Rule #1 of Beeminder: Things that make staying on the yellow brick road easier make reaching your overall goal harder. There’s no free lunch. Any leniency today will get paid for down the (wait for it) Road.

If that sounds counter-intuitive, imagine the extreme case of ultimate leniency where we’re like “don’t worry honey, as long as you’re at your goal weight a year from now all deviations from the road will be forgiven.” That completely destroys all the benefit Beeminder has to offer! [1]

“At some point you’re going to end up pushing the limits, which means you have to understand the precise limits.”

In general, we need to minimize the number of rules and caveats to think about. Any rules and caveats that make staying on the road harder are bad for obvious reasons. But even the ones that try to make it easier require you to think about them. That’s because at some point you’re going to end up pushing the limits, which means you have to understand the precise limits. Consider grace periods, three-strikes policies, and generous exemption criteria. Those, ironically, do not reduce your chances of derailing!

How not? Because they don’t make the overall goal any easier. They mostly just add some fuzziness about how far you can push things before you really derail. Which just means you push a little farther than you would otherwise and end up increasing your chances of derailing. Better to push it / procrastinate up to a bright, unambiguous line than to push it / procrastinate up to a line whose exact location is shrouded.

The lesson we’ve learned (the hard way): make the goal itself easier, don’t try to make it easier with various leniencies.

Catching Back Up Just This Once

The general rule is that leniencies necessarily backfire. Sometimes newbees unaccustomed to our hard-assery will balk at a derailment that they view as still recoverable. But catching back up “just this once” is, like, defeating ze whole point of ze commitment device. [2] If that’s even a possibility in your head then we can predict failure with pretty high confidence. The problem with that mentality is that you may catch up once or twice, but each catch-up will take longer until it just never ends up happening. Which is why, early on, we made it fundamental to the way Beeminder works that you pay the penalty the very day that you go off the road.

Image credit: adorable plushies by Heidi Kenney. Visit her blog if you need a faceful of cute.

Footnotes

[1] Except for those non-akratics who just like the visualization and tracking, but this is for akratics. Yellow brick roads without meaningful commitments are useless for us.

[2] Watch Dr Strangelove say it for full effect.

If you asked 100 people to fill in the following blank, Family-Feud-style, what would be the most popular answer?

“I’ve always wanted to learn ______”

In an informal poll of authors of this blog post, the runaway winner was “a new language.”

It’s pretty easy to get through “ciao” and “auf wiedersehn,” but neither of those are going to get you directions to the nearest gas station when your hovercraft is full of eels. [1]

Duolingo is an online platform for language learning that’s 100% free. As you learn a new language, you also help to translate the web. You can learn Spanish, French, Italian, Portugese, or German. [2]

We’ve integrated Duolingo with Beeminder so you can give yourself extra motivation to make progress towards learning your new language. Just head to beeminder.com/duolingo after you’ve set up your Duolingo account and enter your Duolingo username. Beeminder will check on your progress every day and make sure you stay on your Yellow Brick Road.

Bonne chance!

 
Image credit: Hans Hillewaert
Thank you to John Bachir for suggesting that we do this. Thank you also to David Klionsky for helping us test this out.

Footnotes

[1] Monty Python’s Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook could be a fun prank idea for Duolingo, possibly requiring massive collusion.

[2] If you’re looking to add Chinese or Japanese to your repertoire, there are some ways (still primitive) to automatically beemind that as well.

This is crossposted on AndyBrett.com.

The third James Bond movie, Goldfinger, opens with an amphibious mission to destroy an illicit chemical processing facility. After emerging from the water and planting the explosives, Bond strips off his drysuit to reveal a perfectly pressed white tuxedo and calmly affixes a red carnation to the lapel.

It’s rare that the next step after “take off your wetsuit” is “attach carnation to lapel” — it’s not routine, even ignoring the exploding chemicals bit. The Bond franchise and other filmmakers succeed by mastering this device, by leading viewers along a path and then suddenly yanking them out of the context they thought they were in. In some cases it’s overused to the point of becoming a trope (and ironically, somewhat predictable).

Another example is natural language processing — what Google uses to guess what you’re searching for, like it did just now when I typed “natural la”. In most sentences that start with “he left the keys on the kitchen…”, the next word is “table”, or maybe “counter”.

The drysuit-to-tuxedo reveal is the word that you don’t see coming. It’s the equivalent of completing the sentence above with “ceiling” instead of “table”. When you read a sentence or watch James Bond, your brain automatically produces guesses and predictions for what’s going to happen next.

