Anti-akrasia tool: like stickK.com for data nerds

Yeah, I personally really love the graphs that I don't have to manually enter data for, like my weight (withings scale) or any time-based goal [http://tagti.me] or pushups (sort of, thanks to an Android app that Bethany Soule wrote [1]).

Thanks for the kind words, and be sure to upvote the API suggestion here: http://beeminder.uservoice.com/forums/3011-general/suggestions/2281597-publish-the-beeminder-api-

Oh, and note we have an SMS interface: http://blog.beeminder.com/textbot (US only, unfortunately; via Twilio)

[1] It counts pushups by touching your nose to your phone. You still have to enter on Beeminder but it's an odometer-style goal so no need to enter every day. It would actually be pretty easy to connect it to Beeminder so no data entry is needed at all, if there's demand for that...

Thanks Kaj! I'm very interested to hear your tricks for dealing with akrasia.

If you want to waste more time talking about not wasting time, you might like the Akratics Anonymous email list: http://groups.google.com/group/akratics (seriously though, very smart discussion there)

You're welcome! Glad you're finding it useful. Mind if we excerpt this high praise as a testimonial?

Also that's really an interesting insight about the difference between Beeminding things you want to do vs things you know you should. I've noticed that too, for me reading falls under the former, and pretty much everything else under the latter. With reading it is like a matter of inertia -- once I start reading I'm happy to keep doing it, but it is hard to start. But losing weight I never want to do, I only ever want to have done it.

Great goal! I don't think any wedging is required: Pick the "Set a Limit" goal type and then just report how much you spent each day (maybe set the bot reminder to come after lunch at 1pm and reply to it with the amount). Set the initial rate to, say, $50/week and decrease it till it feels about right.

The thin line (supposed to be purple, not gray) is an exponentially weighted moving average. It's what's recommended in The Hacker's Diet [http://dreev.es/hackdiet] as a way to keep from freaking out about the day-to-day fluctuations in your weight. As long as all your datapoints are below that line then you're inexorably trending downward.

The "rose-colored dots" are an attempt at a more normal-person-friendly version of that. It's a transformation of your data to be as monotonic as possible such that the transformed datapoints (the rose-colored ones) are still within something like a standard deviation of the actual measured datapoint.

There's also the blue-green aura around your datapoints which is a very thick polynomial regression on your data.

All of these things are an attempt to show you your true trend.

(Also, they only apply to goals like weight loss where the measurements are noisy.)

factor = 0.9
numerator = denominator = 0.
every day:
    numerator = factor * numerator
    denominator = factor * denominator
    if user reports weight:
        numerator = numerator + today.weight
        denominator = denominator + 1.
        today.smoothed_weight = numerator / denominator

sigma_sq = 1
c_sq = 0.01111111111111111111
smoothweight = 0
sigman_sq = infinity
every day:
    sigman_sq = sigman_sq + c_sq
    if user reports weight:
        smoothweight = (smoothweight/sigman_sq + today.weight/sigma_sq)/(1./sigman_sq + 1./sigma_sq)
        sigman_sq = 1./(1./sigman_sq + 1./sigma_sq)

So many of you wanted to start commitment contracts immediately that we hurried and implemented that feature. What Bethany said is still true (first try is free), and the original fee schedule applies, but if you want to jump ahead in the fee schedule, now you can.

We also added a 24-hour delay in actually charging your credit card if you go off the road, just in case we screwed anything up in our rush to add this feature. (We'd refund a spurious charge regardless, but then we'd have to eat a small fee, so better to catch it before that.)

We've also been augmenting the FAQ -- http://beeminder.com/faq -- based on, well, the frequently asked questions we've been getting. Keep them coming!

Oh, and also, despite obvious rough edges still, we decided to officially launch: http://blog.beeminder.com/launch

Can't you also have a 60 minute study, with no safety buffer, by using the "personal max" option on a flat road?

Certainly seems like that'd work to me.

Really appreciate this feedback from everyone! Some incredibly valuable suggestions, including this one.

