Other places where Beeminder-type nerds hang out?

I’ve enjoyed being a part of this forum so much. You all are great. :smile:

What other places do behavioral economics / productivity / captology nerds hang out?

(Is there a better way to describe our community? Don’t let my poor description limit what you include in your answers!)

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I would not describe myself as economics or captology nerd. If only because I have never heard of the latter one :wink:
I’d go with that self improvement.
I theorise that there exists a great number of people with AD(H)D who are frustrated with how hard it is for them to focus, their executive dysfunction and as a result their inability to get done what they want to get done. Amongst them are relatively large number of highly intelligent people who want this to change. I think this is a breeding ground for type bee people.

I further theorise that there is a certain overlap in mindset between entrepreneurs and type bee people without wanting to go into detail right now.

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Yeah, I was struggling to come up with a good description, since I think there is such a variety of people here on the board. :slight_smile:

Any forums, Slack channels, Facebook groups, etc, you know of?

On the entrepreneurship thing, a community I discovered recently is IndieHackers, which (among other things) is a forum for people working on bootstrapping their own web businesses.

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Nope, I’m not aware of any specific online communities. I do know that there is group therapy for people with ADHD so at least there is some sort of offline community. Dunno about the situation in the US though :man_shrugging:

The Complice GCI community is a little like ours, but not 100%. We talked about the GCI already here: https://forum.beeminder.com/t/complice-goal-crafting-intensive/4804

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You could lurk in a lean management LinkedIn group, or talk shop with the the Lean guys at work.

Lean Management relies on the same principles as Beeminder: Making problems visible, tracking them, making it easy to do the right thing, focussing on what gets results, etc. Beeminder users can benefit from their experience how to set the right goals. See the link at the end. The main difference is that Lean Management applies to corporations (and their interpersonal complexity). I’ll show you the common ground in a few examples:

  • KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): The way a Beeminder goal is quantified
  • Kaizen (Continuous Improvement): The philosophy of getting one small change done instead of getting paralyzed by a huge mountain. Beeminder splits up a huge goal into tiny daily pieces of workload. The philosophy also shines through in the way the number of goals is limited by default. It shines through in the excessive use of trello / UVI / Mark Forster / other productivity systems that reduce the cognitive load from “be productive” to “do this concrete, simply, doable thing today”.
  • Andon: Beeminder’s graphs
  • Bottleneck Analysis: No analogon. In consequence, Beeminder newbies often set goals that lack leverage.
  • Gemba (The Real Place): Lean’s Goals should work in the factory, not in the corner office where they are made up. Beeminder has lots of safeguards (akrasia horizon …) so that you can fiddle with goals in practise (=factory floor) without losing their teeth. This frees you to set up goals in advance (=corner office) and fine-tune them later.
  • Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment). Align the goals of the company (Strategy), with the plans of middle management (Tactics) and the work performed on the plant floor (Action). In Beeminder parlance, figure out what to track (=tactics) in a serene state of mind, then focus on the Bee stings when you’re in everyday stress (=action). Also, lots of users have meta-goals, or overarching guidelines (=strategy) how to set their goals (=tactics).
  • Jidoka (Autonomation) Design equipment to partially automate the manufacturing process. Beeminder has a heavy focus on autodata, i.e. on going from fully-manual to semi-automated.
  • Muda (Waste) Anything in the manufacturing process that does not add value from the customer’s perspective. Beeminder support is singularily awesome at removing technical roadblocks (=muda) so that we users can beemind our goals (=add value).
  • Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) Availability, Performance, Quality: The analogy breaks down on this one. Frankly, that’s a good thing. I’ve seen plenty of perverse incentives arise from the mindset “use the expensive machines at 100% capacity at all times” during a sales slump.
  • PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) An iterative methodology for implementing improvements: Plan (establish plan and expected results), Do (implement plan), Check (verify expected results achieved), Act (review and assess; do it again). Beeminder Power users understand this intuitively in the way they set up and adjust their goals. Watch them. Beeminder-the-company could improve onboarding by teaching new users this skill.
  • Poka-Yoke (Error Proofing): Autodata removes human error from the data stream. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do Poka-Yoke on the actual goals without losing flexibility.
  • Root Cause Analysis, focuses on resolving the underlying problem: Beeminder power users will instinctively set their goals to resolve the underlying roadblock. E.g. those who succeed in getting up early every morning will set a goal to get in bed on time. Those who succeed in getting places on time will always figure out the stop-doing-everything-else-and-get-going time and will set up a cellphone reminder. Those who succeed in making Getting Thing Done work, will somehow address the emotional barriers. Newbies, go watch them. Beeminder-the-company could improve onboarding by teaching newbies this skill.
  • Value Stream Mapping: I’ve noticed an emphasis on Process over Goals in the Beeminder community.
  • Visual Factory: There’s a reason the Beeminder app has widgets to put those goals graphs on your phone homescreen.

https://www.leanproduction.com/lean-glossary.html

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I don’t spend much time in there these days, but the lesswrong slack might be a good bet. The productivity channel especially feels like it overlaps with beeminder. (I found beeminder originally through a lesswrong post I believe).

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_Slack

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Any specific ones you’d recommend? I haven’t really used LinkedIn as a proper social media platform so I’m not sure how to best find these