When our guesses are wrong, we become engaged, or upset, or we laugh. We feel alive. That’s because bucking routine, and the expected, is uniquely human — for the moment, anyway. Artificial intelligence bots like Watson or competitors in the Turing test are usually confounded by the absurd or unexpected. It’s conceivable that they could eventually do quite well with it though, especially given how quickly humans turn the absurd into the hackneyed.

Avoiding routine

Falling into a routine can diminish your potential, not to mention your sense of free will. Athletes know that if they maintain constant mileage, weight, or intensity for a long period of time, their muscles will eventually stagnate. Much better is constant growth, followed by recovery.

How can you avoid falling into a routine? It’s helpful to have an outsider’s perspective. If you’re the one that’s stuck in the rut, it can be hard to notice and break out. The path of least resistance is usually the one that doesn’t bend much from the current trajectory.

There are plenty of hacks to get around this. The oldest, low-tech approach is regularly talking to a good friend who is willing to act as a sounding board and give candid feedback. A more formal approach looks something like a life coach — regular checkins on stated goals and aspirations.

In the life coach situation you’re paying, often dearly, for personal attention from a real human being in order to keep you on your toes. But what you get from a life coach (or any outsider, really) isn’t all that different from what you might tell yourself to do. If only you could have your present self communicate effectively with your future, soon-to-be-present self and guide him through evaluating some things in the cold light of yesterday.

Even before we get AI bots that can understand subtle, even British, humor, software is eating the world [1] in this domain, all the way at the top of Maslow’s pyramid.

That may seem like a ridiculous conclusion, and contrary to everything I just said — that you could write software to make people more spontaneous, more human, and more fulfilled. I suspect, though, that this falls into the category of problems where the right combination of AI and UI proves to be incredibly powerful.

Image: a variant of Tux the Linux Penguin

Footnotes

[1] I made a first attempt at an app that would add spontaneity to your day, with Whimsical — every day you get a new challenge to complete that will likely force you to break your normal routine. There’s also Everest, which is focused more specifically on goals that you set up for yourself and capturing “moments” as you progress towards them. Sort of a self-directed life coach. And of course there’s Beeminder, which is the ultimate way for your present self to get the attention of your soon-to-be-present self — through his wallet. Some kind of meta-beeminding goal could do the trick nicely.

You know how a lot of services offer things like one month free if you pay yearly? We were nerding out over the math of that and thought, why not generalize to compute the perfectly fair discount for paying at any frequency you like, including every infinity years, i.e., paying once for a lifetime subscription? Just pick a discount rate and do the net present value calculation to get the amount to charge at your chosen frequency so that it’s equivalent to paying monthly. Before we lose all but the hardest core math and finance nerds, just try it. There’s a nifty slider!

To compute the discount we’re going with a 3% monthly (36% annualized) discount rate. If you work out the discount rate [1] that makes “one month free if you pay yearly” fair, it’s 19% annualized. We decided to go higher in part because we expect higher attrition with our unusually generous auto-canceling subscriptions. Trello, on the other hand, recently launched Trello Business Class at $25/month or $200/year. You’ll notice that \(\$25 \times 12 = \$300\) so that’s quite a discount for paying yearly — equivalent to a 97% annualized discount rate.

Of course you’re not really pricing the discount based on the time-value of money [2] but rather your expected churn rate. We heard that 3% attrition per month was common so that’s the other reason we thought we’d start with that. (Note the self-selection bias there though — those opting to pay for a year or more at a time are less likely to be the ones churning.)

The Math

If the nominal monthly fee is \(\$m\) and we pick a monthly discount rate \(r\) (e.g., 2% = 24% annualized) and you want to pay every \(n\) months instead of every month then the perfectly fair amount to charge every \(n\) months (starting with right now, of course) is: $$m\frac{\exp(r)-\exp(r-n\cdot r)}{\exp(r)-1}$$

For the cost of a lifetime subscription, take the limit as \(n\) goes to infinity: $$\frac{m e^r}{e^r – 1}$$

In finance-speak, that’s the net present value of the annuity of \(n\) monthly payments at the nominal monthly rate, \(m\). For example, with \(m=20\), \(r=.02\), and \(n=12\) you get $215.51 as the yearly cost. So that’s slightly better than “one month free if you pay yearly” — \($20 \times 11 = $220\) [3] — which, as we noted, implies an annualized discount rate of 19%. Setting \(n=\infty\) yields $1010.03 so that would be the cost of a lifetime subscription, using those parameters. Picking 20 years (\(n=240\)) yields $1001.72 so you might as well go with a lifetime subscription well before that point.

