Beeminder Seasons

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I wish beeminder didn’t come in seasons for me, but it does seem to. For months I monitor it and then I notice it’s been a month and some goals derailed a bit too often and the magic isn’t working. I usually archive a bunch of goals and then several months later I start them up again.

I don’t think it’s quite burnout but something about it feels ineffective. Anyone else? How do you manage it?

I will say that I think notifications might be the fail point. They just get missed or don’t happen or whatever - same difference to the human I suppose.

Sometimes I think about hiring a human nannybot until we have a real nannybot in beeminder. Anyone done that?

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I’m dealing with a similar situation right now - in that it’s not quite burnout (although I’m not super happy with a couple of my life areas right now, so that tends to drain me overall) but more so a loss of interest/“emotion-inducing” for a lot of my beeminders.

I wrote a long post about this in another thread… I think my perspective has evolved since then.

IMO there are 4 key factors to make a beeminder effective:

  1. Correct pledge level. The pledge level must be high enough to cause your brain to put attention towards it, but not so high that it is stress-inducing to the point of creating a fight/flight/freeze response.

  • imo this is an area where beeminder could do a bit better. $5 minimum is fine to me, but the jump from $5 to $10 feels significant, while the jump from $10-$30 feels huge, unless it’s a weekly or monthly goal. Since most of my beeminders are daily routine oriented, where some derails are to be expected, $30 is much too high, and $5 feels too low at times. I wish I could bump goals up to $6, $7, $8, instead of that straight jump to $10

  • side note: if there’s one thing beeminder has done for me, is to have less of a perfectionist relationship with money and to value my time more highly. can maybe explain this more in another post

  1. Data Honesty
  • this is one that took me a long time to accept, and still struggling with cheating at times. Having a weasel-proofing is helpful in the short term, but I’ve now realized in the long term it’s important to find ways to trust yourself to operate in the honor system. I know @dreev had a blog post called “Fake Data is the Devil” or something… and it’s true, because once you have fake data in the beeminder, the graph is no longer accurate, which makes it impossible to glean any insights from the data
  • I now have a rule that once I cheat on a goal, I have to archive it and start fresh
  1. Ease of data entry
  • the more automated and frictionless the data entry is, the more likely the beeminder will stick. Also the data entry should be fun if possible.
  1. Effectiveness of reminder system (notifications)
  • as you mentioned, notifications can often be hit or miss. It’s a confusing algorithm for how often to notify you vs how much not to. I think you have to be thoughtful in the beeminder settings regarding the “Start Alerts” settings as well as “Lead Days” for longer term goals. But I think ultimately it’s important to develop some of your own scaffolding for tracking

Note: that I said “a beeminder” - I’ve found in my beeminder system that looking at them as discrete units is very helpful. If you have 30 beeminders, and 29 of them aren’t working, but 1 is working fantastic, we don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m experiencing this right now, as I had added/experimented with a ton of different beeminders, some which were simply to test out beeminder functionalities like auto-ratchet and auto-dial.

I’ve now gotten to the point where I feel like 3-5 really solid, high-impact beeminders can be a really great value add to my life, and it’s not worth it to litter my beeminder system with a ton of low-impact beeminders.

That’s currently where my head is at - let me know if any of that resonates/helps you. I glanced at your public beeminders and it seems like you are a power user. One other thing to consider might be a rewards system to hit the pleasure side of our pain/pleasure motivational system.

Do you have any rewards for completing your beeminders ? Or just punishment for not completing ?

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This is a really good list. I think the last bit about just needing 3-5 core goals is key

I think almost everyone could benefit from using Beeminder, but mainly for just a few core things

Getting the volume and consistency right of those few things alone can be life changing

I have 50+ things, and I don’t use alerts / notifications at all

But I keep the pledges for the non core things very low to keep the focus in the right place

I think for the little things it’s mostly valuable as a tool to uncover the optimal rates of things and keep a consistent pace, not for accountability.

There are already built-in annoying things that will naturally happen in the short-term if I:

  • don’t take the dog out
  • don’t take the trash out
  • never do the dishes

I mentally anchor those consequences to derailing far more than the money.

