Hi Paul, that is indeed a good idea. I use this technique myself and I also
initially wished that there was some to do list manager that allowed you to
put money on the line for certain tasks. But I’ve found that if you want to
use this method, it’s not really that important that your to do list
manager explicitly has a built in feature for incentivising tasks. I just
add a label to tasks that I want to put money on the line for, so that I
can pull those tasks up whenever I want, and I’ve written down (as a note
in elsewhere in the to do list manager) that by default I lose £1 if I
don’t complete an incentivised task by its due date. If I want to put more
money on the line for certain tasks, I just write in a desired value into
the task description. This has been working splendidly. I personally use
todoist http://www.todoist.com as my to do list manager, but I know other
people who prefer remember the milk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/,
wunderlist http://www.wunderlist.com/, and others (all have mobile apps
though not sure about api’s).
One limitation of todoist is that it doesn’t allow for end dates for
recurring tasks, so I have to write a date range into the description of an
incentivised recurring task to make it clear how long I am monetarily
committed to doing it for.
So anyway, my point is that although there may be certain advantages to
having a to do list manager that explicitly allows for putting money on the
line for individual tasks, you can already do that with existing task
managers and get yourself to do stuff that way.
On 21 November 2012 04:08, Paul Fenwick paul.j.fenwick@gmail.com wrote:
G’day everyone,
Super-short idea/question before I run out the door.
I’ve been trying to find the best way to motivate me to do the things
that are on my todo list, particularly those for which I’ve set due
dates. And it struck me that there’s something that would be very
motivating: placing a monetary forfeit on items that need to be
completed:
* Call client regarding XYZ report. [due: Tuesday] [forfeit: $5]
Miss the due date, lose the forfeit (and potentially keep losing it
until done).
Does anyone know of a TODO service (with a phone app, and a decent
API) that implements this? If Beeminder implemented a
/api/v1/losemoney method, then I even have the infrastructure to build
a personal version myself. 
Paul
