we’ll augment the list!

There are a lot of things in the category of “nerd tendencies I’ve had to unlearn”. I often turn them into capital-P Principles as a way to drill them into my head. Eventually I intend to collect them all into a meta post but here are a few random examples in the meantime: the Anti-Magic Principle, the Anti-Settings Principle, the Shirk-n-Turk Principle, and the Anti-Robustness Principle. (Hover over the links for the nerd tendencies those are counterpoints to.)

Today I have one that’s a variant of the classic Knuth-ism [1] that premature optimization is the root of all evil.

“Don’t create premature ontologies”

Knuth was saying that programmers tend to spend too much time fussing with their code to make it more efficient. You should profile your code to find the actual bottlenecks and only optimize the code that’s actually slowing your application down.

I claim that people (well, a certain kind of nerd, including past-me) make a similar mistake with ontologies. They’ll start a Discord server and create an elaborate set of channels for all the topics they anticipate people wanting to discuss. Or create an elaborate set of labels for a new code repository in GitHub, or for their email, or for a filesystem.

So the Anti-Ontology Principle is this: Don’t add categories speculatively. Start with exactly one category in your ontology and add new ones only in response to an actual thing in the actual world happening that makes you actually need a new category. If you delay that kind of organizing until there’s a clear and present need, you save yourself a lot of wasted work.

In other words, start with a single umbrella category and then branch it as needed. Don’t create premature ontologies!

Provenancial postscript: I’ve mentioned the Anti-Ontology Principle in various places before (the Beeminder forum, a previous blog post, and Twitter) but I refer to it often enough that it wanted to be its own blog post. Et voila.

Footnotes

[1] I almost clarified that it was originally Hoare who said it, but then I found this claim on Hacker News:

Actually that was Donald Knuth — it’s an urban legend that it’s an urban legend that it was originally Knuth. Hoare was quoting Knuth, but Knuth forgot he said it, and re-mis-attributed the quote to Hoare.

So I officially don’t know what to believe but calling it a Knuth-ism feels pretty apt regardless.

PS: No, I’m too epistemically obsessive to shrug that off. I’ve now found some research by Shreevatsa R that convinces me that it really was Knuth after all. Phew!

Here are two handy wisdom nuggets:

1. Adam Wolf’s trick of committing now to start doing something in 30 days (i.e., create a goal with a 30-day initial buffer) to overcome the mental friction of getting yourself on the hook.
2. Tim Harford’s heuristic of only committing to something in the future if you’d be willing to commit to doing it today, to overcome the common delusion in which you think “next week I’ll be less busy”.

Do those conflict?

Harford’s trick might seem anti-Beeminder-y. Only commit if you’d be ok with doing it now, within your akrasia horizon? That’s exactly what Beeminder assumes you won’t do, not without re-engineered incentives!

But I actually agree with both of those wisdom nuggets and even think they’re instances of the same general principle.

The standard story of akrasia is that I delusionally think I can screw around now and be more productive tomorrow (or next week). I’m hyperbolically discounting and prioritizing immediate pleasure and deferring pain.

“For the exact same reason, I both procrastinate and overcommit”

Similarly, when someone asks me to commit to something, I have a strong immediate desire to make them happy and say yes. Disappointing people feels horrible. So, for the exact same reason, I both procrastinate and overcommit. I don’t overcommit to myself, just to other people. For self-originating commitments it’s the hassle of committing that’s most salient. Not bothering is easiest in the moment. I need to lock myself in. For other-originating commitments it’s the pain of disappointing someone that’s most salient. It’s easiest to say yes now and worry about the consequences in the future.

In short, I’m tempted to say no to my suggestions to myself of new commitments and I’m tempted to say yes to others.

Hence Adam Wolf’s trick for overcoming that immediate ugh-reaction and getting myself on the hook for things I want to commit to. And hence also Tim Harford’s heuristic for defending against the temptation to say yes in the moment (and avoid the pain of saying no) to all those potential commitments to others that future-me will have to worry about making good on.

