# Thoughts on Beeminder

**URL:** <https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453>\
**Category:** uncategorized\
**Created:** [September 24, 2013, 8:33pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453 "2013-09-24T20:33:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 14\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Brian\_Fabian\_Crain](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/brian_fabian_crain/32/694_2.png) [@Brian\_Fabian\_Crain](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Brian_Fabian_Crain)\
**Post date:** [September 24, 2013, 8:33pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/1 "2013-09-24T20:33:45Z")

</div>

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted to  
share some of my thoughts on it.

First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my life  
and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it in Nick  
Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions with the  
Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding and I  
feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other company I  
can think of right now.

Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from Beeminder.  
I’ll describe the reasons why.

_Akrasia Horizon_  
In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and I  
derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating about  
them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important and more  
urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to  
anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very good  
at that.

I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat resentful  
about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of  
Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not really  
aligned with my bouts of laziness.

_Graphs_  
Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very motivating.  
But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data  
points the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some  
satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped working  
for me as a motivational tool.

_Clutter_  
I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it I was  
probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became difficult as  
they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some were things I  
wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do occasionally anyway and  
just wanted logged somewhere. Some were automatically pulled from other  
applications. Over time, this just started to feel very confusing and I  
didn’t like that the only effective organization to this was how many days  
I had left until derailment.

_Behavioral/Project Alignment_  
Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has been  
that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals or  
with the structure of my day.

One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of goals.  
e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been able  
to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I could  
have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear  
overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder feels  
like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,  
relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined  
limbo-state.  
It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your attention  
when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.

_Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking_  
A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I  
derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on these  
derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking  
service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder has.

_Going Forward_  
I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.

I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic  
activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author, rating  
and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can  
export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are a few  
more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit  
integration as it is frictionless.

But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some of the  
habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy, untameable  
octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something else to give me  
structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that would be  
Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…

I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and that a  
lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great and I  
really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very successful  
future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder somehow.

But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful for  
Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from the  
knowledgeable folks of this list.

Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?  
Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have  
avoided this?

Cheers,  
Brian

–  
Go get my PGP Public Key [http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl](http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl), then use  
Mailvelope[http://www.mailvelope.com/](http://www.mailvelope.com/) to  
encrypt your webmail.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Presley\_Pizzo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e9a140/32.png) [@Presley\_Pizzo](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Presley_Pizzo)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 2:30pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/2 "2013-09-25T14:30:21Z")

</div>

As I start more and more goals I am also noticing that the goals page is a  
little cumbersome. I hadn’t thought categories of goals would help,  
because I was imagining topic-based categories (health, work, etc), but  
categorizing by when you want to look at them is a great idea.

I also have a little bit of tension between realizing that if I want to get  
anything done I should track it, and feeling like my entire day would be  
spent getting reminders if I did that. I get a lot of texts at the same  
time at the end of the day. Having reminders set for a category of goals  
instead of each individual goal would probably help. (I like inputting data  
through the iPhone app, so I don’t need a text to come from the goal I’m  
going to update.)

Presley

On Tuesday, September 24, 2013 4:33:45 PM UTC-4, Brian F Crain wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted to  
> share some of my thoughts on it.
> 
> First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my life  
> and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it in Nick  
> Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions with the  
> Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding and I  
> feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other company I  
> can think of right now.
> 
> Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from  
> Beeminder. I’ll describe the reasons why.
> 
> _Akrasia Horizon_  
> In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and I  
> derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating about  
> them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important and more  
> urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to  
> anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very good  
> at that.
> 
> I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat resentful  
> about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of  
> Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not really  
> aligned with my bouts of laziness.
> 
> _Graphs_  
> Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very motivating.  
> But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data  
> points the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some  
> satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped working  
> for me as a motivational tool.
> 
> _Clutter_  
> I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it I  
> was probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became  
> difficult as they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some  
> were things I wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do  
> occasionally anyway and just wanted logged somewhere. Some were  
> automatically pulled from other applications. Over time, this just started  
> to feel very confusing and I didn’t like that the only effective  
> organization to this was how many days I had left until derailment.
> 
> _Behavioral/Project Alignment_  
> Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has been  
> that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals or  
> with the structure of my day.
> 
> One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of goals.  
> e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been able  
> to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I could  
> have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear  
> overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder feels  
> like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,  
> relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined  
> limbo-state.  
> It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your attention  
> when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.
> 
> _Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking_  
> A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I  
> derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on these  
> derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking  
> service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder has.
> 
> _Going Forward_  
> I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.
> 
> I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic  
> activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author, rating  
> and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can  
> export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are a few  
> more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit  
> integration as it is frictionless.
> 
> But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some of  
> the habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy,  
> untameable octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something else to  
> give me structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that would  
> be Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…
> 
> I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and that a  
> lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great and I  
> really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very successful  
> future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder somehow.
> 
> But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful for  
> Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from the  
> knowledgeable folks of this list.
> 
> Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?  
> Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have  
> avoided this?
> 
> Cheers,  
> Brian
> 
> –  
> Go get my PGP Public Key [http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl](http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl), then use Mailvelope[http://www.mailvelope.com/](http://www.mailvelope.com/) to  
> encrypt your webmail.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Reto\_Stamm](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/reto_stamm/32/693_2.png) [@Reto\_Stamm](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Reto_Stamm)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 2:42pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/3 "2013-09-25T14:42:57Z")

</div>

I think I agree with each of these points, really. Especially the cluttered  
inbox state. I made a new account just for that, and I start cluttering it  
up again. It seems that goals are not forever.

I have moved daily habits to lift.d, which has a nice checklist interface,  
and community cheering, which was somewhat nice. Since there’s no long term  
tracking, I’ve done that for all of a week, then stopped. What I plan on  
doing is to add lift.do to Beeminder - it has a Ruby gem that pulls from  
it, and a csv interface also. The lift.do guys were friendly but not very  
helpful when I chatted with them.  
I plan to add a “% of habits done/day” tracker (or # of habits), so I can  
set up a “do more” goal for these as a whole thing.

The “Urgent, extremely demanding project” is a very real thing. Getting  
back into the groove afterwards is hard, too.

Graph readability with many datapoints may be improved if it only shows the  
next week and the last month or so. But then it of course looks less  
impressive.

Reto

On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Brian Fabian Crain [crainbf@gmail.com](mailto:crainbf@gmail.com)wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted to  
> share some of my thoughts on it.
> 
> First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my life  
> and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it in Nick  
> Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions with the  
> Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding and I  
> feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other company I  
> can think of right now.
> 
> Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from  
> Beeminder. I’ll describe the reasons why.
> 
> _Akrasia Horizon_  
> In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and I  
> derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating about  
> them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important and more  
> urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to  
> anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very good  
> at that.
> 
> I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat resentful  
> about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of  
> Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not really  
> aligned with my bouts of laziness.
> 
> _Graphs_  
> Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very motivating.  
> But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data  
> points the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some  
> satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped working  
> for me as a motivational tool.
> 
> _Clutter_  
> I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it I  
> was probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became  
> difficult as they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some  
> were things I wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do  
> occasionally anyway and just wanted logged somewhere. Some were  
> automatically pulled from other applications. Over time, this just started  
> to feel very confusing and I didn’t like that the only effective  
> organization to this was how many days I had left until derailment.
> 
> _Behavioral/Project Alignment_  
> Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has been  
> that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals or  
> with the structure of my day.
> 
> One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of goals.  
> e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been able  
> to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I could  
> have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear  
> overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder feels  
> like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,  
> relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined  
> limbo-state.  
> It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your attention  
> when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.
> 
> _Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking_  
> A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I  
> derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on these  
> derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking  
> service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder has.
> 
> _Going Forward_  
> I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.
> 
> I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic  
> activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author, rating  
> and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can  
> export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are a few  
> more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit  
> integration as it is frictionless.
> 
> But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some of  
> the habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy,  
> untameable octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something else to  
> give me structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that would  
> be Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…
> 
> I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and that a  
> lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great and I  
> really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very successful  
> future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder somehow.
> 
> But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful for  
> Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from the  
> knowledgeable folks of this list.
> 
> Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?  
> Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have  
> avoided this?
> 
> Cheers,  
> Brian
> 
> –  
> Go get my PGP Public Key [http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl](http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl), then use Mailvelope[http://www.mailvelope.com/](http://www.mailvelope.com/) to  
> encrypt your webmail.
> 
> –  
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Rob\_Felty](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/rob_felty/32/678_2.png) [@Rob\_Felty](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Rob_Felty)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 2:52pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/4 "2013-09-25T14:52:54Z")

