I liked Melzafit’s Thought of the Week this week, on Accountability:
If you’re trying to motivate yourself to move more, there’s nothing better than accountability. Find it wherever and whenever you can. Find a class, a group, or a friend to do the activity with. If you don’t have that, tell someone out loud what you plan to do and then excitedly let them know you did it afterwards… and maybe even just before to make sure you get started! Other ways to find accountability include setting some rules for yourself such as, I always walk to this activity or I always ride my stationary bike for the first 30 min of TV I watch in the evening, or I always walk for 10 minutes after meals. When movement happens for more reasons than simply “I should / have to do this”, your motivation comes from a place of desire rather than shame. You simply cannot sustain moving consistently over time if it’s just a chore, a have-to, or a punishment.
(That’s my sister, and, back in the day, Beeminder’s original Resident Fitness Expert.)
At first I worried that the last couple sentences were an anti-Beeminder argument. She said maybe some uses of Beeminder can be like that? But her point is that you can’t hate yourself into doing things. “Ugh, I have to work out because I’m too fat”, was her example.
My sense is that there are masochists on Beeminder, but they’re the minority. Beeminder is about doing things you genuinely want to do, just that life tends to get in the way of fitting in. See “Beeminder Making You Do Self-Indulgent Things” for anti-masochism use cases.
So I think @mel’s point is very pro-Beeminder. If you can join a gym, make workout dates with friends, get yourself on the hook to follow through by talking about your goals [1], all those things create accountability. As does creating a Beeminder goal.
[1] Remember when the internet was convinced you shouldn’ttalk about your goals? Fun times.
Indeed, it seems like a lot of us feel that beeminder ultimately doesn’t work when we don’t actually want to do the thing! Often enough, someone remarks something like “well, I learned from the goal that I actually didn’t want to achieve the goal.”
Relatedly, I restarted my running goal about a week ago, which failed a couple times in the past. I seem to be getting somewhere (too soon to say) this time, perhaps, and I think the main difference is just that I have some actual excitement about improving. I hope the goal will function as just a light push now and then to keep me from falling off the wagon.
TL;DR: I like that Beemidner also works really well for people who really, really dislike dependency on external accountability to maximize pace
I think for me personally what has happened in the past is if the social side wasn’t a sufficient motivation, then at some point I would stop doing it, or at worst do fake data (the great mortal sin).
Or not necessarily fake, but bending it or twisting it here and there, because I cared much more about the shame of missing a target (really just being perceived as inconsistent) than about actually being consistent.
So I tend to keep all of my day to day commits / achievements private.
Although in practice I do have some channels where I share wins / do a standup, but I keep the bar in those fairly low so I don’t feel too much stress about them (as I find that counterproductive for PTSD / again fake data reasons).
The downside of that is that although it helps “pull” me into the work when I’m on a roll, it doesn’t really help me push or increase my own pace beyond some “minimum expected output” amount that others can perceive on a gut level.
I think that’s the beauty of Beeminder for me:
I have a semi-automated way to track and manage my own pace to a comfortable but near maximal level
there is a very real sting that will affect my ability to spend disposable income on other things (and can literally cause me to have to pull in my belt for a month if it’s something I’m really committed to and have a high $ ceiling for)
I much prefer reducing my own freedom (by reducing my $) and “seeing it coming” a week away and having time to adjust etc. rather than either numbing myself to social feedback and/or creating a lot of PTSD about the unknowns about when the other shoe will drop due to not hitting some hard-gauge pace
For some reason paying money really doesn’t “hurt” me or drive anxiety at all, but still gives me something to avoid – maybe because of the Akrasia horizon and how you can “see it coming” from a mile away in a very clear and comprehensible way
I really feel like it’s helped me go from slightly guilty satisficing to guiltless maximizing, because I can:
get far more granular feedback on my pacing in a way that also has a real (but not PTSD-inducing) weight and
I can effectively set a ceiling on how far I maximize so that my personal life doesn’t fall apart
I’ve derailed 3x so far, and it’s really, really awesome.