Beeminder
24 Oct 2020
tl;dr: I’ve been playing with beeminder.com to track commitments.
What is beeminder?
It’s habit-tracking app with teeth.
You set a habit, a goal, commitment, something you want to get done. It has to be measurable. It has to have many small steps. It has to be very simple.
For example: Take 10,000 steps a day. Study three hours a day. Mediate for ten minutes a day. Go jogging three times a week. Floss teeth every day. Clean the gerbil cage twice a week. Stop work after seven hours. Eat five portions of vegetables a day.
And you pledge cash money that you will do this thing. Then, if you miss cleaning the gerbil cage once too often, then $5 is deducted from your credit card. And the next time it’s $10. Maximum fine is up to you; it depends how much you & your gerbils care about clean sawdust. Yes, you can lie about how often you clean the gerbil cage. But (say the beeminder team) people tend not to; it spoils the tool for them and it isn’t fun any more.
Beeminder works very well for nerdy people; if you like excel sheets, graphs, if you like Fitbit, then this is a tool you might enjoy.
Does it work?
It does for me. The beeminder website talks about “goals” a lot; I prefer “habits”. It works for small things which I have to do and keep on doing.
I had a torn rotator cuff, and the physiotherapist gave me a set of (very boring) exercises to be done every day. I know what happens; I will do my exercises fervently for about four days and then I slack off. I will think about doing the exercises, I will feel guilty about not doing them, but just don’t get round to it. Beeminder helped. I set a goal of “Do physio exercises 6 days a week” and then I was getting (very annoying) email & phone reminders until they had been done.
I could track the days, I could see progress, and yes, it made a difference…