</div>

I think that interactive graphs would solve the graph readability problem.  
I personally would also like the ability to set the y-axis on the graph. If  
you look at my weight graph, it looks like I have made some big changes,  
but if you made the y-axis start at 0, it would look very flat (which is  
closer to the truth in my opinion)

> **[Beeminder](https://www.beeminder.com/rob/weight)**
>
> Goal tracking and commitment contracts

Rob

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Reto Stamm [reto@retostamm.com](mailto:reto@retostamm.com) wrote:

> I think I agree with each of these points, really. Especially the  
> cluttered inbox state. I made a new account just for that, and I start  
> cluttering it up again. It seems that goals are not forever.
> 
> I have moved daily habits to lift.d, which has a nice checklist interface,  
> and community cheering, which was somewhat nice. Since there’s no long term  
> tracking, I’ve done that for all of a week, then stopped. What I plan on  
> doing is to add lift.do to Beeminder - it has a Ruby gem that pulls from  
> it, and a csv interface also. The lift.do guys were friendly but not very  
> helpful when I chatted with them.  
> I plan to add a “% of habits done/day” tracker (or # of habits), so I can  
> set up a “do more” goal for these as a whole thing.
> 
> The “Urgent, extremely demanding project” is a very real thing. Getting  
> back into the groove afterwards is hard, too.
> 
> Graph readability with many datapoints may be improved if it only shows  
> the next week and the last month or so. But then it of course looks less  
> impressive.
> 
> Reto
> 
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Brian Fabian Crain [crainbf@gmail.com](mailto:crainbf@gmail.com)wrote:
> 
> > Hi Everyone,
> > 
> > I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted to  
> > share some of my thoughts on it.
> > 
> > First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my life  
> > and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it in Nick  
> > Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions with the  
> > Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding and I  
> > feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other company I  
> > can think of right now.
> > 
> > Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from  
> > Beeminder. I’ll describe the reasons why.
> > 
> > _Akrasia Horizon_  
> > In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and I  
> > derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating about  
> > them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important and more  
> > urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to  
> > anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very good  
> > at that.
> > 
> > I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat resentful  
> > about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of  
> > Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not really  
> > aligned with my bouts of laziness.
> > 
> > _Graphs_  
> > Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very motivating.  
> > But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data  
> > points the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some  
> > satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped working  
> > for me as a motivational tool.
> > 
> > _Clutter_  
> > I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it I  
> > was probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became  
> > difficult as they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some  
> > were things I wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do  
> > occasionally anyway and just wanted logged somewhere. Some were  
> > automatically pulled from other applications. Over time, this just started  
> > to feel very confusing and I didn’t like that the only effective  
> > organization to this was how many days I had left until derailment.
> > 
> > _Behavioral/Project Alignment_  
> > Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has been  
> > that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals or  
> > with the structure of my day.
> > 
> > One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of goals.  
> > e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been able  
> > to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I could  
> > have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear  
> > overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder feels  
> > like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,  
> > relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined  
> > limbo-state.  
> > It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your attention  
> > when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.
> > 
> > _Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking_  
> > A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I  
> > derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on these  
> > derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking  
> > service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder has.
> > 
> > _Going Forward_  
> > I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.
> > 
> > I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic  
> > activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author, rating  
> > and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can  
> > export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are a few  
> > more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit  
> > integration as it is frictionless.
> > 
> > But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some of  
> > the habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy,  
> > untameable octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something else to  
> > give me structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that would  
> > be Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…
> > 
> > I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and that  
> > a lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great and I  
> > really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very successful  
> > future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder somehow.
> > 
> > But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful for  
> > Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from the  
> > knowledgeable folks of this list.
> > 
> > Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?  
> > Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have  
> > avoided this?
> > 
> > Cheers,  
> > Brian
> > 
> > –  
> > Go get my PGP Public Key [http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl](http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl), then use Mailvelope[http://www.mailvelope.com/](http://www.mailvelope.com/) to  
> > encrypt your webmail.
> > 
> > –  
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> > “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> > email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> 
> –  
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Katherine\_Baxter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/839c29/32.png) [@Katherine\_Baxter](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Katherine_Baxter)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 3:12pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/5 "2013-09-25T15:12:35Z")

</div>

For your weight graph, set vmin to 0 in the advanced options.

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Rob Felty [robfelty@gmail.com](mailto:robfelty@gmail.com) wrote:

> I think that interactive graphs would solve the graph readability problem. I  
> personally would also like the ability to set the y-axis on the graph. If  
> you look at my weight graph, it looks like I have made some big changes, but  
> if you made the y-axis start at 0, it would look very flat (which is closer  
> to the truth in my opinion)
> 
> [https://www.beeminder.com/rob/weight](https://www.beeminder.com/rob/weight)
> 
> Rob
> 
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Reto Stamm [reto@retostamm.com](mailto:reto@retostamm.com) wrote:
> 
> > I think I agree with each of these points, really. Especially the  
> > cluttered inbox state. I made a new account just for that, and I start  
> > cluttering it up again. It seems that goals are not forever.
> > 
> > I have moved daily habits to lift.d, which has a nice checklist interface,  
> > and community cheering, which was somewhat nice. Since there’s no long term  
> > tracking, I’ve done that for all of a week, then stopped. What I plan on  
> > doing is to add lift.do to Beeminder - it has a Ruby gem that pulls from it,  
> > and a csv interface also. The lift.do guys were friendly but not very  
> > helpful when I chatted with them.  
> > I plan to add a “% of habits done/day” tracker (or # of habits), so I can  
> > set up a “do more” goal for these as a whole thing.
> > 
> > The “Urgent, extremely demanding project” is a very real thing. Getting  
> > back into the groove afterwards is hard, too.
> > 
> > Graph readability with many datapoints may be improved if it only shows  
> > the next week and the last month or so. But then it of course looks less  
> > impressive.
> > 
> > Reto
> > 
> > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Brian Fabian Crain [crainbf@gmail.com](mailto:crainbf@gmail.com)  
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > Hi Everyone,
> > > 
> > > I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted to  
> > > share some of my thoughts on it.
> > > 
> > > First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my life  
> > > and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it in Nick  
> > > Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions with the  
> > > Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding and I  
> > > feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other company I can  
> > > think of right now.
> > > 
> > > Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from  
> > > Beeminder. I’ll describe the reasons why.
> > > 
> > > Akrasia Horizon  
> > > In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and I  
> > > derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating about  
> > > them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important and more  
> > > urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to  
> > > anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very good at  
> > > that.
> > > 
> > > I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat resentful  
> > > about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of  
> > > Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not really  
> > > aligned with my bouts of laziness.
> > > 
> > > Graphs  
> > > Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very motivating.  
> > > But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data points  
> > > the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some  
> > > satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped working  
> > > for me as a motivational tool.
> > > 
> > > Clutter  
> > > I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it I  
> > > was probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became difficult  
> > > as they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some were things  
> > > I wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do occasionally anyway and  
> > > just wanted logged somewhere. Some were automatically pulled from other  
> > > applications. Over time, this just started to feel very confusing and I  
> > > didn’t like that the only effective organization to this was how many days I  
> > > had left until derailment.
> > > 
> > > Behavioral/Project Alignment  
> > > Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has been  
> > > that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals or with  
> > > the structure of my day.
> > > 
> > > One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of goals.  
> > > e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been able  
> > > to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I could  
> > > have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear  
> > > overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder feels  
> > > like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,  
> > > relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined  
> > > limbo-state.  
> > > It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your attention  
> > > when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.
> > > 
> > > Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking  
> > > A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I  
> > > derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on these  
> > > derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking  
> > > service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder has.
> > > 
> > > Going Forward  
> > > I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.
> > > 
> > > I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic  
> > > activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author, rating  
> > > and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can  
> > > export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are a few  
> > > more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit  
> > > integration as it is frictionless.
> > > 
> > > But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some of  
> > > the habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy,  
> > > untameable octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something else to  
> > > give me structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that would  
> > > be Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…
> > > 
> > > I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and that  
> > > a lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great and I  
> > > really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very successful  
> > > future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder somehow.
> > > 
> > > But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful for  
> > > Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from the  
> > > knowledgeable folks of this list.
> > > 
> > > Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?  
> > > Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have avoided  
> > > this?
> > > 
> > > Cheers,  
> > > Brian
> > > 
> > > –  
> > > Go get my PGP Public Key, then use Mailvelope to encrypt your webmail.
> > > 
> > > –  
> > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> > > “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> > > email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> > 
> > –  
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> > “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> > email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> 
> –  
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Rob\_Felty](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/rob_felty/32/678_2.png) [@Rob\_Felty](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Rob_Felty)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 3:19pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/6 "2013-09-25T15:19:58Z")