Fair’s Fair

First, the point of getting a discount is that you’re pre-paying for a greater length of time, i.e., committing to subscribe for at least that long. We’re happy to give refunds, no questions asked, if you’re not happy but we don’t automatically refund money you pre-paid if you stop using Beeminder. Hopefully that’s not surprising when paired with our auto-canceling subscriptions. The way we implement it is simply this: Regardless of how frequently you’re paying, we look at your activity for the previous month when it’s time to charge you. If you haven’t added any datapoints in that month, we suppress the charge. We still check again next time, in case you come back.

Crazy Loopholes

Our simplistic way of implementing auto-canceling subscriptions — stop the charge if you weren’t active in the past month — does make for one unfortunate loophole when combined with the ability to choose your payment frequency: You could, for example, pay for a yearly premium plan on January 1, use Beeminder until December 1, then stop for a month. On January 1 of the following year you’ll be officially inactive and we won’t charge you. You can then resume beeminding for another 11 months and rinse and repeat. You’ll pay for one year but get a lifetime of use, minus Decembers. We figured we’d just hand you that one on a silver platter on the theory that it takes the fun out of exploiting it and why else would anyone bother to exploit such a loophole than to prove that they could. If it’s actually to save money then by all means, knock yourself out, and you’re very welcome.

Footnotes

[1] I think there’s no closed form solution to this, i.e., setting the first equation on this page equal to x and solving for r. I let Mathematica do it numerically.

“Well I’ve already paid for Netflix this month, so I might as well watch another episode of ‘Say Yes To The Dress’. I’ll get around to canceling later. You know, when I’m less busy.” — A slightly caricatured version of me

When you sign up for some subscription services they make it super easy to “cancel anytime!” That’s good of them. If they’re really good they might even make it one click to cancel. Well, we’ve done them one better. If you stop using our service we stop charging you. You don’t have to remember to do a single thing. Regardless of what premium plan you signed up for, if it’s time to charge your credit card but you haven’t actually used Beeminder in the previous 30 days, we suppress the charge. We think that’s especially important for the type of person who uses our service, but we frankly find it almost unconscionable that so many services are willing to cash in on the laziness of their formerly active customers. [1]

So we’d like to address our fellow startups: Join us on the Light side! Implement auto-canceling subscriptions!

“If you show up again, charges resume.”

It might leave money on the table, but you have to admit that it’s money you’re not truly earning. In an ideal world — perhaps when this idea catches on, if you’ll allow us to dream — you’ll make up for that lost money from people who don’t sign up for trials at all because they don’t trust themselves to stay on top of canceling. Those people (if I can generalize at all from myself) will be happy to try a subscription service that sounds promising if they’re free of the burden of deciding whether to cancel. We should also note that we’ve implemented this as both auto-canceling and auto-resuming. If you show up again, charges resume. Still nothing for you to do or click.

Of course, if you do actively want to stop, it’s one click to downgrade to the free plan at any time too. In case you want to stop getting charged for premium features but still stick around. You can also upgrade at any time and we’ll only charge you the difference. You can even have refunds; we’re happy to guarantee that you’ll be happy with any money you spend on our premium plans. [2]

So how about it, fellow startups? I don’t doubt that you have a million ways to rationalize continuing to take a customer’s money when all evidence suggests that it’s tantamount to a laziness tax. But search your feelings — you know it to be true!

(If this really did convince you, be sure to tune in next time when we’ll make our case for exquisitely fair pre-pay discounts — an elegant generalization of offers like “pay yearly instead of monthly and get a month free!”)

UPDATE: Hacker News discussion

Image credit: scragged.com

Footnotes

[1] That may sound like a hilariously ironic thing for us to say, given our business model. (We’re a commitment device service where you pledge money to stay on track towards your goals and if you go off track, you literally pay us.) But we’re firmly committed to only making money from fixing laziness, procrastination, and head-in-the-sand syndrome — in a word, akrasia. The timing of when we get paid — the moment that you succumb to akrasia — is perverse but what you’re paying for is that you succumb less. In any case, this post is not about that aspect of Beeminder. For our premium plans we get paid like any other subscription service.

[2] Again, this is separate from the other part of Beeminder where we charge you money for going off track on your goals. We can’t literally guarantee you’ll be literally happy about those payments since that would spoil the commitment device. But in practice it seems to be a near guarantee. People feel, almost always, that the pledges they’ve paid for derailing were worth it for how long the threat of said payments kept them on track.

Exciting news about Beeminder today: we’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal! [1] It’s an interesting little write-up about the Quantified Self movement as “digital mother” — capturing Beeminder’s relationship to Quantified Self beautifully — and features one of our favorite beeminders (Okay, we have a lot of favorite beeminders, don’t be jealous), Reto Stamm.

Roundup of Other Press

Since we went to the trouble of blogging it, we’d better do a roundup of other press since the last time we did this, namely, when we had our full-page feature in Southwest Airlines magazine in January.