PS: Caveats and Advice-Reversal

As with most advice given blindly, some people may do better to reverse this advice. You know who you are. Creating a Beeminder goal every time the whim strikes could be a recipe for Beeminder Burnout for some folks. (Presumably some people should apply Scott Alexander’s advice-reversing advice to Tim Harford’s heuristic as well.) But I think it’s possible to get the best of both worlds. As we explain in our old blog post about it, beating Beeminder burnout doesn’t have to mean beeminding fewer things, just beeminding less so. Follow Adam’s advice and create every Beeminder goal that pops into your head, with the 30 days’ buffer, and also do calendialing. That way you can beemind All The Things, but very gradually and nonstressfully (or at whatever stress level you may thrive on).

Did you just hear about Beeminder (“get charged money if you go off track on your goals, what?”) and have one of the Four Canonical Dismissive Reactions, prompting the person you heard about Beeminder from to point you to this post?

Great! Pick your reaction and let’s dive in.

1. “That’s (evil) genius, I would lose so much money lol”

We figure this is knee-jerk dismissal because the concept is so bizarre at first blush. Or you may be saying it’s just too hard core for your tastes, which of course is fine. Beeminder is not for everyone! (Mostly it’s for nerds.)

2. “Why wouldn’t I just lie?”

Because you’re not a liar? Ok, if this is you then possibly Beeminder is not for you but we do have a lot to say about combatting cheating. To recap, here are seven reasons people don’t lie to Beeminder, if any of these are compelling:

1. You have a scientific, quantified-self mindset and don’t want to falsify your data
2. You’re using an autodata integration and aren’t the one reporting your data to Beeminder
3. Your graph is public and you’ve pointed friends and family to it and you don’t lie to your friends and family
4. You wouldn’t have signed up in the first place if you were the type to weasel out of a commitment
5. You feel like Beeminder has earned the money (see also reaction #4 below)
6. You don’t want to set a precedent that ruins Beeminder’s power as a motivational tool
7. Think of the children?

We also have a good help doc with a collection of anti-cheating strategies.

My favorite answers to the “wouldn’t you just lie?” reaction are the inherent incentive to not ruin Beeminder’s efficacy, plus autodata. Beeminder has dozens of integrations with other apps and gadgets and we keep adding more.

3. “Beeminder profits from your failure. Perverse incentives!”

Maybe you figure we’ll end up sending you Twinkies to sabotage you? People don’t seem to have specifics in mind when they raise this objection but it sometimes feels very bad to them on principle.

Maybe the simplest counterargument we can make is that we couldn’t have survived well over a decade (!) without our incentives being aligned with the success of our users. Starting from the early days (before we had that elegant counterargument!) we’ve written a lot of things addressing the question of perverse incentives.

Most recently we wrote “Derailing It Is Nailing It” which I think is the most fundamental counterargument. Namely, that the whole notion of “paying money when you fail” is wrong. As in, it is not in fact what happens on Beeminder. You pay money when you go off track but that is emphatically not failing. If you have an ambitious goal then of course you will sometimes go off track. If you never do then it wasn’t an ambitious goal. It’s something you probably could’ve done without Beeminder and Beeminder isn’t really helping you. The people whom Beeminder helps a life-changing amount, they definitely go off track sometimes. [1] So they pay Beeminder sometimes and that is massively worth it to them. It’s quite win-win.

4. “Isn’t positive reinforcement better?”

We have yet another blog post laying out the reasons we think positive reinforcement isn’t all that: “Contra Positive Reinforcement: Why Beeminder Is A Glutton For Punishment”. But that makes us sound more pro-punishment than we are. Most of our arguments are pragmatic. Beeminder is not a charity and can’t literally reward you with money for staying on track towards your goals. [2] But if you prefer, you can reframe it that way. Imagine depositing money with Beeminder to pay for:

• the graphs and data
• the reminders
• the smartphone apps
• all the integrations
• the process of quantifying (in dollars) the value of your goals
• the charming community of over-achievers
• these scintillating blog posts?