</div>

Thanks for the tip Katherine! I didn’t know about that feature. And now  
that I have played with it, I think I like the beeminder defaults better!  
Thanks for knowing what I _actually_ wanted Danny!

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Katherine Baxter \<  
[baxter.katherine@gmail.com](mailto:baxter.katherine@gmail.com)\> wrote:

> For your weight graph, set vmin to 0 in the advanced options.
> 
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Rob Felty [robfelty@gmail.com](mailto:robfelty@gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > I think that interactive graphs would solve the graph readability  
> > problem. I  
> > personally would also like the ability to set the y-axis on the graph. If  
> > you look at my weight graph, it looks like I have made some big changes,  
> > but  
> > if you made the y-axis start at 0, it would look very flat (which is  
> > closer  
> > to the truth in my opinion)
> > 
> > [weight – rob – beeminder](https://www.beeminder.com/rob/weight)
> > 
> > Rob
> > 
> > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Reto Stamm [reto@retostamm.com](mailto:reto@retostamm.com) wrote:
> > 
> > > I think I agree with each of these points, really. Especially the  
> > > cluttered inbox state. I made a new account just for that, and I start  
> > > cluttering it up again. It seems that goals are not forever.
> > > 
> > > I have moved daily habits to lift.d, which has a nice checklist  
> > > interface,  
> > > and community cheering, which was somewhat nice. Since there’s no long  
> > > term  
> > > tracking, I’ve done that for all of a week, then stopped. What I plan on  
> > > doing is to add lift.do to Beeminder - it has a Ruby gem that pulls  
> > > from it,  
> > > and a csv interface also. The lift.do guys were friendly but not very  
> > > helpful when I chatted with them.  
> > > I plan to add a “% of habits done/day” tracker (or # of habits), so I  
> > > can  
> > > set up a “do more” goal for these as a whole thing.
> > > 
> > > The “Urgent, extremely demanding project” is a very real thing. Getting  
> > > back into the groove afterwards is hard, too.
> > > 
> > > Graph readability with many datapoints may be improved if it only shows  
> > > the next week and the last month or so. But then it of course looks less  
> > > impressive.
> > > 
> > > Reto
> > > 
> > > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Brian Fabian Crain [crainbf@gmail.com](mailto:crainbf@gmail.com)  
> > > wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Hi Everyone,
> > > > 
> > > > I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted to  
> > > > share some of my thoughts on it.
> > > > 
> > > > First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my  
> > > > life  
> > > > and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it in  
> > > > Nick  
> > > > Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions  
> > > > with the  
> > > > Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding  
> > > > and I  
> > > > feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other company  
> > > > I can  
> > > > think of right now.
> > > > 
> > > > Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from  
> > > > Beeminder. I’ll describe the reasons why.
> > > > 
> > > > Akrasia Horizon  
> > > > In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and I  
> > > > derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating  
> > > > about  
> > > > them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important and  
> > > > more  
> > > > urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to  
> > > > anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very  
> > > > good at  
> > > > that.
> > > > 
> > > > I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat  
> > > > resentful  
> > > > about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of  
> > > > Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not really  
> > > > aligned with my bouts of laziness.
> > > > 
> > > > Graphs  
> > > > Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very  
> > > > motivating.  
> > > > But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data  
> > > > points  
> > > > the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some  
> > > > satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped  
> > > > working  
> > > > for me as a motivational tool.
> > > > 
> > > > Clutter  
> > > > I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it I  
> > > > was probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became  
> > > > difficult  
> > > > as they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some were  
> > > > things  
> > > > I wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do occasionally  
> > > > anyway and  
> > > > just wanted logged somewhere. Some were automatically pulled from other  
> > > > applications. Over time, this just started to feel very confusing and I  
> > > > didn’t like that the only effective organization to this was how many  
> > > > days I  
> > > > had left until derailment.
> > > > 
> > > > Behavioral/Project Alignment  
> > > > Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has  
> > > > been  
> > > > that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals  
> > > > or with  
> > > > the structure of my day.
> > > > 
> > > > One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of  
> > > > goals.  
> > > > e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been  
> > > > able  
> > > > to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I  
> > > > could  
> > > > have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear  
> > > > overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder  
> > > > feels  
> > > > like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,  
> > > > relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined  
> > > > limbo-state.  
> > > > It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your  
> > > > attention  
> > > > when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.
> > > > 
> > > > Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking  
> > > > A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I  
> > > > derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on these  
> > > > derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking  
> > > > service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder  
> > > > has.
> > > > 
> > > > Going Forward  
> > > > I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.
> > > > 
> > > > I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic  
> > > > activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author,  
> > > > rating  
> > > > and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can  
> > > > export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are a  
> > > > few  
> > > > more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit  
> > > > integration as it is frictionless.
> > > > 
> > > > But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some of  
> > > > the habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy,  
> > > > untameable octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something  
> > > > else to  
> > > > give me structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that  
> > > > would  
> > > > be Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…
> > > > 
> > > > I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and  
> > > > that  
> > > > a lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great  
> > > > and I  
> > > > really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very  
> > > > successful  
> > > > future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder somehow.
> > > > 
> > > > But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful for  
> > > > Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from  
> > > > the  
> > > > knowledgeable folks of this list.
> > > > 
> > > > Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?  
> > > > Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have  
> > > > avoided  
> > > > this?
> > > > 
> > > > Cheers,  
> > > > Brian
> > > > 
> > > > –  
> > > > Go get my PGP Public Key, then use Mailvelope to encrypt your webmail.
> > > > 
> > > > –  
> > > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google  
> > > > Groups  
> > > > “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send  
> > > > an  
> > > > email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > > > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> > > 
> > > –  
> > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google  
> > > Groups  
> > > “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send  
> > > an  
> > > email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> > 
> > –  
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> > “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> > email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> 
> –  
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Noah\_Wilde](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/noah_wilde/32/691_2.png) [@Noah\_Wilde](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Noah_Wilde)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 4:30pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/7 "2013-09-25T16:30:49Z")

</div>

I would also like some categorisation or organisation system. Even  
something light weight would do. The below the fold, above the fold stuff  
is okay. But it’s a very blunt tool.