Weight loss, yeah, we've gone through some identity crises, wondering if we should really focus on weight loss since it can be hard trying to be too general. So far we're sticking with generality, which seems like a good choice for the current influx from LessWrong, which are mostly Do More -- though plenty of weight loss goals too.

When signing up, I was told the password I tried to use was too long (I have unique, randomly generated, passwords for each site I use). so I generated a < 20 chars password instead - however, password length limits around this size suggest that the site might be storing the passwords as plain text, rather than only storing a salted hash of the password.

So I was wondering, if that's the case here?

For the 'Slug' value I entered "Sleep" and I was told only letters and numbers could be used. I entered "sleep" and it worked.

How did it turn out?

Yeah, the tagtime integration is super sketchy. It does let you update anyone else's tagtime graph but if that happens before we get API keys worked out, it's all undoable. The master copy of your data for a tagtime graph is your tagtime log.

Definitely let us know if there's any vandalism or anything going on and we'll clamp down right away. There are just very few tagtime users so far (it being a perl script, and of course the whole concept being a little nutty, cf http://messymatters.com/tagtime ) so it hasn't been an issue. We adore beeminder/tagtime integration ourselves -- like for http://beeminder.com/d/meta -- but the tagtime part is really for hackers only right now.

Btw, we also added a 24-hour delay before charging anyone's credit card so in case someone loses for any kind of technical reason (someone screwing with your graph, beeminder bug, or even your own extenuating circumstances a la http://blog.beeminder.com/sos ) you won't lose. I guess I mentioned that in another comment. To further repeat, we'd refund a spurious charge regardless, but then we'd have to eat a small fee, so better to catch it before that.

A fundamental tenet of Beeminder is: no one ever loses money on a technicality. If you go off your yellow brick road it should be because your akrasia was more powerful than the amount of money you had at risk.

Great questions! Here are answers!

Giving yourself variance: Yes. It should become obvious as you add datapoints. The real nitty gritty about the width of the yellow brick road is here: http://blog.beeminder.com/roadwidth (In short: The width of the road is constructed so that if you're in the correct lane today then you're guaranteed not to lose tomorrow.)

Paying $5: Note that the first attempt is free. You only put money at risk if you go off the road and want to reset. Gory details at http://beeminder.com/money (note especially the part about the exponential fee schedule).

How do I delete a goal if I screw it up in some way?

We've hesitated to expose that option since we're not sure how to handle the case of someone deleting a goal they have a contract on. The option does appear if you delete the only datapoint though.

Is the goal value a median or is it a target?

The goal value is the y-value of the end of your yellow brick road. For weight loss it's obvious -- your goal weight. But for many kinds of goals, like "work out 20 minutes a day" for which the y-axis is the total (cumulative) amount reported, the goal value is probably not what you care about. This is confusing and we're scrambling to find a way to make it less so.

I would like the ability to expressly exclude days at a certain rate. Like "I will practice ear training approximately X minutes per day, 5 out of 7 days a week."

That works beautifully with beeminder! Just specify your rate as 5*X per week.

Is there a 'vacation' feature? If I'm on a holiday, I might not be able to maintain certain goals. I would expect vacations to have to be declared in advance, though, to prevent someone from using it as a method of worming out of an impending failure.

Well said. And yes, just use the road dial below your graph to flatten your road for the vacation. If it's a weight loss goal and you're going on an all-you-can-eat-buffet-hopping vacation, you can even make the road slope up for a while. Always with that one-week delay of course.

Are you tracking your software development goals in the same software?

Damn straight: http://beeminder.com/meta

An exponential punishment curve seems harsh. Is the concern that a linear rate of punishment might lead to basically buying indulgences? I would think that even linear curves at good rates would create incentive.

I think harshness/mildness is the wrong question here. It's just trying to help you find the order of magnitude that the punishment needs to be to get you to treat it as a hard commitment. In some sense the steeper the curve the less harsh since it means wasting less money on punishments that were insufficiently punishing before hitting your Motivation Point. We went with, roughly, 3^x.