• Fatcyclist beeminds his weight, and links to his Beeminder weight graph in the sidebar of his blog. He also tweeted his graph every day as he beeminded his way to belying his name, which has been a pretty big deal for us.
• Productivity author Michael Linenberger wrote about arbitrary deadlines and Beeminder. If you like Beeminder you’ll probably love Linenberger’s systems — they jibe with ideas from Beeminder, such as the akrasia horizon (10 days in Linenberger’s system instead of Beeminder’s 7).
• Long-time beeminder Jake Jenkins made a touching case for signing up for a Beeminder premium plan.
• Brent Yorgey wrote another heart-felt post about his now six-month tenure with Beeminder and how literally life-changing it has been for him.

“Not cherry-picked, we promise!”

And for completeness, here’s everything else we know of since January: Mirabai Knight writes about akrasia and Beeminder and what she beeminds, Robin Ryder writes about beeminding your resolutions, Quantified Savagery gives Beeminder and Lift as examples of tools applying the science of behavior change, our esteemed co-founder guest blogs at Productivity in Context, here’s a fancy infographic from Betterment where we’re paired with Lift again, a tiny TechCrunch mention (not to be confused with our big TechCrunch mention in January), Beeminder in Spanish, Beeminder in German, and in Spanish again, Brian Ogilvie blogged about his weight loss plans with Beeminder and is still going strong (not cherry-picked, we promise! nothing in this list has been culled for being a failure story), Jana Beck featured Beeminder in a Quantified Self talk, Allison of The Muse Garden has a wonderful write-up of Quantified Self, featuring Beeminder, an old MetaFilter post that we forgot to include last time includes a nice Beeminder testimonial, our esteemed co-founder (again) gives an interview with Voxus PR, we made the front page of Hacker News again for Gitminder, here’s some praise of Beeminder by Liora Hess (including why we’re better than StickK), Beeminder as an extreme example of Dogfooding Until It Hurts in the Fog Creek blog, a blurb about Beeminder in a list of tools for combatting ADHD, a blurb about how Beeminder understands goal-setting, an awesome writeup of lots of Beeminder goals, a testimonial on Reddit, a post by a mathematician talking about the principles behind Beeminder’s yellow brick road, Muflax’s blog uses a thumbnail of his Beeminder graph as an ETA to next blog post, Beeminder is featured in Fitbit’s app gallery, Ian Ross wrote a review of Beeminder and the war on Akrasia, here’s the actual printed front page of the Wall Street Journal article about us, and, finally, we have a new competitor, Saga, who kindly blogged about us.

Footnotes

[1] We’re below the (literal) fold, but still, it’s the front page. It’s the A-hed, to use WSJ’s jargon.

[Prescript: Yes, we paid someone $270 because this post was late (see blog.beeminder.com/blogdog). We think it was worth it and hope you’ll agree!]

We’ve been improving Beeminder at a brisk pace lately. First, just as you can reduce the amount you have pledged on a goal, you can now get rid of a goal altogether. Press the Archive button in the goal’s settings and a timer will appear, counting down until the goal disappears in a week. That also means no more need for “temporary test goals”, so those are gone. Phew!

We also added a limit to the number of new goals you can create without adding a pledge. We call those pledgeless goals Freebees. Creating a goal with no pledge isn’t really in the spirit of Beeminder, it’s just needed so people can get acclimated. So you can now create seven such pledgeless goals (don’t worry, long-time users, we grandfathered your existing goals). If you don’t want to be limited in that way, that brings us to our big announcement…

Premium Plans!

“Some people are so hardcore and self-aware that they can predict that they’ll shrug off those $5 and $10 pledges.”

Believe it or not, Beeminder is profitable just with our crazy revenue model of collecting people’s pledges when they derail. Users pretty much invariably feel that those payments work out to a fair fee for the service Beeminder provides. Namely, keeping you in line. And, the pledges progress along an exponential schedule that tends to make people who need Beeminder more (and thus get more value out of beeminding) pay us more. It’s beautifully win-win. But it doesn’t work for everyone. Some people are so hardcore, not to mention self-aware, that they can confidently predict that when the chips are down they’ll shrug off those $5 and $10 pledges. They want to be immediately bound by more meaningful amounts. A few months ago we introduced the ability to pay us directly — half the current amount pledged — to jump to the next pledge level. In theory that solves the problem but it’s a painful thing to do. So we now have a less painful option: the ability to jump to any pledge level you want if you pay a subscription fee for Beeminder.

Yes, amusingly, we have premium plans both for people who don’t want to pledge money on goals and for people who want to pledge more money on goals. [1] But wait, there’s more! We also have premium plans for power users and for those who want actual lifecoaching, centered around their Beeminder goals.