I have three major contexts: personal, open source, and work. And often I  
only care about one context at a particular point in time. (Though logging  
on in the morning to see what is red, yellow, etc, gives me a good idea of  
what I need to work on during the day.)

But I also imagine that it would be useful to add more than one category to  
a goal. For example, within those contexts, I have binary success goals (1  
or 0 for the day) and time based goals.

So the ability to perhaps tag goals would be useful, and then an easy way  
to filter or sort or group based on tag. Perhaps something like OS X’s  
smart search (in Mail.app, Finder.app, any lots of other places) so you  
could create a smart search for "all goals tagged with ‘personal’ and  
‘time’ and under seven days safety buffer’ and then save that as “Priority  
(Personal)” or whatever, and have that saved search come up in a list on  
the dashboard. And then you can just flip between searches. Could even do  
something like that with JS on the client side.

Anyway, just spitballin here. But yes, “one big inbox” can be cumbersome.  
(I track over 30 goals!)

On 25 September 2013 17:19, Rob Felty [robfelty@gmail.com](mailto:robfelty@gmail.com) wrote:

> Thanks for the tip Katherine! I didn’t know about that feature. And now  
> that I have played with it, I think I like the beeminder defaults better!  
> Thanks for knowing what I _actually_ wanted Danny!
> 
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Katherine Baxter \<  
> [baxter.katherine@gmail.com](mailto:baxter.katherine@gmail.com)\> wrote:
> 
> > For your weight graph, set vmin to 0 in the advanced options.
> > 
> > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Rob Felty [robfelty@gmail.com](mailto:robfelty@gmail.com) wrote:
> > 
> > > I think that interactive graphs would solve the graph readability  
> > > problem. I  
> > > personally would also like the ability to set the y-axis on the graph.  
> > > If  
> > > you look at my weight graph, it looks like I have made some big  
> > > changes, but  
> > > if you made the y-axis start at 0, it would look very flat (which is  
> > > closer  
> > > to the truth in my opinion)
> > > 
> > > [weight – rob – beeminder](https://www.beeminder.com/rob/weight)
> > > 
> > > Rob
> > > 
> > > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 8:42 AM, Reto Stamm [reto@retostamm.com](mailto:reto@retostamm.com) wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I think I agree with each of these points, really. Especially the  
> > > > cluttered inbox state. I made a new account just for that, and I start  
> > > > cluttering it up again. It seems that goals are not forever.
> > > > 
> > > > I have moved daily habits to lift.d, which has a nice checklist  
> > > > interface,  
> > > > and community cheering, which was somewhat nice. Since there’s no long  
> > > > term  
> > > > tracking, I’ve done that for all of a week, then stopped. What I plan  
> > > > on  
> > > > doing is to add lift.do to Beeminder - it has a Ruby gem that pulls  
> > > > from it,  
> > > > and a csv interface also. The lift.do guys were friendly but not very  
> > > > helpful when I chatted with them.  
> > > > I plan to add a “% of habits done/day” tracker (or # of habits), so I  
> > > > can  
> > > > set up a “do more” goal for these as a whole thing.
> > > > 
> > > > The “Urgent, extremely demanding project” is a very real thing. Getting  
> > > > back into the groove afterwards is hard, too.
> > > > 
> > > > Graph readability with many datapoints may be improved if it only shows  
> > > > the next week and the last month or so. But then it of course looks  
> > > > less  
> > > > impressive.
> > > > 
> > > > Reto
> > > > 
> > > > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Brian Fabian Crain \<[crainbf@gmail.com](mailto:crainbf@gmail.com)
> > > 
> > > > wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > Hi Everyone,
> > > > > 
> > > > > I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted  
> > > > > to  
> > > > > share some of my thoughts on it.
> > > > > 
> > > > > First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my  
> > > > > life  
> > > > > and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it  
> > > > > in Nick  
> > > > > Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions  
> > > > > with the  
> > > > > Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding  
> > > > > and I  
> > > > > feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other  
> > > > > company I can  
> > > > > think of right now.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from  
> > > > > Beeminder. I’ll describe the reasons why.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Akrasia Horizon  
> > > > > In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and  
> > > > > I  
> > > > > derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating  
> > > > > about  
> > > > > them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important  
> > > > > and more  
> > > > > urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to  
> > > > > anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very  
> > > > > good at  
> > > > > that.
> > > > > 
> > > > > I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat  
> > > > > resentful  
> > > > > about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of  
> > > > > Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not  
> > > > > really  
> > > > > aligned with my bouts of laziness.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Graphs  
> > > > > Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very  
> > > > > motivating.  
> > > > > But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data  
> > > > > points  
> > > > > the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some  
> > > > > satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped  
> > > > > working  
> > > > > for me as a motivational tool.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Clutter  
> > > > > I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it  
> > > > > I  
> > > > > was probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became  
> > > > > difficult  
> > > > > as they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some were  
> > > > > things  
> > > > > I wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do occasionally  
> > > > > anyway and  
> > > > > just wanted logged somewhere. Some were automatically pulled from  
> > > > > other  
> > > > > applications. Over time, this just started to feel very confusing and  
> > > > > I  
> > > > > didn’t like that the only effective organization to this was how many  
> > > > > days I  
> > > > > had left until derailment.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Behavioral/Project Alignment  
> > > > > Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has  
> > > > > been  
> > > > > that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals  
> > > > > or with  
> > > > > the structure of my day.
> > > > > 
> > > > > One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of  
> > > > > goals.  
> > > > > e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been  
> > > > > able  
> > > > > to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I  
> > > > > could  
> > > > > have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear  
> > > > > overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder  
> > > > > feels  
> > > > > like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,  
> > > > > relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined  
> > > > > limbo-state.  
> > > > > It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your  
> > > > > attention  
> > > > > when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking  
> > > > > A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I  
> > > > > derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on  
> > > > > these  
> > > > > derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking  
> > > > > service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder  
> > > > > has.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Going Forward  
> > > > > I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.
> > > > > 
> > > > > I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic  
> > > > > activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author,  
> > > > > rating  
> > > > > and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can  
> > > > > export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are  
> > > > > a few  
> > > > > more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit  
> > > > > integration as it is frictionless.
> > > > > 
> > > > > But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some  
> > > > > of  
> > > > > the habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy,  
> > > > > untameable octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something  
> > > > > else to  
> > > > > give me structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that  
> > > > > would  
> > > > > be Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…
> > > > > 
> > > > > I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and  
> > > > > that  
> > > > > a lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great  
> > > > > and I  
> > > > > really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very  
> > > > > successful  
> > > > > future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder  
> > > > > somehow.
> > > > > 
> > > > > But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful  
> > > > > for  
> > > > > Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from  
> > > > > the  
> > > > > knowledgeable folks of this list.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?  
> > > > > Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have  
> > > > > avoided  
> > > > > this?
> > > > > 
> > > > > Cheers,  
> > > > > Brian
> > > > > 
> > > > > –  
> > > > > Go get my PGP Public Key, then use Mailvelope to encrypt your webmail.
> > > > > 
> > > > > –  
> > > > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google  
> > > > > Groups  
> > > > > “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > > > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,  
> > > > > send an  
> > > > > email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > > > > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> > > > 
> > > > –  
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> > > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send  
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> > > > email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > > > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> > > 
> > > –  
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> > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send  
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> > 
> > –  
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> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
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> > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> 
> –  
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
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> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
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---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nrgunby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/9de053/32.png) [@nrgunby](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/nrgunby)\
**Post date:** [September 25, 2013, 9:30pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/8 "2013-09-25T21:30:12Z")

</div>

If you want a % habits done/day, you could try moving to DayScore (  
[http://dayscore.net](http://dayscore.net)), which is designed specifically for tracking that  
(although with no commitment contracts-maybe a beeminder graph for your  
dayscore score?). I used to use it, but I found the fact that you couldn’t  
see which habits were getting missed and which ones done made it pretty  
useless, although any % habits done/day system would have the same problem.

