I have followed Simone Giertz for a some time, known as the queen of shitty robots on Youtube. Yesterday or so she started a Kickstarter campaign for a product that is a calendar of sorts, where each day can be turned on or off. The campaign suggests to use this a “gold star” setup - light up for every day you do something. A lot of the sales pitch sounds very similar to Beeminder (or Habitica or others), but it is also hackable/programmable/buildable, so maybe an integration with Beeminder isn’t totally off the table?
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to sell this product (and I don’t think I will buy it myself either), but it looks interesting and well made nonetheless.
That said I have a couple of charts from Jira and screenshots of my beeminder gallery page printed out and pinned on my announcement board as a physical reminder of progress, ones that I can serendipitously glance at random times without thinking about it or clicking the beeminder bookmark.
Lovely! My first reaction is that I’d rather have this in software and get a dedicated tablet to mount on the wall to run it. Or possibly just use posterboard and gold star stickers. Dedicated electronic hardware kind of strikes me as the worst of both worlds, but I might be being curmudgeonly! Probably the main reason this would make sense is aesthetics. Which is a fine reason! Also there’s a commitment device angle (beyond don’t-break-the-chain, which I’m not the biggest fan of) in that buying that (literal) device creates a strong compulsion to follow through and use it.
So, yeah, if you’d find that pretty to have on the wall, motivating to look at, and satisfying to light up the boxes, $300 could be money well spent!
Related idea: a dedicated tablet mounted on the wall permanently showing a Beeminder graph.
We all love gadgets, but I find this an irresponsible use of energy (and money) when you can do the same with pen and paper. Just feels wrong having something glowing 24/7/365 that is not “doing” anything.
I saw a runner friend a really beautiful wall calendar where he’d cross off each day he had run at least once. Even more flexible than an electronic one as you can vary how you tick it off or arrange the days yourself if you make your own.
