Beeminder

What is Beeminder?

Beeminder is a goal-tracking application with a few little extras:

• It’s designed thoughtfully, letting you set and track goals. It displays your progress in an accumulating format, giving you a small dopamine hit as you watch your numbers increase each day. Once you see a couple days aligned, it feels impossible not to keep the good work.
• It encourages daily action. While you can set weekly or monthly goals, you need to “mark” something daily, which helps establish consistent habits.
• The major differentiator: Accountability. The concept is simple - they charge you $5 (minimum) each time you “fail” by not meeting your daily goal.
• You can modify your goals, but any changes only take effect after a week (the “akrasia horizon”). So you could slack next Sunday if you wantd, but not today.

My experience with it

In theory, the $5 penalty is supposed to motivate you to work harder to avoid losing money. In my case, it works a bit differently: I would easily pay $5 to skip many of the activities I’ve set up in Beeminder - activities that, in the moment, I often don’t feel like doing.

However, what Beeminder actually creates for me is a sense of seriousness. My self-commitment isn’t about paying $5 for failing; it’s about not failing at all. I don’t consider failure a real possibility, and Beeminder solidifies that commitment: I know I’ll have to record my progress, I’ll see the graph rise, and when I create a new goal, I know that graph will always continue upward. In my daily life, my mindset shifts from weighing how much I want to do something versus how much I want to skip it, to simply accepting that I will do it and figuring out when during the day I’ll complete it.

Essentially, it’s a way for my long-term self to take control and force my short-term self to take action. And so far, it’s working. My main goals to date are:

• Focused work minutes: 90 minutes of serious work daily, which currently totals 10,871 minutes. This was the first goal I created, and it has changed my life the most. I always had self steem problems derivated from procastination, and right now I’m hitting all work goals almost easily.
• Pages read: 15 pages per day, 1,354 pages since I started. This has allowed me to regain my reading habit that I had sadly lost, and I’ve completed 8 books in just the first two months of this year.
• Hours planned: 4 hours per day that I must have pre-planned, currently at 318 hours. This forces me to add structure to my day and avoid days of mindless scrolling or wasting time on the internet.

The key for me is maintaining the feeling that meeting my goals is inevitable. I only set goals that I know I can achieve and that are within my control. For example, I haven’t tried to set goals based on work output, but rather on time spent working. The amount I accomplish may vary each day, but at least I’ll have made an effort.

So far, after about 4 months of using it, Beeminder has transformed my life and doesn’t seem to be losing its effectiveness over time. It helps me prove to myself that I can actually make and keep commitments, and it has restored my confidence in my ability to change and grow. At this point, I even feel that the desire to improve every day has become part of my identity.

Could it work for you?

I don’t know. Maybe? You need a very specific mindset:

• You want to improve. You are willing to force yourself to work.
• You are extremely honest. You know you won’t lie or input false data. You need a bit of pride in seeing that chart go up.
• You have 5$ to spare. But maybe it works best if you don’t.

So if you’re considering it, I recommend giving it a try.

It just 5 bucks, and only if you fail. And if you really have decided not to fail… Nothing to lose, right?