It’s just nice for optimization freaks to be able to maximize our time by finding the minimum / optimal amount to do all these random chores.

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I don’t - what’s that look like for you if you do?

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So what does this look like in practical application? You just have a pattern to look at beeminder and do the things in red every so often?

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Yeah like 5 - 8 of them will be be red everyday

Most things will be quick, and most of my important things (those main core goals) have enough buffer that they’re only yellow or red 1-2 times a week

I do track the yellows as well (I have a data-only goal similar to scarabea where 1-2 times a day I set the cumulative number of yellow / red goals, so like 9 or so) and often do a little towards those as well

I think at like 30 or fewer goals you probably don’t need the yellow tracking thing

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For myself, I need to treat the notifications as DO IT NOW triggers. If I fall into the habit of ignoring them, then the value of Beeminder diminishes.

If I’m going to ignore a notification, it may as well not exist. Beeminder doesn’t like having all notification channels disabled, but is happy for them to start a minute before the deadline.

And of course, we now have the Uncle! button if doing it now means committing to not doing it today.

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A little thing that makes a big difference for me is that about once every 6 weeks or so I change up the notification sounds on my phone. Something about there being a different sound makes my brain notice and act on notifications that I previously ignored. It’s something that keeps Beeminder and all my other reminder apps just that little bit more effective.

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For me I think it’s more like I have seasons of setting and tuning goals and then seasons of “oh yeah that’s a thing I want to do” minimalism. I think the novelty effect is the thing that gets me back in the setting/tuning goals part, and some of the novelty with my current goal sets is just figuring out how to still do them when the circumstances/location changes. For instance, the Melzafit group interest form made me want to look up actual daily / testable fitness goals rather than just adding more minutes or distance for my existing goals.

(Example fitness goal that’s got external poor/good/excellent numbers Wall Sit Single Leg Strength Test )

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It’s funny you ask that because the main thing I have tried is “rewarding” myself through buying small amounts of stock.

This does seem to work for me as it hits my desire to accumulate money… my rationale is “well if I didn’t do the habit I’d be getting charged $5 to beeminder, so charging $5 to a stock that is likely to go up is nbd”.

My previous rule was that if I complete all beeminders in a day (no derails - as mine are a mix of everyday and weekly-ish goals) then I run a script that randomly picks a stock from the NASDAQ-100 and then I go buy $5 of that stock.

That was motivating in the short-term, but it was somewhat tedious for me to keep track of/automate since I won’t know if I completed all my beeminders until very late in the day (midnight and now ~2AM).

Just in the last few days, I did start using stock-buying rewards again however to motivate myself to reach higher “tiers” on my daily habits.

I was able to create some automations within Obsidian to make tracking the reward numbers a lot easier. (can go into detail if anyone wants to know)

And just today I had the idea to tie stock buying reward just towards completing SPECIFIC beeminders (the ones where the punishment alone isn’t too motivating). I found a way to automate tracking this with the beeminder API as well so it’s a more passive automated thing rather than requiring me to meticulously track it in a spreadsheet or something.

I like this approach because I believe the numbers can be dialed in with amounts that work with you. If you’re using beeminder, you’re by definition ok with getting charged $5 derails so therefore having a corresponding $1-$5 stock buying reward is completely reasonable.

I do think that you have to be somewhat interested in investing/businesses/stocks/trading/etc in order for this to work, however you could also apply it to buying crypto, or putting money in a savings account with a specific desirable purchase in mind.

certainly in the last few days this approach has spruced up my interest in completing my habits and going above and beyond with them.

As I mentioned earlier, beeminder has helped my money mindset a lot, and I’ve become more comfortable with losing money to derails and using the honor system. The stock buying rewards on the other hand is helping to create a good habit of investing.

What’s very cool to me is that this system is scalable as well. If I were making $50k/month, I could raise my derails and my stock buying to $500+ and it would still be motivating…

Edit: I did have an automation idea for completing all beeminders in a day, which would be a simple script to run at 4AM each morning, and check yesterday for any derails, and if no derails are found then it sends myself an email telling me “you earned a stock reward”, and then the next day I would buy the stock and delete the email. This method would be a delayed reward though, which has it’s con of being less motivating (and a pro of training yourself to respect delayed rewards?)