Then if you stay on track you’re rewarded by getting most of that money back — or not paying it in the first place. Same thing.

PS: I tried running these reactions by GPT-4. In case you haven’t played with GPT-4 yet, I imagine you’ll be pretty surprised by how well it fields them. Thanks also to Bren Jones and the anonymous reviewers on the App Store for helpful discussion that led to this post.

Footnotes

[1] There are rare exceptions. Nick Winter (of The Motivation Hacker fame, plus now CodeCombat) has a classic guest post on the Beeminder blog, “Spiraling Into Control”, making the case for a never-ever-derail philosophy.

[2] Some of our competitors have tried this. See especially the case of Pact, whose scheme of paying successful users we’ve written about separately: “Beeminder: Like Pact Except All We Do Is Take Your Money”.

We’re excited to announce our official integration with trydeepwork.com! See also the announcement on the trydeepwork blog which is also a pretty brilliant introduction to Beeminder’s philosophy.

Cal Newport’s classic book Deep Work is quite popular with Beeminder users [1], so we predict a lot of you will be into trydeepwork.com. It brings together a little bit of Toggl, Focusmate, Complice, and Spotify into one simple tool, which, incidentally, we are using right now to draft this post! It aims to help you do deep work, minimize distractions, and make the most of your time. It has timers and goals and challenges and analytics and productivity muzak.

But mostly it’s just this: You describe a task, start a timer, and get down to work.

If you’re new to Beeminder, funneled here because of a deep love for deep work, the quick recap is that we’re quantified self + commitment contracts. You set a goal, we graph your progress, and whenever your datapoints cross a bright red line, we take your money. We’re a great antidote to procrastination. If there’s something you want to do, you know you can do, and yet historically you don’t do, then you should beemind it!

“describe a task, start a timer, and get down to work”

What does that have to do with deep work? Maybe you like trydeepwork.com but you keep forgetting to start sessions? Beeminder does not let you forget.

Actually setting up the integration

Beeminding trydeepwork.com is super easy. You need to know your username, which you can find in your account profile on trydeepwork.com. Then you pick whether you want to track total sessions or total hours of work, and you are ready.

For more of a walk-through, with screenshots, see the announcement on the trydeepwork blog.

Ready to dive into the deep end?

Footnotes

[1] Danny adds: I’m embarrassed to say that I avoided reading it myself for years despite all the recommendations. But I decided to rectify that at the beginning of 2023 and am gradually beeminding my way through it.

This is a guest post by Melissa Smith of Datasmithing! If you like Beeminder and other Beeminder-adjacent things like BaaS or Complice, but want more troubleshooting and guidance, you might like Datasmithing. (You might also like her blog which includes such gems as the graph paper method for tidying. Or check out her brilliant Beeminder pitch.) Here’s Melissa (pjpants on Beeminder) to tell you all about it!

Huge thanks to Beeminder for sharing this guest blogging opportunity. My name is Melissa Smith, and Beeminder has been critical scaffolding for me since 2015. I’ve used it to:

• transition careers (twice)
• relearn languages
• build a business
• establish a daily journaling habit that’s 4.5 years old and 265,000 words strong.

(I’m especially proud of that last one!) I’m a Beeminder user for the same reasons we all are: change is hard, entropy is real, and it takes a lot of focus and reinforcement to stick with new behavior.

But what if habits weren’t so hard? What if you had an expert problem solver to support and troubleshoot your habits, systems, and processes?

Maybe you’ve outgrown your habits and systems and need help making upgrades. Maybe you recently realized you’re neurodivergent, which explains why your systems never quite worked — they were built using guidance from people with a different operating system. Or maybe you are so burnt out that your brain sizzles every time you try to focus on the work that used to be your passion but is now impossible.