Categorisation of goals would definitely be useful

Nate

On Thursday, September 26, 2013 2:42:57 AM UTC+12, Reto Stamm wrote:

> I think I agree with each of these points, really. Especially the  
> cluttered inbox state. I made a new account just for that, and I start  
> cluttering it up again. It seems that goals are not forever.
> 
> I have moved daily habits to lift.d, which has a nice checklist interface,  
> and community cheering, which was somewhat nice. Since there’s no long term  
> tracking, I’ve done that for all of a week, then stopped. What I plan on  
> doing is to add lift.do to Beeminder - it has a Ruby gem that pulls from  
> it, and a csv interface also. The lift.do guys were friendly but not very  
> helpful when I chatted with them.  
> I plan to add a “% of habits done/day” tracker (or # of habits), so I can  
> set up a “do more” goal for these as a whole thing.
> 
> The “Urgent, extremely demanding project” is a very real thing. Getting  
> back into the groove afterwards is hard, too.
> 
> Graph readability with many datapoints may be improved if it only shows  
> the next week and the last month or so. But then it of course looks less  
> impressive.
> 
> Reto
> 
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Brian Fabian Crain \<[cra...@gmail.com](mailto:cra...@gmail.com)\<javascript:\>
> 
> > wrote:
> 
> > Hi Everyone,
> > 
> > I’ve been a very active user of Beeminder for over a year and wanted to  
> > share some of my thoughts on it.
> > 
> > First things first, the past year has been the most productive of my life  
> > and Beeminder played a significant role in this. I learned about it in Nick  
> > Winter’s (excellent) book and I’m very glad I did. My interactions with the  
> > Beeminder team in various support emails have also been outstanding and I  
> > feel a more personal connection to Beeminder than to any other company I  
> > can think of right now.
> > 
> > Yet, over the past months I have gradually been moving away from  
> > Beeminder. I’ll describe the reasons why.
> > 
> > _Akrasia Horizon_  
> > In August I worked extremely hard on finishing my Master’s thesis and I  
> > derailed on various goals during that time. I wasn’t procrastinating about  
> > them. It was simply that I had one project that was more important and more  
> > urgent and I made the decision to neglect everything else. I tried to  
> > anticipate these by adjusting the road beforehand but I was not very good  
> > at that.
> > 
> > I know this was my fault, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat resentful  
> > about it. More broadly, I often felt that the short-term rigidity of  
> > Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of derailing was not really  
> > aligned with my bouts of laziness.
> > 
> > _Graphs_  
> > Initially, I found the graphs and staying above the road very motivating.  
> > But over time this effect disappeared entirely. With hundreds of data  
> > points the graphs had become very difficult to read. I might have felt some  
> > satisfaction looking at how far up I had come but they just stopped working  
> > for me as a motivational tool.
> > 
> > _Clutter_  
> > I have tracked 24 things overall on Beeminder and at the height of it I  
> > was probably tracking around 17 things simultaneously. This became  
> > difficult as they pertained to completely different areas of my life. Some  
> > were things I wanted to do daily. Some were logs of things I do  
> > occasionally anyway and just wanted logged somewhere. Some were  
> > automatically pulled from other applications. Over time, this just started  
> > to feel very confusing and I didn’t like that the only effective  
> > organization to this was how many days I had left until derailment.
> > 
> > _Behavioral/Project Alignment_  
> > Following up on the Clutter point: The broader problem, for me, has been  
> > that Beeminder doesn’t really align (anymore) with overarching goals or  
> > with the structure of my day.
> > 
> > One solution to this, I think, would be to allow categorization of goals.  
> > e.g. Beeminder might have partially kept its usefulness if I had been able  
> > to group goals by ‘Morning Routine’ or ‘Learning’ or ‘Weekly’. Then I could  
> > have looked at the relevant place and it would have provided a clear  
> > overview of where I’m at in this area. Instead, coming to Beeminder feels  
> > like coming to a cluttered inbox with (now) a jumble of relevant now,  
> > relevant some other time, not relevant anymore, and or in undefined  
> > limbo-state.  
> > It’s not pleasant and there are ten things that take away your attention  
> > when only a small subset is relevant at that moment.
> > 
> > _Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking_  
> > A very minor misgiving I have is that I can’t see anywhere how often I  
> > derailed, when, on which goal and how much money I have spent on these  
> > derailments. I find that a bit against the spirit of a self-tracking  
> > service, particularly one of the high ethical standard that Beeminder has.
> > 
> > _Going Forward_  
> > I am not quite sure what I will do going forward.
> > 
> > I will most likely continue using Beeminder particularly for sporadic  
> > activities. For example, I log how many books I read and put author, rating  
> > and title in the comment. This works fine for me and I like that I can  
> > export the data and analyze it at some point if I want to. There are a few  
> > more similar trackers and I’ll also keep up things like the fitbit  
> > integration as it is frictionless.
> > 
> > But when it comes to my daily habits, the thought of restarting some of  
> > the habits makes me feel as if I’m about to take on some unwieldy,  
> > untameable octopus. The only thing I can imagine is using something else to  
> > give me structure and use Beeminder to keep a data log. But then that would  
> > be Beeminder without its core behavior change functionality…
> > 
> > I know these are my personal experiences and feelings right now and that  
> > a lot of you are getting a great deal out of Beeminder. That’s great and I  
> > really hope the Beeminder and its great team will have a very successful  
> > future. I might also change my mind and restart with Beeminder somehow.
> > 
> > But I wanted to share these thoughts as I hope they might be useful for  
> > Beeminder itself and because I would love to get some reactions from the  
> > knowledgeable folks of this list.
> > 
> > Have some of you had similar issues and dealt with them successfully?  
> > Should I have adopted a different approach somewhere that would have  
> > avoided this?
> > 
> > Cheers,  
> > Brian
> > 
> > –  
> > Go get my PGP Public Key [http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl](http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl), then use Mailvelope[http://www.mailvelope.com/](http://www.mailvelope.com/) to  
> > encrypt your webmail.
> > 
> > –  
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> > “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> > email to [akratics+u...@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+u...@googlegroups.com) \<javascript:\>.  
> > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dreev](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/dreev/32/4311_2.png) [@dreev](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/dreev)\
**Post date:** [September 26, 2013, 8:03am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/9 "2013-09-26T08:03:02Z")

</div>

Brian, thank you so much! Let me first say to everyone: Categorizing  
goals, got it. That’s actually the number 2 item on  
[uservoice.beeminder.com](http://uservoice.beeminder.com) but I hadn’t taken it seriously until hearing  
all this. So thanks especially to Brian and to everyone else for  
chiming in on that. I’m still thinking that customizing “midnight” (#4  
on uservoice) is even more important – it’s the biggest thing I  
personally need – but I see now that they’re related so we’ll keep  
thinking hard about how best to handle the general problem of goal  
clutter and inbox-style overload.

More specific comments interspersed:

> the past year has been the most productive of my life and Beeminder played a significant role in this

I get a warm glow every time I hear that kind of thing 🙂

> short-term rigidity of Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of  
> derailing was not really aligned with my bouts of laziness.

