DRMacIver's Notebook

Beeminder for Enforced Participation

Beeminder for Enforced Participation

I’m a huge fan of beeminder. I was on a break with it for a while, not for any very good reason, but I’ve been back using it for a couple of months now, and it’s really good to be back.

A lot of the things I’ve been using beeminder for recently are a sort of… “making the fundamental feature of Beeminder contagious”. The fundamental feature of Beeminder for me is that you cannot simply decide to give up on a goal - because the goal will charge you if you don’t satisfy it, and because you have to wait a week for changes to take effect, the choice to stop a goal has to be a deliberate decision planned out in advance.

This is fairly huge to me.

A lot of goals I’ve had recently are basically of the form “keep doing the thing”. This allows me to create systems with this property - beeminder doesn’t track my success at using the system, it just tracks that I’m doing it at all.

Examples:

The notebook and day plan goals do have some quantity attached to them but it’s not that important. The journal and book goals literally all they track is “Did I do the thing today?”. If yes, I get a point. If no, I don’t. I can do as much or as little as I like as long as I do something. The system itself is then what keeps me doing it well, “all” beeminder is doing is keeping me participating in it.