Bee mentions in the talk that she had put in 283.5 hours on what would become Beeminder at that point. Tracked by TagTime nee TimePie.
That was still a couple years before we publicly launched. A total of 145 goals had been created – we manually created them all – for friends and family and ourselves.
One of the questions from the audience was “how many people achieve their goals?” and Bee looks at me off-camera and we’re both like “ummm, we don’t know?”
Which is still our answer today! Actually our answer is that the question is all wrong. It’s rare for a goal to be binary (achieved or not) and if it is then arguably StickK works better for it. Also Beeminder can’t actually tell the difference between a goal ending because it was achieved and ending because you gave up. It’s all about the journey with Beeminder, I guess. I think it’s worth Beeminder asking more questions and learning the difference but it obviously hasn’t been a priority so far. Maybe we’ll get to that in the next 10 years?
I have achieved maybe 1/10 goals I set on Beeminder, 9/10 I eventually gave up on. But those 1/10 were worth it, and maybe 6 out of the remaining 9 were good learning experiences. (The last 3 were ill-conceived.)
This prompted me to go and look through all my goals and see what proportion of them made me achieve things. Since ~2013 I’ve got 34 goals that are current or archived.
9 successful short term goals, achieved what I set out to do (26%)
6 goals that led me understand that the thing I thought I wanted to do wasn’t really my priority (18%)
6 goals (18%) that I think led to sub par performance, I feel as if I might have done better without them, I set the bar too low maybe
5 goals (14%) where I gave up because the metrics I was trying to measure were too fuzzy or hard to keep track of, these are “you need a plan B” sort of goals.
4 goals (12%) that got superseded or subsumed into another goal, a variation on the above one where I actually had a plan B.
4 goals (12%), 3 of which are ongoing, that I consider long term successes
I’ve certainly set up more goals than that, some were deleted very quickly when I worked out they were in categories 2-4.
Looking at this I’d consider most of categories 1, 5 and 6 to be achieved but my head certainly doesn’t feel this 50% success rate!
The ones where I think beeminding has made me subpar are the most thought provoking. I usually think that beeminder’s value is in setting small hurdles but making me jump over them regularly. I’m very much a hare rather than a tortoise, and trying to induce tortoise like keeping-on-going behaviour in myself is how I feel beeminder works. It’s interesting to me that I still seem to feel I’m napping on some of these goals. I think it might be a fear of failure thing. I’m worrying about failing at beeminder more than I’m worrying about failing at my goals.
Actually reading this back before posting I’ve realised that I haven’t labelled single goal as “outright failure”. I think I’ve probably mislabelled something in my notes or missed out some of my goals, but all the same I think that’s pretty positive.