Every once in a while I feel like I’d have some value for customizing  
the akrasia horizon. With my blogging goal for Messy Matters I’ve  
found myself akratically procrastinating beyond the nominal akrasia  
horizon (“maybe next month when I’m not so busy with Beeminder work”)  
and at the other extreme my mustdo goal is sort of like having a 1-day  
akrasia horizon and that additional flexibility can have value.

Of course there’s a definite cognitive savings to be had in sticking  
with a universal immutable akrasia horizon. So far I haven’t been  
convinced that it’s worth the cost to customize that. I’d love to keep  
hearing evidence to the contrary.

> With hundreds of data points the graphs had become very difficult to read

This is really important. Note the stopgap we have in the meantime:  
change tmin in advanced settings (we’ll probably at least move that to  
basic settings soon) to zoom in on the more relevant part of the  
graph.

> Clutter

Like I said at the top of this email, this was persuasive. All I can  
recommend in the meantime is to use the frontburner/backburner feature  
(or just archiving) to pare down the goals at the top of your gallery  
to just a handful of things that you’re really akratic about.

> Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking

Roger that. We shall add it. We have [beeminder](http://beeminder.com/contracts) which, if  
you’re signed in, shows all your current pledges, but not history,  
which is needed.  
Trello’ing that here: [Trello](https://trello.com/c/FAD4Z5dM/928-pledge-history)  
(And thanks for being frank about how glaring an omission it is!)

–  
[http://dreev.es](http://dreev.es) – search://“Daniel Reeves”  
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == [http://beeminder.com](http://beeminder.com)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Brian\_Fabian\_Crain](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/brian_fabian_crain/32/694_2.png) [@Brian\_Fabian\_Crain](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Brian_Fabian_Crain)\
**Post date:** [September 30, 2013, 4:19pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/10 "2013-09-30T16:19:09Z")

</div>

Thanks for all the responses. I was at a conference so it’s taken me a  
while to get around to it.

I’m glad the categorization feature is high on the priority list. I  
remember voting for that too!

Regarding the flexibility versus rigidity point, I would agree with you  
that any weakening of the akrasia horizon is a very significant change and  
the chance of getting it wrong is probably higher than that of improving  
Beeminder. This wasn’t so much a change proposal as it was me noticing that  
personally derailing was often a consequence of busyness rather than  
procrastination.

I also saw the separate emails by Essy and Ben Ellis regarding the  
dashboards they have constructed. This is something I have been thinking  
about a lot as well and I may also try to do something of that sort in the  
next month.

Thanks for all the comments and discussions. I think it’s fantastic this  
forum exists to discuss and improve Beeminder!

On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Daniel Reeves [dreeves@beeminder.com](mailto:dreeves@beeminder.com)wrote:

> Brian, thank you so much! Let me first say to everyone: Categorizing  
> goals, got it. That’s actually the number 2 item on  
> [uservoice.beeminder.com](http://uservoice.beeminder.com) but I hadn’t taken it seriously until hearing  
> all this. So thanks especially to Brian and to everyone else for  
> chiming in on that. I’m still thinking that customizing “midnight” (#4  
> on uservoice) is even more important – it’s the biggest thing I  
> personally need – but I see now that they’re related so we’ll keep  
> thinking hard about how best to handle the general problem of goal  
> clutter and inbox-style overload.
> 
> More specific comments interspersed:
> 
> > the past year has been the most productive of my life and Beeminder  
> > played a significant role in this
> 
> I get a warm glow every time I hear that kind of thing 🙂
> 
> > short-term rigidity of Beeminder often meant that the ‘punishment’ of  
> > derailing was not really aligned with my bouts of laziness.
> 
> Every once in a while I feel like I’d have some value for customizing  
> the akrasia horizon. With my blogging goal for Messy Matters I’ve  
> found myself akratically procrastinating beyond the nominal akrasia  
> horizon (“maybe next month when I’m not so busy with Beeminder work”)  
> and at the other extreme my mustdo goal is sort of like having a 1-day  
> akrasia horizon and that additional flexibility can have value.
> 
> Of course there’s a definite cognitive savings to be had in sticking  
> with a universal immutable akrasia horizon. So far I haven’t been  
> convinced that it’s worth the cost to customize that. I’d love to keep  
> hearing evidence to the contrary.
> 
> > With hundreds of data points the graphs had become very difficult to read
> 
> This is really important. Note the stopgap we have in the meantime:  
> change tmin in advanced settings (we’ll probably at least move that to  
> basic settings soon) to zoom in on the more relevant part of the  
> graph.
> 
> > Clutter
> 
> Like I said at the top of this email, this was persuasive. All I can  
> recommend in the meantime is to use the frontburner/backburner feature  
> (or just archiving) to pare down the goals at the top of your gallery  
> to just a handful of things that you’re really akratic about.
> 
> > Minor: No Derailment/Expenses Tracking
> 
> Roger that. We shall add it. We have [beeminder](http://beeminder.com/contracts) which, if  
> you’re signed in, shows all your current pledges, but not history,  
> which is needed.  
> Trello’ing that here: [Trello](https://trello.com/c/FAD4Z5dM/928-pledge-history)  
> (And thanks for being frank about how glaring an omission it is!)
> 
> –  
> [http://dreev.es](http://dreev.es) – search://“Daniel Reeves”  
> Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == [http://beeminder.com](http://beeminder.com)
> 
> –  
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).

–  
Go get my PGP Public Key [http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl](http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl), then use  
Mailvelope[http://www.mailvelope.com/](http://www.mailvelope.com/) to  
encrypt your webmail.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Essentiae](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dec6dc/32.png) [@Essentiae](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Essentiae)\
**Post date:** [October 1, 2013, 2:22pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/11 "2013-10-01T14:22:04Z")

</div>

Hi Brian,

I had problems keeping up with my goals during busy periods too (still do) but found that was part of my own particular brand of procrastination / time management problems. (I’m not saying this is probably the case for you; I’m just tossing this out there.) I was planning too many things (or to do too much of each) and so I was getting too few done. The problem wasn’t that “being busy” unfairly ruined my plans, but that my plans were failing to take that kind of fluctuation into consideration. As Beeminder kept stinging me, I started learning to leave wiggle room, to agree to less, to sign up for less, to under-promise… and it’s really helped me move away from overcommitting and towards seeing how to plan more realistically.

There have been a couple of times when (the equivalent of) my boss threw me a huge curve ball that I really couldn’t have predicted and so I used the legitimacy check to cancel the crisis/busyness-induced derailment, but that was rare. (If I had a boss who sprung things on me frequently, I would consider that something I ought to start leaving room for and to start adapting my plans to accommodate.)

What I’m getting at is that maybe the benefit of the akrasia horizon for people who are often very busy is that it forces us to start imagining ways our plans might be thwarted and to work some space into those plans. In a way, it’s helped train me out of best-case-scenario planning of my time and train me to REALLY pay attention to how much time and energy I have.

E.g.:  
Last night a goal I should never have tried to squeeze in right now derailed. It sucked, but I realized that I’m trying to do too much. I didn’t give the goal up, but I dialled the road to a slow crawl. I also realized that I’ve hit my limit for now and have started streamlining. (“All for the low, low price of $5!”)

I personally see the cost of “I’m too busy for this right now” derailments as the cost of that kind of training.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dreev](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/dreev/32/4311_2.png) [@dreev](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/dreev)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2013, 6:38am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/12 "2013-10-02T06:38:40Z")

</div>

Essy, this is an astoundingly good email and is wonderful reassurance  
that your other so-called cranky email was motivated by nothing but  
love for Beeminder. 🙂

(You’ve also given an eloquent rebuttal to the common claim that  
Beeminder’s business model is perverse, by making clear that you pay  
Beeminder for value you derive from Beeminder. As opposed to the  
outside perception that the more people fail the more money we make.)

