What if you added a way to get a monetary reward for moving far enough away from the line and getting so far ahead of your goal. Here’s an example of how it would work in my mind.
Let’s say you set a goal to get 5,000 steps a day. Cool. But what if you could also deposit $100 that you would get back if you got 20 days of buffer?
Then, maybe at that point you would have the opportunity to recalibrate your goal to 6k steps/day and start the process all over again.
Maybe you could even have sponsors that could deposit the carrot for others. But, I digress.
I would like this feature. I like seeing my little dots move further away from the red line. I like seeing “due in 18 days.” It means I am succeeding. It would be cool to have the option to have a carrot waiting for me when I get to “due in 20 days.” It would also be a nice point at which to have a celebratory email from Beeminder and a process through which to recalibrate the goal if I choose to step it up a notch.
Lots of good ideas here! For the monetary reward idea in particular, we have a blog post arguing against it:
But that was 2.5 years ago and our thinking has evolved a bit. We’re working on a thing called Honey Money that mayyyybe will open up possibilities here. But mostly I still agree with the above blog post. I think especially the idea of depositing money and later withdrawing it is off the table for a host of messy legal and accounting reasons.
When is the honey money expected to be added? I am excited for the feature. Will make it easier since I won’t have many Beeminder transactions to enter into my budget software.
Any $UNIT_OF_TIME now! It actually depends on what aspect of you’re excited about. If it’s an easy way to pre-deposit money and then having that balance debited from when you derail, we could be ready for beta testers of that as early as a couple weeks from now. Not sure about timeline for making it work for anyone/everyone. Like the idea of weekly invoices where we charge you once for all derailments in the past week, that’ll take longer, though we still like that idea and it could be important to switch to that model at some point.