“Change is hard, entropy is real, and it takes a lot of focus and reinforcement to stick with new behavior”

I can help! As a habit coach, I help people learn tools and strategies to live and work with less friction and stress. I learn my clients’ strengths, and together we experiment to tweak processes to suit those strengths while removing the pitfalls that keep bogging them down. My coaching incorporates what I’ve learned about habit change, neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, gamification, and a lifetime of inventing creative solutions to get out of my own way.

Here’s what I believe about supporting my clients:

1. Sometimes we outgrow our productivity systems — or they’ve never comfortably fit.

Our systems must consider and support our authentic selves, not shoehorn us into who we think we should be. Many of my clients are neurodivergent and, like me, are autistic or have ADHD. We grew up learning time management and productivity tools that don’t support our unique needs, leading us to struggle to be effective and productive, often with significant shame.

For example, a classic To Do List works just fine for many people. But what if looking at your list overwhelms you and sends you down an epic, procrastination-driven web crawl? I’ve got a quiver of different To Do List structures that can prevent this.

2. What’s easy for one person might be hard for others.

Many of my clients start off feeling embarrassed or even ashamed about their struggles. Astrophysics or fire science are easy, but managing a stack of paperwork is nigh impossible. Giving an hour-long presentation is a piece of cake, but going to the grocery store is torture. I helped these clients restructure what was hard for them or strategize to eliminate it.

3. YOU don’t need to change, but your habits and tools might.

Even your “bad” habits exist because they fulfill a need. And that need is usually perfectly natural — part of our evolutionary wiring. Often, the first step towards effective change is observation and data collection to figure out what environmental triggers surround the issue. For example, many people struggle with getting enough quality sleep, but for some of my clients the root causes weren’t clear until they started filling out a shared sleep diary document, with lots of cheering and rewards from me. Once we analyzed the diary together, we could start incrementally testing out small changes to find what sleep rules worked for them.

4. Our executive functioning needs scaffolding to make both brain work and drudgery more efficient, sustainable, and pleasureable.

Especially for neurodivergent people, a core issue that regularly sabotages productivity is executive functioning struggles. Executive functioning is a bundle of skills — motivation, task initiation, focus, and more — managed by the prefrontal cortex of our brain. Threats or big emotions like shame, frustration, or panic send us into our amygdala instead, home of the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. I help my clients understand that “be more disciplined” isn’t the solution. Instead we defuse and deconstruct the situation and figure out which tool might make discipline entirely irrelevant. [1]

Difficulties with executive functioning can also impact anyone who is stressed, depressed, burnt out, or under pressure. We need tools to help our maxed-out brains focus on difficult intellectual work, especially when our brains are locked into a pattern where they think every task is an immediate threat to our survival. Otherwise burnout and exhaustion can turn even our easy tasks into all-day battles.

5. Everyone deserves validation and a kind, supportive internal script. You might need to hear what that sounds like.

We hear a lot of criticism over a lifetime — parents, teachers, bosses, frenemies. Gradually, we internalize critical voices we hear, imposing on ourselves harsh expectations of unyielding perfection that we’d never accept from a boss or friend. This self-criticism not only makes life miserable, but also sabotages productivity, resulting in avoidance, procrastination, burnout, and dread. Eventually the jerk of a boss who makes you want to quit your job can be you. I offer a gentler approach and direct clients to resources that foster deep work and self-compassion.

6. Changes can be hard because old behavior is ingrained.

One of my favorite analogies about habit change comes from the book “You Are Not Your Brain”. The author likens our neural pathways and habits to hiking trails. You can carve out a new trail at any time, but it takes work and dedication (and brush clearing). The old, established path is always RIGHT THERE, beckoning us with its familiarity, convenience, and lack of plants with prickly thorns. I help clients spot the challenges in their new path, reassure them when they revert to the old path, and send rewards for reinforcement.

7. Massive life changes may demand that you level up — fast.

Sometimes life shoves you into the deep end. New parenthood, eldercare, or work duties can leave you drowning. I help clients pinpoint, prioritize, and troubleshoot solving the big problems. I provide extra brain power when it might be in short supply.