The data tracking features are interesting to me and one reason I might try this. Is there a way to export the data?

You answered this one yourself, but, yes, we're fellow data nerds and we want import/export to always be easy.

Some goals might contain periodic sub-goals...

Oh my, that sounds like a terrible, terrible idea! :) Very likely my lack of imagination though. Want to add it on http://uservoice.beeminder.com and see if it gets any upvotes?

Just remember Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Thanks so much for asking these questions. One of our biggest problems right now is conveying how this all works to someone just dropping in, so answering these helps us a lot.

PS: Anyone who read all this might also find our commitment contract template interesting: http://beeminder.com/contract

I think it doesn't work so well. Especially with weight gain because, I suspect, if you had to you could always gain weight, but not in the right way. My suggestion would be to beemind pushups or protein consumption, or something where you do have direct control.

Not being able to because of being sick is another story altogether though. For that we have an SOS Clause in the commitment contract: http://blog.beeminder.com/sos

Isn't it better if we blow the money on cocaine and hookers, to maximize the pain of giving it to us? :) (Seriously though, this is highly valuable feedback; really appreciate it!)

StickK.com originally envisioned being the beneficiary of people's commitment contracts but found that people would not go for that. That should certainly give us pause, but here's why we think it could make more sense in our case:

1. The exponential fee schedule [http://beeminder.com/money] makes a big difference. In addition to removing the difficult choice about how much to risk, it makes it feel more reasonable for Beeminder to be the beneficiary. You're starting with a small amount at risk after you've already gotten value out of Beeminder. (That could change if you climb up the fee schedule very far though so we need to keep thinking about options for specifying other beneficiaries.)

2. I think we're fundamentally providing more value than StickK because of the pretty graphs and storing your data.

As for where the money is going, well, it's still on the early side to say much about that, as you can see from these dogfood graphs:

http://beeminder.com/meta/atrisk http://beeminder.com/meta/paid

We'd love to hear more thoughts on this, like are we in fantasyland with the above rationalizations for being the beneficiary?

Yup! I really love the Beeminder/Withings combo -- you literally do nothing but step on your scale and your graph stays updated.

Send your Withings id (like a 6-digit number) and api key (or web key, or something, they call it) to withings@beeminder.com and we'll make sure it's linked up.

Make differently coloured bands corresponding to each task. you're only allowed to work on the task if you're wearing the correctly coloured band. The bands are placed far away from where you do the tasks or in a box with a complicated lock or something like that. You chose which band to wear first using dice.

Assuming you have a good idea what tasks you want to do in total, just automate it. Try to delegate away as many day-to-day decisions as you can.

I extended my todo scripts for that exact purpose. I track how much time I spend on each task and how much time I should spend, based on a relative weight. (As in, this task is 2x as important as this and so on. I estimate my weights by starting with 200 usable hours per month and then distribute them among all tasks, using the assigned hours as a weight.) The script then checks if "time spent on task this week" is close to the relative time it should receive, according to the total time I've worked so far, and sorts all tasks based on their deficit. I then just do whatever project is furthest behind for as long as I can concentrate, let the script pick the next one and so on.

Advantages: I never have to make any decision except when choosing the initial projects. (This happens rarely and is no problem.) No individual project ever gets ignored. I don't have to bother with timeboxes, I just work for at least ~15 minutes (I have an automated alarm for that) and then continue until I get bored / tired. I only have to personally check and maximize one variable - total time worked per day. It's as simple as "make this number go up".

Works pretty well so far.

Here are my everything-looks-like-a-nail tips!

I know the Sunday morning problem you're talking about but stepping back slightly from the particular Sunday morning you can probably identify what things are getting short shrift, or vice versa (the Sunday morning paralysis leads to just surfing the web half the day). If you can identify a few instances of akrasia then I think Beeminder can very much provide that guidance in choosing what to do: focus on whichever yellow brick road you're in greatest danger of driving off of. (Or if you're highly akratic, do whatever thing Beeminder is forcing you to do Right Now because you're skating the edge of your yellow brick road.)