commitment contract escape clauses; death of the SOS clause

#1

Here are the ideas we’ve thought of for dealing with emergencies or
other reasons you may want to flatten your yellow brick road
immediately, ie, pause your commitment contract:

  1. The SOS clause – http://blog.beeminder.com/sos
  2. Tweet or post to facebook your reason for pausing (if you’re
    willing to say it publicly it’s probably legit)
  3. Pre-specify a couple friends who have to corroborate your excuse in
    order to pause your road
  4. Explain your reason to the Beeminder founders (status quo)
  5. Just type your excuse in a box on your graph page

The point of Beeminder of course is to bind your impetuous future
self, yet to retain as much flexibility as possible –
blog.beeminder.com/flexbind – so anything that you don’t think your
future self would be inclined to abuse should suffice. At least for
the kind of users Beeminder has attracted so far – over 5000 of them
– we have learned that the SOS clause is beyond overkill. We’ve
assumed all along that #4 was a highly nonscalable stopgap, but we’re
ramen-profitable now and unfreezing people’s graphs when they derail
illegitimately takes (or could take, with slightly more streamlined
admin tools) mere minutes a day. And no one is abusing it!

So we’re inclined to stick with #4 indefinitely. What do you think?

–
http://dreev.es – search://"Daniel Reeves"
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com

#2

I like #2, for all the obvious reasons.

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Daniel Reeves dreeves@beeminder.com wrote:

Here are the ideas we’ve thought of for dealing with emergencies or
other reasons you may want to flatten your yellow brick road
immediately, ie, pause your commitment contract:

  1. The SOS clause – http://blog.beeminder.com/sos
  2. Tweet or post to facebook your reason for pausing (if you’re
    willing to say it publicly it’s probably legit)
  3. Pre-specify a couple friends who have to corroborate your excuse in
    order to pause your road
  4. Explain your reason to the Beeminder founders (status quo)
  5. Just type your excuse in a box on your graph page

The point of Beeminder of course is to bind your impetuous future
self, yet to retain as much flexibility as possible –
blog.beeminder.com/flexbind – so anything that you don’t think your
future self would be inclined to abuse should suffice. At least for
the kind of users Beeminder has attracted so far – over 5000 of them
– we have learned that the SOS clause is beyond overkill. We’ve
assumed all along that #4 was a highly nonscalable stopgap, but we’re
ramen-profitable now and unfreezing people’s graphs when they derail
illegitimately takes (or could take, with slightly more streamlined
admin tools) mere minutes a day. And no one is abusing it!

So we’re inclined to stick with #4 indefinitely. What do you think?

–
http://dreev.es – search://"Daniel Reeves"
Follow the Yellow Brick Road – http://beeminder.com