Anyone running their company (contracts/promises) with the use of beeminder?

[zedmango]

@shanaqui

My gmailzero goal is nearly always flat because there’s nothing there; in theory, my reviewbacklog goal should be flat as well.

What type of goals are those?

[shanaqui]

Whatever is normal for a gmailzero goal with the integration (probably whittle down) and one that’s definitely a whittle down goal.

[mary]

@narthur

Where can I learn more about that?

Voilà:

GitHub - chipmanaged/MCM-Dashboard: Micro(chip)Managed's Beeminder Dashboard

(Though, I’ll admit that I haven’t looked at that version at all in years… but I do still use a version of it for some of my own goals and thinks it’s the cat’s pyjamas, if I do say so myself.)

[zedmango]

Oh thank you! I’ve been wondering about that and wanting to try it out!!!

[mary]

You’re more than welcome. I’m just kinda bummed that I haven’t made it better and uploaded more in the last few years.

But please let me know what you think of it if you try it! I’ve been tempted to do more with it, but I’m often too busy to play with these things, so i’d be curious what kinds of solutions other people might come up with too!

Actually, all day I’ve been fighting off the urge to shirk my responsibilities and fiddle with it. If I succumb to that temptation in the near future, I’ll let people know!

[zedmango]

@mary Looks like it’s a PHP webpage? Does it require regular visits to update the goal rates with auto-dialer then?

[bcool]

well this escalated quickly

[mary]

Sorry! This got derailed.
Let’s move any conversation about the autodialer to: Help yourself to some API files

[bcool]

I mean the whole thread about running the company with the use of beeminder, sorry for not being specific

[bcool]

@dreev

I’ve managed to convince a handful of founder friends over the years to beemind UVIs , which is still my top recommendation for beeminding something like a startup or side business.

Experimenting since 1 week with UVI. Setting the slope pretty flat.

Wanted to ask what counts as UVI, so I found this

You can start with a very unambitious definition of “improvement”. When we originally announced our commitment to do this we listed all of the following as things that count:

• New blog posts
• Fixing typos
• Tweaking the layout or the logo or whatever
• Improvements to how the bot responds to emails
• Tweaks to the algorithm for generating the yellow brick road
• Tweets from our main twitter account (@bmndr)
• Improvements to the log in procedure or payment processing
• Any new feature or tweak to any feature
• New tips-of-the-day in the email responses from the bot

Basically, anything that makes Beeminder better, even in the most tiny, trivial way. Over the last 1000 days, we’ve gradually gotten more ambitious. Fixing typos and adding tips of the day and whatnot don’t count anymore. Bugfixes and CSS tweaks still do. And we have a separate graph for blog posts, which you can see in the sidebar, so this article doesn’t count as a UVI.

The real criterion is simply anything we’re not ashamed to publicly announce as our UVI of the day. We have (just) enough pride that we’d rather cough up the $1000 than tweet anything that clearly violates the spirit of the commitment.

Outstanding recommendation, will keep experimenting with it. Any other recommendations ?

[bcool]

I’ve been away for a while. Bumping this to the top of the forum. Any other known cases where beeminder is used within an organization/company?

[dreev]

I just learned that the lead engineer of CodeCombat is a hardcore Beeminder user since forever and beeminds his time writing code as part of his job.

[sheik]

I use it to check for database backups. I have a script that checks backups automatically with OpenAI. If the JSON doesn’t look good, I don’t get a point.
After a few days of staleness, it starts becoming a beemergency and I look at the backup. Saved my ass a couple of times.
This is a clever system that gives me peace of mind.
It’s a guarantee that 1) I have a fresh backup and 2) if it goes wrong, I’ll fix the backups

I also Beeminder closing our monthly accounting. Without it, I would never spend the 2 hours that are needed on it. I actually started doing this since 2 month and it changed my life… I noticed that having a tighter financial control motivated us more. Ok, we did XXXX of benefits this month, let’s try making more next month! So this one is a must-have too.

I think that if I need a goal right now, it would be to reach out to customers proactively instead of just taking their money. Building trust goes a long way…

I have one goal that’s called “_reduce_costs”. I look at our spendings and reduce them. This can be servers, subscriptions, etc.

Product quality is important, of course, and UVIs help for that. But everything else matters too. It’s useful to take a bird’s eye view of the business and ask yourself: “what should this human regularly do to improve this company?”. It might not be UVIs, but rather, hiring, improving a Google Ads campaign, etc.

Overall, I think the right goals need to be discovered with time. Don’t copy paste other’s goals. Create goals that you truly need. (Writing for myself here )

[bcool]

Saved my ass a couple of times

it changed my life…

Exactly.

[bcool]

Familiar with the ‘Beeminder terminology’, I researched a little more and it seems that contracts/promises are called ‘compliance’ in organizations. I found the 8 disciplines of problem solving an interesting model to approach ‘stings’ or as they are called in organizations ‘non-conformities’. Who is familiar with compliance?

[napkin]

closing monthly accounting is a genius beeminder.

I always procrastinate that until it’s needed.