8. Normalizing failure makes success easier.

When relevant and helpful, I talk about my own failures and struggles with my clients. I’m not just theoretically familiar with habit and behavior change, but I constantly need to use the strategies on myself. This means I can easily suggest strategies for whatever trips you up. And I also deeply understand just how much reinforcement and structure we need to make things stick. In addition to providing this practical support, my experience also reassures my clients that they are not alone in their struggles.

But what does this coaching look like in practice?

Let’s look at an example from my client Phil, shared with his permission. He’s working on burnout recovery and wanted to take Wednesday afternoons off billable work to spend time on passion projects. For two weeks, he tried to take this time off on his own, but he just kept plowing on with his client work. In addition to our regular coaching hour, I suggested we meet for 5 minutes every Wednesday at 3. Having that specific hard stop, boundary, and little bit of accountability provided the structure he needed to start the habit.

Phil had a great first week, but weeks 2 and 3 weren’t as satisfying; he floundered during his passion project time, overwhelmed by the possibilities of what to do. So I modified the terms of our check-in: now Phil shows up having already selected 3 sub-tasks to start with. That has been exactly the choice architecture he needs to have fulfilling Wednesday afternoons. And he knows I’m there to help him troubleshoot if he gets tangled up in his backlog again.

Of course, this is just a single example from my work with Phil. If only burnout were this simple to fix. But he’s got me to help him mop up the aftermath of burnout and build new habits and skills to prevent it in the long term. Every week, we talk about what went well, what needs a different approach, and what help he needs to figure out the week ahead.

That’s a reasonable description of how most of my sessions work, but ultimately I adapt the structure to meet whatever my client needs. What are you struggling with? Connect at melissa@datasmithing.com or on Twitter at datasmithing1 to find out how I can help.

Lastly, if you are a struggling graduate student or you know someone who is, please reach out. I’m launching a program to provide support and tools for the unique challenges graduate students face: the Graduate Student Productivity Support Club.

Footnotes

[1] This is also Beeminder’s philosophy. See for example “What Is Willpower?” and “Incentive Alignment”.

The Beeminder Lichess integration is officially launched! Lichess is basically the cool kids version of Chess.com. [1]

As yet more evidence of what huge nerds Beeminder users are, a chess playing website got voted up towards the top of our list of candidate autodata integrations. And not just voted up. Multiple people built their own tools to automatically get their chess stats into Beeminder. (In particular, Austin Ely’s GitHub repo and Robert Perce’s Bash script in the forum.) We take efforts like that as very strong votes for an official, built in autodata integration. Since Lichess also has a beautiful API, that put it over the top.

How does it work? You create a Lichess-playing Beeminder goal on a screen like this:

Yes, you have to specify a fraction if you want to commit to less than one game per day. The math all checks out though.

Also you can choose to beemind all games or only one kind of game:

1. Blitz
2. Bullet
3. Correspondence
4. Classical
5. Rapid
6. Puzzle
7. Global Thermonuclear War

Austin Ely recommends Rapid Chess (10-20 minutes) as better for learning and improving than Blitz or Bullet.

Wait, I’m a Lichess user new to Beeminder

Welcome aboard! You might want to check out our getting started guide in our Help Docs, and then get yourself signed up. Assuming you’re on board with the commitment device, paying-money-if-you-go-off-track bit, the beauty of an autodata integration is that you don’t normally need to interact with Beeminder once you’ve gone through the process above of setting up your commitment. Just play more chess when Beeminder yells at you and you’re good.

Ready to dive in?

Footnotes

[1] Here’s Robert Perce with more on Lichess vs Chess.com:

Lichess is an open-source nonprofit with no paywalled features. Chess.com is a for-profit company with a freemium model. On the free plan you get only limited analysis of games. The flip side is that Chess.com’s income stream means they can do a lot more sponsorship of tournaments, clubs, and players. They do a lot for the growth of chess. The marketing budget for Chess.com means they have a larger userbase as well.
 

