Type Bee Minus - Akratic but obsessive

Akrasia
1

Hi,

so, there’s this classic: The Type Bee Personality | Beeminder Blog

Here’s the main takeaway from that blog post:

People often ask, sometimes incredulously, what kind of person uses Beeminder. We’ve found that the following personality traits are required:

  1. Akratic (obviously (see sidebar for definition))
  2. Ambitious/motivated (ironically)
  3. Self-aware (knowing the limits of one’s motivation)
  4. High-integrity (to not spoil the whole point by cheating/weaseling)
  5. And probably lifehacking data nerdery

I 100% fall into every one of these boxes, no doubt about it.

My doubt though is about my tendency to obsess about things, and I fear that beeminder might feed into that. It’s ironic for someone so akratic to get obsessed about productivity and systems, considering my days without those systems can fall into “get nothing done”, random chaos, whatever happens, really quickly - but there’s also the opposite side of this where if I do use something like beeminder, I obsess about them.

In a way, I already know that beeminder does work for me in certain circumstances and within certain aspects of my life. I also feel like I “should” do things because that’s who I am and that’s what I do, not because an app is telling me to (but on the other hand, I’m putting on the app what I want to do…).

I also need to figure out something to organize my day for stuff that isn’t easily beemindable (not sure about exact examples right now), and that’s a whole another rabbit hole that can quickly get out of hand for me.

Has anyone ever had similar conflicting thoughts about beeminder, and productivity systems in general?

3 Likes
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I actually think that a combination of do more and do less goals would work for you. Essentially, the do more goals would have very reasonable slopes (e.g. practice a language for 15 minutes a day). The do less version of the same goal would stop you from going overboard (e.g. practice a language no more than 1 hour a day).

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That’s an interesting idea, but I think the kind of obsession is more towards the system of productivity itself, it’s not about suddenly going from 0 hours of productivity to 12 hours of productivity a day. :slight_smile: