{"id":6130,"date":"2012-03-06T08:40:33","date_gmt":"2012-02-24T08:34:04","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2012-03-06T10:54:01","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T04:54:01","slug":"beemindercom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/beemindercom\/","title":{"rendered":"Beeminder.com"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a number of goals I find hard to reach because I struggle with self-discipline. Losing weight, for instance. Great tools like the previously-reviewed <a href=\"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/the-hackers-die\/\">Hacker&#8217;s Diet<\/a> have helped me lose weight in the past, but, like most people, eventually I just put it back on again, with interest.<\/p>\n<p>The reason why people have self-discipline issues is that different parts of our brain run us at different times. The person I am as I&#8217;m walking past the refrigerator at 10:00 at night is a different person who swore off late-night snacks at 10:00 in the morning. The ancient Greeks had a fancy word for when we do things we know we shouldn&#8217;t do, or fail to do things we know we should do: akrasia. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.beeminder.com\/\">Beeminder<\/a> is an anti-akrasia tool.<\/p>\n<p>For any goal with quantifiable steps, like losing a certain amount of weight per week, or doing something every day, or keeping something to a set minimum, etc., Beeminder allows you to set and track a commitment contract. It then displays a pretty graph of your progress (the Hacker&#8217;s Diet-style weight graph is a particularly nice example &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.beeminder.com\/glennonymous\/goals\/weight\">here&#8217;s the chart of my weight loss in Q4 of last year<\/a>.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"Weight over time.jpg\" src=\"\/wp-content\/archiveimages\/Weight%20over%20time.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"340\" class=\"mt-image-none\" style=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>If you fail to keep on track with your goal, you can reset it. But here&#8217;s the akrasia-defeating catch: resetting the goal requires you to pledge money, and each time you need to reset it, the amount you must pledge increases exponentially. This exploits a neat psychological trick called self-binding, which you can <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.beeminder.com\/akrasia\/\">read more about here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The bottom line is that Beeminder is a great tool for fooling yourself into doing what you really want to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enforced goal tracking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}