Elo ratings are not directly comparable between the Lichess and Chess.com. Mid-range Elo is typically about 200 points higher on Lichess but it diverges widely on the ends.
 

I personally strongly prefer Lichess’s interface but both are good.
 

There’s a perception that Lichess has more cheaters because it’s free but that’s broadly unfounded. Playing is free everywhere, and bots don’t need computer analysis of their games.
 

And, yes, “the cool kids version of Chess.com” is how I think of it. 😎

You know how it used to be that you only got three goals on Beeminder’s free plan? Well stop the presses! Now you get three goals on Beeminder’s free plan, and you earn extra goals by derailing existing goals.

Does that still sound kind of restrictive? Dare I say… stingy?

(The bee puns, in addition to the first three goals, are free.)

Let us convince you with the soothing tones of our newbee-facing webcopy / FAQ item / help doc…

How many goals can I create?

Initially just three! Why so stingy? Well, hear us out. We promise it’s not as restrictive as it sounds. (And you can jump straight to unlimited goals with a premium plan, however that’s not necessary for the beginning Beeminderer.) Mainly we believe that you should start slowly. Adding too many goals right off the bat is a sure path to overwhelm and rage quitting. But even better — you earn additional goals when you hit good Beeminder-y milestones! For starters when you derail a non-zero-pledged goal.

Wait, what? Are we trying to bribe you to fail at your goals? Not at all, I mean, well, we’re kind of bribing you to derail but derailing is not failing. More than “not failing”, even. Derailing it is nailing it! It’s like how if you never make mistakes then you’re not learning. Pushing yourself is the point and that will mean occasional derailments and that’s fine. Creating a ton of goals off the bat is a common recipe for actual failure — the kind where you get overwhelmed and quit altogether. (Another form of actual failure is setting your goals so unambitiously that you never derail but also never do more than you would’ve without Beeminder, which is part of our derailing-it-is-nailing-it argument.)

Anyway, so that’s partly why we parcel out additional goals so stingily. If you still want another one after derailing then you’re probably ready for it. Also it’s how we make money. Again, you can pay for unlimited goals directly with a premium plan.

Whatever your goal limit (check it in account settings), it only applies to active (non-archived) goals. So the other way to create another goal is to archive existing ones.

We’re also happy to bump up your goal limit in exchange for feedback. Get in touch!

What happens if I downgrade from a premium plan?

We don’t rescind goals you already have. But it is possible to wind up in a situation where you have more goals than your nominal limit. In that case you won’t be able to make any new goals for the time being, but your limit will still grow with each derail payment, so you may be able to create more after a while. Archiving existing goals, emailing us to ask for more (with feedback), or re-upping on premium are all also legit ways to get more goals.

Derails are just the first step. Next: the world!

Earning more goals when you derail is fine and well. But it got some of us excited about a more general sort of “earn goals by doing beeminder-y things” kind of system.

We brainstormed on the community Discord and in beemails and came up with a bunch of great ideas for the kinds of things we could hand out goals for. (And perhaps someday badges? If Bee ever gets in an Illustrator sort of mood.)

1. “You get a goal for setting up your first goal”
2. “Your first datapoint added, you get a goal!”
3. “Your first $5 paid, you get another goal!”
4. “You added 50 datapoints! You get a new goal!”
5. “Your first forum post, here’s a goal”
6. “You invited a friend, get a goal”
7. “You set up an autodata goal, you get a goal”
8. “Your first 100 datapoints, you get a goal!”
9. “Your first time ratcheting away safety buffer”
10. “Your first No-Excuses Mode goal, that’s worth a goal”
11. “Dialing your bright red line, why not”
12. “Making a bee pun in an email to support?”
13. “Your first scheduled break”
14. “Setting up a calendial goal”
15. “Bug reports, we love those”
16. “Any feedback at all is a good excuse to give you another free goal” (Again, this one’s already true in the status quo!)