If you’re tired of all this build-up, feel free to jump below for the bottom line. Otherwise, here’s the scoop on the current offerings, Free, Bee Lite, Plan Bee, Beemium, and Beekeeper…

Free Plan ($0/month)

Just to re-emphasize, you don’t need no stinkin’ premium plan to experience the full awesomeness of Beeminder. We’ve always said that Beeminder is entirely free if you never fall off your yellow brick roads and we intend to keep it that way.

Bee Lite ($5/month)

Fitness tips. We’re proud of our collection of hundreds of fitness tips that we add to the bot reply emails. Some are dirt simple suggestions or pointers to Lifehacker articles, some are pointers to our own blog posts, some are pointers to handy xkcds, and some are mini blog posts not published anywhere else. They’re inserted randomly so you’ll tend to see repeats before you see them all. In fact, you’ll probably never actually see them all.

Custom goals. The main attraction of Bee Lite, though, is being able to tweak the crap out of your goal settings. You probably only want this if you’re a power user (the plan was almost named “Powers That Bee” but that was rejected). Even for power users it’s rare to need to do these things, but here’s what you get:

1. Exponential roads, which can be handy for weight loss if you want to, say, lose half a percent of your bodyweight per week. It’s not too onerous to approximate this by periodically dialing your road, but it’s a cool feature in some circumstances. We use it on some of our meta roads though those tend to be retrofitted, i.e., we’re not truly beeminding most of those things.
2. Choose how multiple datapoints on each day are aggregated. For weight loss we default to the minimum and for Do More goals it’s the sum. But with custom goals you could choose the mean or the max or the first or the last. We’d be happy to throw in any other function, like median, if anyone had a use for it. UPDATE: Someone did and we obliged.
3. Choose whether to plot all the datapoints or just the aggregated one.
4. Choose whether to enable the fancy odometer setting.
5. Change other settings like which is the good side of the road, though changes like that can easily break your graph.
6. We’re currently debating on Akratics Anonymous whether custom road width should be exposed as a setting for custom goals. UPDATE: We bowed to the pressure! This is now live.

Plan Bee ($10/month)

Each plan subsumes all the previous plans so Plan Bee also gets you fitness tips and custom goals. The main feature of Plan Bee is unlimited Freebees.

Freebees are goals that don’t have a pledge attached to them. If you derail you still have to pledge (not pay) to unfreeze. Normally Freebees are limited to seven to close the loophole where you create a new goal each time you derail so you don’t have to ever pledge. Like “weight”, “weight2”, “june-weight”, “for-real-this-time”, etc. It’s not in the spirit of Beeminder but if you’re willing to pay us $10/month then knock yourself out.

Beemium ($25/month)

Fitness tips, custom goals, unlimited freebees, and…

Free short-circuiting. Now we’re getting elite. Free short-circuiting means you can immediately jump to a motivating pledge level, without paying at each jump. We’re very impressed with people who have value for this — we’re not sure we do ourselves! Beemium subscribers are highly akratic and have the foresight to know what will motivate them. We’re highly akratic, no question there, but we’re always a bit delusional about it. “Maybe this time $5 will be enough to keep me on track!” We’re pretty enamored with our exponential pledge schedule but some of our most hardcore users can save money by paying for Beemium so they can jump straight to commitment contracts that they know will keep them on track indefinitely.

Real-time support. Since Beemium is so super elite we’re also letting those folks hang out in our developer chat room where you can ask us questions and often get an immediate response. Danny, Bethany, and Andy are usually there all day every day. We’re on Pacific time, though that doesn’t always mean much for some of us.

Beekeeper ($200/month)

Fitness tips, custom goals, unlimited freebees, free short-circuiting, real-time support, and…

Here’s where it gets really interesting. The Beekeeper program, first introduced in our anniversary post, is still highly experimental but we have a few life coaches on board to partner with. We’re going to figure this out as we go, but if you think that in principle you’d pay $200/month to have someone personally holding you accountable to your goals, helping you keep your roads dialed in, entering data for you, calling you to make sure you’re staying on track, and deciding what things to beemind in the first place, then by all means, sign up. As with all the plans, we’ll give you a full refund if you’re not thrilled with what you’re paying for.