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My investments (and finances in general) are unreasonably automated, and that automation keeps pushing the limit as far as % of income anytime it can on it’s own. I have been incorporating “treat” type foods at a specific time to practice enjoying/savoring things I used to consider “off limits”. It’s actually working pretty well, but I think I could hack it a bit for this purpose.

I think I could probably do something like “treat time” only happens if and after all beemergencies are handled. I’ll try it. Thanks for sharing the concept!

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Any chance you’d be able to explain this system a bit more ?

Sounds very interesting…

I was trying to figure out investing automations but proved difficult to find APIs for bank → buy stock type thing

Perhaps my strategy mainly applies for me and others who have a more dynamic-income (run a couple cashflowing online businesses) as opposed to consistent salary income.

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Sure, my financial “model” has four foundational ideas (turns out it was 5), and two are just inverting what most people do (and what I did for many years). All of this is about personal finance, I do have a similar set of views & a system for business finances as I have some additional business income sources as well. As I mentioned, I think a bit of this is unreasonable for many. But, we do set the standards for ourselves, so maybe not? Do what you think is cool, take what you like and discard the rest. I can’t say I’ve ever written all of this out in this way before, I have lots of notes about it but as a model in full it mostly existed in my mind. Here goes:

  1. The root of the word currency is currens, because it flows, like a river.
    Money flows constantly, but you can pool it if you put dams in the right place. You can make infrequent decisions that will impact the flow of money automatically in the future, and $ will look more like a lake or ocean than a river. This is why banks tend to have massive amounts of it (they automate and “defrictionize” the collection & use of it - most people autopay them monthly and they are constantly lending to more people to get more autopays in the door). Also why most people with DoorDash DashPass, Amazon Subscribe & Save, and Apple Pay tend to have relatively low amounts of it (they automate and remove friction from the depletion of it).

  2. Investing & Saving should be automatic and zero friction.
    Products like M1 Finance have this down to like literally 0 friction for investing in stocks, ETFs, Crypto.

  3. Discretionary spending should NEVER be automated and as high friction as possible.
    With very few exceptions I use Qube Money for all my day-to-day personal/discretionary spending. I don’t use apple pay or store my cards much of anywhere to add friction, and nothing goes through without first opening the “qube” (their word for budget envelope/category).

    I have credit cards for large purchases and travel, but I keep them locked away in a ksafe, set to 72 hours and with the battery removed. If I decide I want to make a major unplanned purchase I put the battery in the ksafe and it counts down a mandatory 72 hour cooling-off period. If I still want to make the major purchase, I do it.

    I do have a beeminder bill qube which lets charges go through so that beeminder stings rob me of money I would otherwise be able to use for discretionary/fun/etc.

  4. The highest value use of $ for me is to give to others, 20% off the top of all income goes to my giving account and it’s literally just for giving, helping others, etc.

    I didn’t start with giving 20% but I did set it as a life goal like 10 years ago and increased it slowly since. I grew up very poor and had many years where if someone would have given me $500 it would have changed my life, so I wanted to always be able to help others and made that a reality.

  5. Re-evaluate automations max 4x per year.
    This one has two focuses, which is to take an intentional look at what is/isn’t working, and to adjust to any new goals or changing life circumstances. Typically, I tweak spending % down if possible, savings/investing % up. This is the part where the system pushes the limits, I have some written plans (increase this or that by 1% if possible) and I also will make ad hoc adjustments. It’s not like you can’t go get some money back out of one of the pools if you push the limit a little too much. They are your pools after all.

Sequence automates all my $ flow, see blurry screenshot below. I have a bunch of accounts and flows in the middle, but the main idea is to flow all the money I can away from spending to either giving or long term goals. Any new earnings or leftovers at the end of the month gets swept away to a better place of greater use. Highly recommend their product.

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Similarly, I use Relay for my business finances, they have great flow automations designed into their product as well!

Hope this helps!

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