Another reason we may want to expand to a more robust, complex set of goal-earning milestones is the possibility that incrementing your goal limit with every sting could cheapen the benefit. If your number of free goals far outpaces any reasonable number of goals you’d ever create — and we kind of think it should because derailing it is nailing it — that could feel unsatisfying. If so, that could be our excuse to introduce these other milestones and only give out free goals for a subset of derails, like the first one at each new pledge level.

All that said, we like giving you goals, and we want you to be successful at beeminding things. If you stub your toe on the goal limit we wanna hear about it.

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 Is Nailing It”.

At first blush, that might seem weird. If you derail, that’s absolutely an instance of not doing something you set out to. It totally makes sense that that can feel like failure.

Still, if you take a look at the average Beeminder graph, it’s not a record of the number of times you failed. For most people, in most cases, it’s a record of the number of times you succeeded. Even derailments represent getting right back to it after sorting out whatever caused you to derail. Each derailment is a time you reestablished your commitment to completing your goal by getting back on track.

“Each derailment is a time you reestablished your commitment to completing your goal by getting back on track”

Do Less graphs make this a little more complicated — which is why we often suggest reframing them to become Do More goals if you can — but even then, the line you see is mostly showing you all the times you stuck to your limits.

Very inspirational, but never derailing is still better than sometimes derailing, right?

Nope!

If you’re literally never derailing, then… well, maybe your goal is just easy and the most minor of threats is enough to keep you on track. I’ve had a few goals turn out that way: the mere presence of the goal is enough to make me do the thing. My goal for brushing my teeth, for example (at least since I got that one figured out), or my inbox zero goal. I don’t need to be on the edge, and there’s no real scope for overachievement here. Don’t get us wrong: there’s definitely a place for these goals in your dashboard.

But for many goals, if you’re literally never derailing then it’s most likely that your goal isn’t pushing you at all. Occasionally getting that little sting that makes the future consequences of your present inaction real. Then you’re really getting pushed toward your goal. It’s even valuable to get that reminder in circumstances where you might feel the urge to call not-legit. Valuable enough to pay for, in fact.

Just as an example, lately I haven’t been calling not-legit on failures on my reading goals, even when the issue is mental health. My reading goals are deliberately low in rate — 5 pages/day — but they have a ratchet to ensure consistency: those 5 pages of progress are due every day. It might seem like these derailments are not quite fair: I didn’t fall prey to akrasia, I was sick! But… if I can’t manage even 5 pages a day, that’s valuable information for me, and I need that wakeup call. To just call not-legit misses the point here. These goals are important to me, they’re actually part of my own efforts to help bolster my mental health. Getting those stings is a positive part of these goals.

But that’s all very “derailing is not failing (it’s just giving me useful information)”, so let’s take it one step further to where derailing now and then is actively making everything better.

“Playing it safe and never being at risk doesn’t actually reach my end goals”

Studying the set amount is good; studying more is (usually!) better. It’s healthier to get any movement in a given day, but more movement and more often is better. And that’s where Beeminder can really shine, and where you can reap the greatest benefits by setting your rate to something aspirational. I can be pretty sure I’d never derail if my goal was only set to 2,000 steps a day — but playing it safe and never being at risk doesn’t actually reach my end goals.

If I set my rate to 5,000 steps a day, when I know I’d always be safe at 2,000 steps a day, I’m probably going to derail now and then, on busy days. But on balance, I’m doing way more toward my overall fitness than I would’ve if I played it safe. Even if I derail this week because I just couldn’t make it, I’ve probably done more than 2,000 steps each day. Even though I’m paying the occasional charge for this — $10 here, $30 there — I’m achieving way more than if I’d played it safe.

Beeminder is great for goals like the ones I mentioned before, where any consequence is enough to keep us from going off the rails. But it’s the GOAT for making us do more than that, for pushing us to overachieve. It’s easy to settle for good enough, and Beeminder makes it possible to commit to being better. For most goals, derailing it means you’re nailing it!

