I’m laying in bed. I don’t feel like exercising. But I know it would be good for me to get up and do 20 minutes on my stationary bike today.
Is there a way for me to set up a one-time beeminder goal of doing exercise before the end of today?
I recommend @narthur’s TaskRatchet for this!
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Founder of TaskRatchet here. Would love to get your feedback if you decide to try it out! It’s still quite early in its development, so every bit of feedback I can get is incredibly valuable. My email is nathan@taskratchet.com.
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Yes I signed up for TaskRatchet. It’s interesting because it’s such a minimalistic app. I created a one time beeminder, a $10 task ratchet, and scheduled a focusmate session.
Then I did my exercise, deleted the beeminder contract, and checked off the task ratchet.
One thing I don’t understand though. You created task ratchet for your own purpose right? Who do you pay if you fail to complete your own tasks on time?
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Currently money I lose to it goes into the business account just like every other user. I would love to change it so that it sends the money to a random active user, but that would take some significant work to make happen, and it hasn’t been a high enough priority to rise to the top of my list of things to change. But still on the list!
That’s an interesting idea, but what would be the tax implications? It would still be considered gross income to you, would it not? And would this be considered something of a raffle? Could be all kinds of laws you would have to deal with.
Another idea would be that a portion of the money goes to a charitable organization. Another idea would be to incorporate your task ratchet idea into some open source to do manager.
And speaking of laws, I sure hope that you have protected yourself by creating an LLC or equivalent business structure to shield yourself.
I’ve created an “NFC alarm” task on beeminder. With the help of an NFC chip (which can be found in any card so I used a throwaway bus card with NFC in it), I place the NFC chip some place outdoors a mile away from my home. Then I set tasker to trigger a POST request when I scan the card with my phone. This fixes BOTH the exercise problem and the getting up problem. If I don’t wake up by a certain time, I won’t make it in time to actually scan the chip, and hence I have to wake up. In order to get to the chip, the most convenient way for me is to run or bike to it.
The only issue is that one day I went to the place where I had hidden the NFC card and it was not there (probably because wind blew it away). Therefore I have switched to triggering the API call when I connect to the wifi network of a nearby cafe.
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Just for interest’s sake, this is what Beeminder does for most of the team, so it’s definitely doable! 
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That’s genius!
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