But wait, there’s more! All premium users also get priority email support. We have a long list of potential premium features so the above will change, though we’ll try to keep each plan at least as good as what we’ve just described. But there are also some things about the plans that we want to commit to…

No Carrots For You

Seriously, we are all about the stick. We do not intend to hold important features as dangling carrots. Premium plans are still an experiment but we’re committed to keeping the non-premium Beeminder a highly functional tool for maximizing the awesomeness of humans prone to procrastination and other forms of akrasia. In fact, the only things that we’re going to charge for are:

1. Features that directly thwart our revenue model, i.e., unlimited freebees and free short-circuiting (or in the future: choosing the beneficiary of your commitment contract [1])
2. Things that may confuse newbees (we’re not sure yet whether customizable retroratcheting and auto-ratcheting fall in this category)
3. Goodies that are incidental to the process of beeminding, like fitness tips
4. Things that cost us money to provide (we may make the SMS bot a premium feature for this reason)

Auto-Canceling Subscriptions

UPDATE: We were so enamored with our auto-canceling subscriptions that we turned this section into its own blog post. The short version is that if you stop using Beeminder, we automatically stop charging you for your premium plan!

Exquisitely Fair Pre-Pay Discounts

UPDATE: Same with our super nerdy discount slider, which you can also get a taste of in the sampler below.

Beeminder Premium Sampler

The above is just to re-cap the plans (and demonstrate our Exquisitely Fair Slider, as we call it). The features shown in brackets are currently live but rather experimental. Again, if we change them we’ll try to replace them with things that are at least as good. So if you’re sold, head to beeminder.com/premium!

Image credit: Altered By The Sea

Footnotes

[1] Choosing the beneficiary of your commitment contract would be very sensible as a premium feature. It’s surely due to selection bias but our existing users generally feel it works out fine for all involved that Beeminder is the beneficiary, as utterly twisted as that sounds to outsiders. We discuss the seeming perversity as well as the behaviorial economics of different choices of beneficiary in previous posts.

Remember our elaborate SOS clause? It describes in excruciating detail what to do if unforeseen circumstances cause you to drive off your yellow brick road. Well, we’ve since realized it suffices to just believe people. If you don’t want us to “just believe you” — it does have the danger of defeating the whole point of a commitment contract! — then we have a “weasel-proof me” check box in advanced settings.

“Here’s our rule of thumb”

But what are good criteria for deciding if a derailment is legitimate? Sometimes the circumstances that led to a derailment make it ambiguous. Here’s our rule of thumb: If you had thought to spell it out in your fine print for the commitment contract, would you have chosen to have an exemption for circumstances like these?

Ideally we want two things to be true any time someone goes off their yellow brick road and loses a pledge:

1. It was due purely to akrasia.
2. The motivation that Beeminder provided up until the derailment was worth more than the amount paid.

The ideal might be unreachable because we need objective criteria for when the pledge should be forfeit. (Though even that we’re not sure about — would it work to just ask you if you felt the derailment was akratic?)

As a bare minimum so far, we’ve been using this policy: Is there anything the platonic ideal of Beeminder could’ve done to prevent this derailment? Maybe better reminders, like separate SMS reminders just for emergency days?

If so (if you can tell us so with a straight face) then we don’t count it as a legit derailment. Unless of course you checked the “weasel-proof me” box.

UPDATE: The “weasel-proof me” checkbox is something you have to opt in to in advanced settings, not to be confused with the “I swear not to weasel” box that you have to check when pledging on goals. We obviously have a terminology problem! Everyone is promising not to weasel and the “weasel-proof me” checkbox is really just authorizing us to be hard-nosed in the face of ambiguously extenuating circumstances.

My mom recently lost $5,000 to my brother in a commitment contract gone wild. That was started in part as an experiment early in Beeminder’s beta period before we’d thought of things like the exponential pledge schedule. Believe it or not, it was actually a pretty positive outcome: my mom gradually lost a tiny bit of weight (more importantly: didn’t gain weight!) for over 2 years, thus paying my brother on average $179/month for that fitness program. Not very cost efficient, but quite socially efficient!

I’m sure not many people are keen to emulate that experiment with my mom and brother, but it really hit home for me how valuable Beeminder’s exponential pledge schedule is. With that $5k contract it was a lot of stress to decide on such a high amount and make sure there was no inadvertently toxic fine print (even amongst family!) and to actually take the plunge and have the contract officially start.

The way it works in the current Beeminder is just infinitely better. By the time you hit motivating amounts of money all the doubts, fears, and uncertainties have been quelled. Beeminder has earned something for its trouble and you’ve got yourself nicely self-bound with quantified confidence that you can stay on track from now on, perhaps with a tweak of the road dial.

If that new crazy amount keeps you on track for years (like it did for my mom) then maybe eventually it will lose its sting (like it did for my mom). Well, if so, we hope you’ll feel like Beeminder earned its money by then. And the next even crazier pledge level should motivate you for even longer.

Foreshadowing

“Once you get to those amounts we’re all but guaranteeing that you won’t actually pay.”

