Whittle down goals with compounding interest

Bugabee
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Recently a friend of mine challenged me to do 1,000 pushups with the complication of 3% daily compounding interest. I found this to be extremely motivating as you can see from my push-ups goal.

A recurring failure mode for me with some of my goals on beeminder is that I feel little motivation to do more than the minimum, but I also don’t necessarily want to raise the minimum because too many beemergencies can be anti-productive and I’ve got enough going on right now.

I think compounding interest is a potential answer to this problem. You’re always rewarded for doing extra because it decreases how much compounding you’ll be subject to.

Excited to hear of other ways people have found to incentivize themselves to do more than the minimum :slight_smile:

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3% compounding interest on the pushups you haven’t yet done out of the initial 1000?

This may sound silly outside of this forum, but that sounds really fun and seems like a clever idea!

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That’s right. Initially, it was 30 push-ups per day just to break even on the interest.

I’ve so far done 761, and I have a remaining debt of 475.

Trying to think about where to go with this after I pay it down… Perhaps a new “debt” with a higher interest rate? challenge myself to continue paying off debts despite ever-increasing interest rates?

In my mind this would be a feature conceptually related to auto-retro-ratcheting.

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