Since Essy and Brian’s emails are sort of in conflict (Brian: “we need  
better categorization/organizational features!” vs Essy: “slow down  
with the new features!”) and we’ve decided that Essy is right (for  
now), maybe we should talk more about workarounds for Brian’s problem.  
Custom dashboards using the API is a pretty hardcore solution, of  
course.

I also wanted to see how people react to the suggestion to just  
beemind less. Pick one thing (or a handful at most) that you’re  
blatantly, egregiously akratic about and focus on it. Dial everything  
else down so they’re no-brainers, put them below the fold in your  
gallery, or even archive them. In other words, apply the Pareto  
principle and identify the 20% effort you can put in for 80% of the  
results.

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Essentiae [essentiae@gmail.com](mailto:essentiae@gmail.com) wrote:

> Hi Brian,
> 
> I had problems keeping up with my goals during busy periods too (still do) but found that was part of my own particular brand of procrastination / time management problems. (I’m not saying this is probably the case for you; I’m just tossing this out there.) I was planning too many things (or to do too much of each) and so I was getting too few done. The problem wasn’t that “being busy” unfairly ruined my plans, but that my plans were failing to take that kind of fluctuation into consideration. As Beeminder kept stinging me, I started learning to leave wiggle room, to agree to less, to sign up for less, to under-promise… and it’s really helped me move away from overcommitting and towards seeing how to plan more realistically.
> 
> There have been a couple of times when (the equivalent of) my boss threw me a huge curve ball that I really couldn’t have predicted and so I used the legitimacy check to cancel the crisis/busyness-induced derailment, but that was rare. (If I had a boss who sprung things on me frequently, I would consider that something I ought to start leaving room for and to start adapting my plans to accommodate.)
> 
> What I’m getting at is that maybe the benefit of the akrasia horizon for people who are often very busy is that it forces us to start imagining ways our plans might be thwarted and to work some space into those plans. In a way, it’s helped train me out of best-case-scenario planning of my time and train me to REALLY pay attention to how much time and energy I have.
> 
> E.g.:  
> Last night a goal I should never have tried to squeeze in right now derailed. It sucked, but I realized that I’m trying to do too much. I didn’t give the goal up, but I dialled the road to a slow crawl. I also realized that I’ve hit my limit for now and have started streamlining. (“All for the low, low price of $5!”)
> 
> I personally see the cost of “I’m too busy for this right now” derailments as the cost of that kind of training.
> 
> –  
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).

–  
[http://dreev.es](http://dreev.es) – search://“Daniel Reeves”  
Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == [http://beeminder.com](http://beeminder.com)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Brian\_Fabian\_Crain](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/brian_fabian_crain/32/694_2.png) [@Brian\_Fabian\_Crain](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Brian_Fabian_Crain)\
**Post date:** [October 2, 2013, 10:45am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/13 "2013-10-02T10:45:34Z")

</div>

Hi Essy,

Yes, I see your point and I certainly agree that using Beeminder that way  
can help you to plan better. It just serves a different function then as I  
think good planning and time management may be related to procrastination  
but it’s not the same thing.

Daniel, Beeminding less is exactly what I’ve resorted to now. Apart from  
some things that are connected through the API or long-term goals that I  
won’t derail for a long time, I am just really tracking one thing at the  
moment ([The One Must-Do Task Each Day | Beeminder Blog](http://blog.beeminder.com/mustdo/)). I also redialed the axis which  
makes the road look relevant again.

But thinking ahead, I’m definitely tending toward the custom dashboard.  
I’ve started playing around with the API and I hope to build something  
simple until the end of the month.

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 8:38 AM, Daniel Reeves [dreeves@beeminder.com](mailto:dreeves@beeminder.com) wrote:

> Essy, this is an astoundingly good email and is wonderful reassurance  
> that your other so-called cranky email was motivated by nothing but  
> love for Beeminder. 🙂
> 
> (You’ve also given an eloquent rebuttal to the common claim that  
> Beeminder’s business model is perverse, by making clear that you pay  
> Beeminder for value you derive from Beeminder. As opposed to the  
> outside perception that the more people fail the more money we make.)
> 
> Since Essy and Brian’s emails are sort of in conflict (Brian: “we need  
> better categorization/organizational features!” vs Essy: “slow down  
> with the new features!”) and we’ve decided that Essy is right (for  
> now), maybe we should talk more about workarounds for Brian’s problem.  
> Custom dashboards using the API is a pretty hardcore solution, of  
> course.
> 
> I also wanted to see how people react to the suggestion to just  
> beemind less. Pick one thing (or a handful at most) that you’re  
> blatantly, egregiously akratic about and focus on it. Dial everything  
> else down so they’re no-brainers, put them below the fold in your  
> gallery, or even archive them. In other words, apply the Pareto  
> principle and identify the 20% effort you can put in for 80% of the  
> results.
> 
> On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 7:22 AM, Essentiae [essentiae@gmail.com](mailto:essentiae@gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > Hi Brian,
> > 
> > I had problems keeping up with my goals during busy periods too (still  
> > do) but found that was part of my own particular brand of procrastination /  
> > time management problems. (I’m not saying this is probably the case for  
> > you; I’m just tossing this out there.) I was planning too many things (or  
> > to do too much of each) and so I was getting too few done. The problem  
> > wasn’t that “being busy” unfairly ruined my plans, but that my plans were  
> > failing to take that kind of fluctuation into consideration. As Beeminder  
> > kept stinging me, I started learning to leave wiggle room, to agree to  
> > less, to sign up for less, to under-promise… and it’s really helped me  
> > move away from overcommitting and towards seeing how to plan more  
> > realistically.
> > 
> > There have been a couple of times when (the equivalent of) my boss threw  
> > me a huge curve ball that I really couldn’t have predicted and so I used  
> > the legitimacy check to cancel the crisis/busyness-induced derailment, but  
> > that was rare. (If I had a boss who sprung things on me frequently, I would  
> > consider that something I ought to start leaving room for and to start  
> > adapting my plans to accommodate.)
> > 
> > What I’m getting at is that maybe the benefit of the akrasia horizon for  
> > people who are often very busy is that it forces us to start imagining ways  
> > our plans might be thwarted and to work some space into those plans. In a  
> > way, it’s helped train me out of best-case-scenario planning of my time and  
> > train me to REALLY pay attention to how much time and energy I have.
> > 
> > E.g.:  
> > Last night a goal I should never have tried to squeeze in right now  
> > derailed. It sucked, but I realized that I’m trying to do too much. I  
> > didn’t give the goal up, but I dialled the road to a slow crawl. I also  
> > realized that I’ve hit my limit for now and have started streamlining.  
> > (“All for the low, low price of $5!”)
> > 
> > I personally see the cost of “I’m too busy for this right now”  
> > derailments as the cost of that kind of training.
> > 
> > –  
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google  
> > Groups “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send  
> > an email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> > For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).
> 
> –  
> [http://dreev.es](http://dreev.es) – search://“Daniel Reeves”  
> Goal tracking + Commitment contracts == [http://beeminder.com](http://beeminder.com)
> 
> –  
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups  
> “Akratics Anonymous” group.  
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an  
> email to [akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com](mailto:akratics+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com).  
> For more options, visit [https://groups.google.com/groups/opt\_out](https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out).

–  
Go get my PGP Public Key [http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl](http://bit.ly/1dLh6sl), then use  
Mailvelope[http://www.mailvelope.com/](http://www.mailvelope.com/) to  
encrypt your webmail.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Essentiae](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dec6dc/32.png) [@Essentiae](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/Essentiae)\
**Post date:** [February 13, 2014, 9:12pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/thoughts-on-beeminder/1453/14 "2014-02-13T21:12:07Z")

</div>

Brian,

Here’s some bad coding for a custom dashboard, if you’d like it. (The  
Beeminder api files need to be placed in the appropriate places alongside  
this, as well.)