There’s another reason we’re so pleased with ourselves for coming up with the exponential pledge schedule: It’s how we make all our money (currently about midway between ramen profitability and day-job equivalency). We get you hooked when it’s free and then charge you more in proportion to how valuable you find us, as demonstrated by the severity of the kick in the pants it takes to keep you on track. Before we figured all this out, we used to get dollar signs in our eyes when gung ho users wanted to jump to commitment contracts with hundreds or thousands of dollars at risk. Eventually we learned that there’s approximately no chance that people will derail with that kind of money at stake the first time.

That’s especially true given how generous we are about what counts as a legitimate derailment. We pretty much only make you pay if the derailment was due to akrasia. But no one is so akratic that they let themselves derail on an $810 goal (well, one person has been; no one at $2430). So once you get to those amounts we’re all but guaranteeing that you won’t actually pay. That’s why we decided to actually charge money directly if you want to jump to higher pledge amounts.

Let’s talk about some novel ways to use Beeminder! Whenever we hear about one of these I want to slap up a big smiling picture of the user in our “new favorite Beeminder” frame.

First though, this entire post is a thinly veiled excuse to point out that OHMYGODGUYS Fog Creek likes us, they really really like us! Check out this excerpt from Dogfooding Until It Hurts:

…if you really want to see “dogfooding until it hurts” in action, check out Beeminder, a tool for setting “goals with a sting.” You set up your goals, and if you stray from them, the service fines you an escalating amount of real money until you’re back on track. Beeminder is dogfooding heavily and publicly to keep their development goals on track. These folks are literally giving away cold hard cash to users as a pre-commitment to do things like delivering user-visible enhancements or blog posts on a regular basis. Amazing. Even better, they have a Trello integration that’ll keep you moving those cards to the Done column regularly (or else).

So, yes, there are some powerful ways to beemind your startup, some which we’ll devote future blog posts to (and feel free to check out our rough notes in the meantime). Another idea from the Fog Creek / Trello folks: sending someone a self-enforcing to-do list, thanks to the Trello+Beeminder integration. For example, Rich Armstrong is telling his family members who need computer help because their Hotmail got hacked again, basically: “I won’t fix your computer until you’ve done the following security basics”. In general the idea is to make a Trello checklist for someone and then send them a link to it. The first item in the list can be a link to set up a Beeminder goal for the list, so they’re bound to keep at it until they eventually finish.

What are some other awesome ways Beeminder users think outside the box? Yes, at least half our users are still interested in losing weight. If you count all the exercise goals too then it’s over two thirds who are tracking fitness related stuff. But we can do more, y’all!

Bundle Goals and The Beeminding of Fun

We’ve blogged about the Must-Do system before, which I’m finding quite powerful. You could take this idea of a sort of bundle goal and use it for lots of things. Philip Hellyer tracks several daily practices — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual — in one goal. He says “my goal for this doesn’t care which of those things I do, so long as I maintain my weekly momentum. It’s my choice on any given day whether I brainstorm a bunch, hit the gym, meditate, or do anything else that defensibly counts as one of the 4 components.” Another idea from Alys is a healthy eating goal. Make a list of various dietary elements that you want to consume regularly and assign points for every class, all going into one bundle goal. For example, 1 point for each serving of protein and 2 points for each serving of vegetables. You could even do negative points for servings of sugar! Then there’s Paul Fenwick’s delightfully nerdy Remember-the-Beeminder — an integration with Remember The Milk and Beeminder where he gets points for finishing items on his to-do list and the points vary depending on how stale the item is and how he originally tagged it when it was added.

“I especially love beeminding hobbies because it is both an enforcement and an excuse.”

Gratitude journaling is another great one. And although beeminding hobbies is old hat by now — starting with Jake Jenkins’s guitar goal — we’re still enamored with it. Overcoming akrasia, after all, means getting yourself to do what you truly want to do, and that doesn’t always happen when left to our own devices. I especially love beeminding hobbies because it is both an enforcement and an excuse. I beemind my craft projects because sometimes I don’t spend enough time on them, but when I come to an emergency day it’s wonderfully liberating to sit down without any guilt. Maybe there are other things that seem more important, like if I’m not playing with the kids or working on Beeminder maybe I should be cleaning the bathroom or folding laundry, for some values of should. But it turns out those are usually pretty stupid values of should and if I have an emergency craft day, well, I conveniently planned last week that crafting would be the most urgent and important thing today. I can sit down without guilt and spend 25 minutes knitting because I want to and because I have to. (Dreeves feels similarly about his set-a-limit goal on time spent with the kids.)

Proxy Beeminding

A lot of our own beeminding is proxy beeminding. Like how our User-Visible Improvements goal is a proxy for inexorable forward progress and never giving up. When what you really care about isn’t straightforward to measure and track, you can often find another metric that is and beemind that instead. Like Danny O’Brien’s browser hack. He wrote some code to automatically beemind how many websites he’d visited in a day as he found it correlates well to his distraction. More websites = more distraction.