PS: Upon reading this, Bee wondered if we picked the wrong metaphor altogether. It’s not derailing, it’s more like hitting the rumble strip on the highway!

That’s right my little bees: we put a commitment device in our commitment device to bring out the commitment flavor of the commitment device.

Does everyone know the soup nazi from Seinfeld? Basically it’s an interesting episode in Seinfeldnomics (and boy howdy do we like economics) where there’s a soup stand that gets really popular, but the guy selling the soup fires customers if they don’t order correctly, and so Elaine and Jerry and the gang start referring to him as “the soup nazi”. Which I guess is funny because he’s refusing to do business with people who want to give him money? But clearly his business is doing just-fine-thank-you. And actually, well, he should clearly just hike the price on his soup until his supply meets the demand without him getting all stressed out and cranky at the customers. But maybe he likes screaming at people? In which case maybe the status quo is just fine from his point of view.

Anyway, I digress. We were talking recently about doing experiments on all of you. Like na[oops, no, we are being told in no uncertain terms that we cannot make this joke]! In particular we were talking about the trade-off between expected value of any particular experiment and expected cost. If something has a small chance of having a large effect, but it’s cheap and fast to do, then why not try it out?

A couple years ago we tried out what would happen if we just killed the free plan — signing up meant coughing up for a premium subscription on day one. Answer: signups plummeted. So we undid that. And it led us to concluding that Beeminder should be pledge-focused. The year before that we tried the commitwall which was an absolutely massive success. Learning things!

We’re not exactly short on problems to solve, but the one that’s been perhaps most salient of late is improving our onboarding gulf. We still get a lot of people who sign up for Beeminder but never get around to creating any goals at all. We’ve got a nice list of Obvious Things To Try, like writing interactive tutorials, a series of onboarding emails that keeps re-prompting users through getting started, office hours, building goal creation into sign up, just overhauling goal creation in general, making clonable goals, etc etc. These are all great ideas. But they’re all pretty high cost to implement.

So then we came up with a crazier thing to try, that has a smaller chance of being a good idea, but is much simpler to implement than any of those things: Signing up for Beeminder is itself a commitment device.

If you’re here, checking us out, you’re probably into the idea of a commitment device. So the idea is that by signing up, we are putting you on the hook to make a goal after signing up, or we will charge you money. And if you’re not on board with that, you might not be in Beeminder’s target audience anyway. (In case you are wondering, this is related to the soup nazi because it intentionally turns away a subset of potential customers.)

We threw some extra clarification into the registration form:

That “Questions?” link has these additional details in a popup:

We make you type out what you want to beemind, and agree to the meta commitment device. Once you’re all signed up that intention gets sent to the workerbees and they say howdy and prod you to get on it if you’ve not created a goal already. That opens up a handy channel to talk to a human if you’re confused. And now you’ve got Damocles’s $5 hanging over your head prompting you to actually follow through.

This was super peasy to do because

1. we were already collecting the intentions and sending them to the workerbees, who
2. already welcome newbees and offer assistance with getting started for people who are stuck.

So pretty much all we had to do with registration was write some words in, and add a new check for the existence of the string “$5” in your “intentions” response. We also added a nice little countdown to the empty gallery page et voila.

Anyhow, it’s not the most uncontroversial thing we’ve tried but mostly no one thought it was too crazy of an idea so, as of last week, we’re trying it!

It has dampened signups a little but that seems to be more than made up for in getting people to actually create goals. Of the people that signed up in the past week since we deployed this, 22% have not created any goals. We don’t have enough data yet on how many people are going to hit that one-week wall and actually get charged — only one person so far! The percentage with no goals at all in the two weeks immediately prior to that was 58%.

If it continues to go well we’ll be tempted to bump up the amount at risk to $10 or $20 instead of the current $5. Or jump to the logical conclusion of all this and require the creation of a meta goal as part of signup. But getting that right would take a lot more thought than this simple gateway drug commitment device did.