Once it’s up and running, tweak to your heart’s content to make any kind of  
groups you’d like. Also, it pulls a picture for each goal from a Dropbox  
folder, making it easier to find graphs quickly if you have many of them,  
as well as giving you something visual to add to your motivation.

# dashboard.php
 div.outter { float:left; border:thin solid black; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 5px; padding-bottom: 0in; padding-left: 5px; margin: 5px; } 

```
div.inner {  

```

float:left;  
height: 275px;  
width: 160px;  
}

```
div.innersmall {  

```

float:left;  
width: 205px;  
}

```
div.outterarchive { 

```

background: #BABABA;  
float:left;  
border:thin solid black;  
padding-top: 0px;  
padding-right: 5px;  
padding-bottom: 0in;  
padding-left: 5px;  
margin: 5px;  
}

```
div.innerarchive {  

```

background: #BABABA;  
float:left;  
height: 275px;  
width: 160px;  
}

img.MaxSized {  
max-width: 150px;  
max-height:43.63%;  
}

 \<?php /\* 1. Create a folder inside your Dropbox "public" folder called "goalpics" and add a jpg that represents each goal (named with the slug for each goal: goalslug.jpg). Keep the picture small in size so you don't waste bandwidth for nothing. 2. Change the placeholders below to your own info. The items you need to change are preceded and followed by "xx" to make it easier to search for them (as well as to find and replace them without unintentionally wiping out anything else). \*/ require\_once 'lib/Beeminder/Autoloader.php'; Beeminder\_Autoloader::register(); // Include the autoloader require\_once dirname(\_\_FILE\_\_) . '/lib/Beeminder/Autoloader.php'; Beeminder\_Autoloader::register(); // Create new client $api = new Beeminder\_Client(); // Setup auth (private token) $api-\>login('xxyourusernamexx', 'xxyourprivatetokenxx', Beeminder\_Client::AUTH\_PRIVATE\_TOKEN); // Fetch a list of goals for the user $goals = $api-\>getGoalApi()-\>getGoals(); $date = new DateTime(); $startToday = strtotime('today'); $endToday = strtotime('tomorrow'); $endTomorrow = $endToday + (24 \* 60 \* 60); $endWeek = $endToday + (6 \* 24 \* 60 \* 60); $fourWeeks = $endToday + (27 \* 24 \* 60 \* 60); $countDays = 0; $countDiff = 0; $countAver = 0; // Output today's derail risks echo "
 "; echo "
## Could Derail Today
"; foreach ($goals as $goal) { if ( ($goal-\>losedate \< $endToday) ){ echo "
"; echo "{$goal-\>title} \n   
"; echo "{$goal-\>limsum} \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]() thumb\_url}\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "
"; } } echo "
"; // NEEDS TODAY'S DATA echo "
 "; echo "
## Needs Today's Data
"; foreach ($goals as $goal) { if ( // NAME ( // As soon as I figure out how to request whether "pessimistic presumptive" is set to "on" for a goal, I will add that here. ($goal-\> goal\_type == "drinker") // If you've changed your goals to the custom type, you'll have to change this to list the do-less goals individually, which uses this format: ($goal-\> slug == "goalslugtitlegoeshere") || ($goal-\> slug == "nextgoalslugtitle") ) && ($goal-\>lastday \< $startToday) && ($goal-\>burner != "backburner") && ($goal-\>frozen != 1) ) { echo "
"; echo "{$goal-\>title} \n   
"; echo "{$goal-\>limsum} \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]() thumb\_url}\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]()slug}.jpg\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "
"; } } echo "
"; // LIMIT SET echo "
 "; echo "
## Limit Set
"; foreach ($goals as $goal) { if ( // Limit Set ( ($goal-\> goal\_type == "drinker") // The same note about custom goals applies here ) && ($goal-\>burner != "backburner") && ($goal-\>frozen != 1) ) { echo "
"; echo "{$goal-\>title} \n   
"; echo "Max: "; echo "{$goal-\>limsum} \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]() thumb\_url}\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]()slug}.jpg\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "
"; } } echo "
"; // COULD DERAIL TOMORROW echo "
 "; echo "
## Could Derail Tomorrow
"; foreach ($goals as $goal) { if ( // NAME ($endToday \< $goal-\>losedate) && ($goal-\>losedate \< $endTomorrow) && ($goal-\>burner != "backburner") && ($goal-\>frozen != 1) ) { echo "
"; echo "{$goal-\>title} \n   
"; echo "{$goal-\>limsum} \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]() thumb\_url}\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]()slug}.jpg\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "
"; } } echo "
"; // COULD DERAIL THIS WEEK echo "
 "; echo "
## Could Derail This Week
"; foreach ($goals as $goal) { if ( // NAME ($endTomorrow \< $goal-\>losedate) && ($goal-\>losedate \< $endWeek) && ($goal-\>burner != "backburner") && ($goal-\>frozen != 1)) { echo "
"; echo "{$goal-\>title} \n   
"; echo "{$goal-\>limsum} \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]() thumb\_url}\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]()slug}.jpg\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "
"; } } echo "
"; // SOME GROUP I WANT TO TRACK // (add something specific to the end of the title of each goal, "(Projects)" in this example, and then adjust what's below to have those grouped together. echo "
 "; echo "
## Work Projects
"; foreach ($goals as $goal) { if ( ((substr($goal-\>title, -6)) == "(Work)") // When you change this, don't forget to change the "6" to the right number of characters ) { echo "
"; echo "{$goal-\>title} \n   
"; echo "{$goal-\>limsum} \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]() thumb\_url}\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]()slug}.jpg\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "
"; } } echo "
"; // ALL ACTIVE GOALS echo "
 "; echo "
## Active Goals
"; foreach ($goals as $goal) { if ( ($goal-\>burner != "backburner") ) { echo "
"; echo "{$goal-\>title} \n   
"; echo "{$goal-\>limsum} \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]() thumb\_url}\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]()slug}.jpg\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "
"; } } echo "
"; // 'ON HOLD' OR 'TO BE ARCHIVED' echo "
 "; echo "
## 'On Hold' or 'To Be Archived'
"; foreach ($goals as $goal) { if ( // NAME ($goal-\>burner == "backburner") ) { echo "
"; echo "{$goal-\>title} \n   
"; echo "{$goal-\>limsum} \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]() thumb\_url}\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "slug}\" target=\"\_blank\"\> ![]()slug}.jpg\" alt=\"{$goal-\>title}\"\> \n   
"; echo "{$goal-\>frozen} \n   
"; echo "
"; } } echo "
"; ?\> 

==================================

On Wednesday, October 2, 2013 6:45:34 AM UTC-4, Brian F Crain wrote:

> Hi Essy,
> 
> Yes, I see your point and I certainly agree that using Beeminder that way  
> can help you to plan better. It just serves a different function then as I  
> think good planning and time management may be related to procrastination  
> but it’s not the same thing.
> 
> Daniel, Beeminding less is exactly what I’ve resorted to now. Apart from  
> some things that are connected through the API or long-term goals that I  
> won’t derail for a long time, I am just really tracking one thing at the  
> moment ([The One Must-Do Task Each Day | Beeminder Blog](http://blog.beeminder.com/mustdo/)). I also redialed the axis  
> which makes the road look relevant again.
> 
> But thinking ahead, I’m definitely tending toward the custom dashboard.  
> I’ve started playing around with the API and I hope to build something  
> simple until the end of the month.