Here’s another example: I track my sugar-free days. What I really want is to reduce my overall sugar intake. Set-a-limit goals do that nicely but set-a-limit goals are a bit fundamentally broken (we’re working on this!) in that they can be rather loosely binding unless you have an automatic data source. And keeping track of my servings of sugar becomes too easy to get vague about. If I don’t remember to update the moment I eat a cookie, it’s very easy to forget later in the day if I ate 1 cookie this afternoon, or was it 10? But sugar-free days are easy and binary. Either I ate some sugary junk or I didn’t. In fact I have a sugar-free emergency today. Much easier not to eat the girl scout cookies that are sitting out invitingly in the kitchen when it would cost me $90. (Yes, I once paid $30 for the privilege of eating some ho-ho, and thus wound up at the $90 pledge level).

Yes, in theory I could eat twice as much sugar on my sugar-allowed days and defeat the whole point. But that would be gross, so in practice this goal succeeds in reducing my sugar consumption just fine.

Let’s Get Creative

Okay, but those aren’t really too far outside the box. They’re really more peering out the window. What about David MacFarlane beeminding his bugging of us until we implemented Fitbit stairs minding? (For the record, we absolutely adored that, and it absolutely worked!) Similarly, although this was more of a Beeminder hack than true beeminding, Matthew Fallshaw used a Beeminder graph to construct a bounty for us for another Fitbit feature. Or how about beeminding the number of safe days on your Beeminder goals to force you to stay further ahead of the game? (We’ve forgotten who did that one.) Or beeminding the amount of time you spend coding up your fancy schmancy custom Beeminder to-do list integration (Paul Fenwick again).

Someone told us about an exercise goal they created where they used a deck of cards and assigned an exercise to each suit — say diamonds are pushups, clubs are kettle bell swings, spades are squats, and hearts are box jumps. Then they’d shuffle deck, draw cards one at a time, and do the face value number of reps of each exercise. Instant random workout, and they beeminded the number of cards they did each week. (Who was this? Please claim your genius!)

Beeminding it to Eleven

“Nick Winter beeminds spontaneous romantic gestures for his girlfriend. SWOON!”

And then there’s Nick Winter, who is writing an entire book about using commitment devices and other lifehacks to get things done and be generally amazing. This included an insanely high Beeminder contract to finish the book draft in time (he did), and to try skydiving (also did). It would have cost him many thousands of dollars not to jump out of that plane. He also talks about beeminding spontaneous romantic gestures for his girlfriend. SWOON! People are always justifying Valentine’s day with some reasoning along the lines of “but it’s a reminder to be kind and demonstrate your love for those around you.” So, live the love every week, and beemind it.

Addendum: More Crazy/Awesome Beeminding

We plan to keep this list updated with new crazy ways to beemind that we learn of, including the best of the comments:

• There’s some very innovative beeminding going on with our API.
• We’re not sure if this is what Alex Ames has in mind with that placeholder page with a big hotlinked copy of his Beeminder graph but it struck us as a perfect way to have something like a “coming soon!” notice that automatically becomes a skull and crossbones instead of becoming a blatant lie.
• Yes, some people beemind sex. The Beeminder founders can neither confirm nor deny that this includes themselves, nor, if so, whether they’re set-a-limits or do-mores.
• We also know of people beeminding talking to other people and other so-called comfort zone expansion tricks.
• Joe Paravisni, in addition to beeminding social contact, cleverly beeminds how early he wakes up by entering the time of day (like “8:45”) as the datapoint and letting Beeminder interpret that as hours after midnight (ie, 8.75). He uses a set-a-limit goal to make sure he wakes up by a certain time on average. (See the colon shortcut.)
• Aaron Maras came up with a way to use IFTTT to beemind his Instapaper queue (and this would work for anything that has an RSS feed). He has a recipe to send a +1 to the bot when he adds an article and another recipe to send a -1 to the bot when he reads an article. Here’s his graph: beeminder.com/aamaras/instap. We made a recipe inspired by Aaron’s for beeminding a Twitter feed but the possibilities are endless!
• We love these examples from Mirabai Knight. (Note to others who’ve blogged about creative beeminding: remind us so we can add you to this list!)
• Brian Crain is beeminding many aspects of his daily productivity, including blogging about his progress.
• Brent Yorgey completely knocked our socks off with “Beeminding for Fun and Profit” in which he describes how he beeminds productivity at work, leisure, learning, chores, even trimming his toenails and all the ways Beeminder has transformed his life (we’re not exaggerating).

Image credit: Duy Huynh