I use Beeminder occasionally. The site’s emails normally suffice to bug me into accomplishing whatever I’ve committed to doing. But I only use it for a few tasks for which my motivation is marginal. Most of the times that I consider using Beeminder, I either figure out how to motivate myself properly, or (more often) decide that my goal isn’t important.
The real value of Beeminder is that if I want to compel future-me to do something, I can’t give up by using the excuse that future-me is lazy or unreliable. Instead, I find myself wondering why I’m unwilling to risk $X to make myself likely to complete the task. That typically causes me to notice legitimate doubts about how highly I value the result.
Thanks for the Beeminder plug! Do you also find any value in the quantified self aspect? Visualizing progress, the “yellow brick road”, etc. That’s also a really great point about Beeminder removing the “future-me is lazy/unreliable” excuse. And that’s a wonderful outcome if the mere possibility/threat of beeminding something causes you to assess its value more realistically.
I often talk about Beeminder as the nuclear option. That you should beemind some bare minimum that you’d definitely be upset with yourself for not following through on, and then find other forms of motivation to make Beeminder moot. But still have the Beeminder graph to catch you if those other forms of motivation fail. (And for tracking/visualizing the progress in any case, if there’s inherent value in that.)
I’ve actually heard the amusingly ironic argument that maybe you *shouldn’t* have Beeminder as backup in that sense because the lack of a backup can serve as a commitment device to ensure that those other forms of motivation *don’t* fail. But I figure if that reasoning is appealing then you’ll probably love Beeminder as a primary source of motivation. 🙂
I don’t find the graphs/yellow brick road useful. Simply looking at whether I’ve got a safe day tells me what I want to know.
Using Beeminder as almost purely an email interface works well for me because parts of my mind imagine that the emails are coming from a person who will be upset if I derail.
It does seem like Beeminder could help by causing me to quantify things that I’d otherwise be vague about, but I don’t have examples where that seemed important.