2.26.2025
I like Beeminder a lot. It feels very old-web in a lot of ways—a big one is that when you sign up, it asks you what you plan for your first goal to be, and when your account is created one of the staff members personally emails you. I swear it's not just an automated message that invites you to reply, the person who emailed me had specific things to say about the goal I wrote down. It is also rather nerdy. It supports tasks that you want to do a certain number of times per week/month/etc. very well, but it tracks them in a very mathematical way. If you have a goal to do something once a week, it will happily inform you that you're commited to doing it 0.14 times a day. Alas, I am a big nerd and as long as that task doesn't need to be done on a specific day of the week, it's the best way I've found to track things that have that sort of schedule. Its flavor of "number go up" is also a lot more motivating to me than streaks like a lot of other habit trackers use.
Its monetization scheme makes a lot of sense to me and I support it. When you first sign up, you can only have up to three goals at a time, and each time you go off track on a habit you pay a predetermined amount and earn one more goal slot. They offer paid plans like any other freemium service, where you can just send them x dollars a month for unlimited goals and extra features. But literally on that page, they say that if all you want is more goals, you should earn them by derailing because "if you never derail, you're not actually pushing yourself."
I've been using beeminder for 2 months and i've been figuring out what things are best to track. It's forced me to figure out what kinds of habits actually lead to things like "better mental health" or "higher effectiveness in life". Maybe it's the stakes, maybe it's that the community tends to care more about tracking the right habits than a lot of habit-tracking communities, where it's honorable to track a whole bunch of stuff just because they're abstractly "good habits to have".
All that said, I still only have three goal slots and haven't earned a fourth yet. Most of the goals I experimented with and ended up archiving were around exercise, because I know that if I go too long without physical activity I get antsy. The most successful of those experiments was playing outside for 20 minutes a day—I stuck with the goal for 3 weeks, and only stopped because actually timing myself felt contrived. Plus I think I gained the ability to intuitively know if I need to go run around outside for a bit, so I still basically do it even though I stopped tracking it. The one non-exercise experiment, in washing my face twice a day, was also successful. I stuck with it for 6 weeks and stopped because it got so easy, there was basically no chance I'd ever slip up on it. Now I just have a reminder on my phone for it.
My current goals:
- Journal. Working my way up to 750 words a day, which probably has no real significance beyond that's 3 pages worth of words and Julia Cameron thinks 3 pages a day is a good amount to write, but it seems like a good amount for my purposes too.
- Read a book off my TBR pile for 30 minutes a day.
- And, one that i'll probably be revamping soon, complete 3 Focusmate sessions a week. Focusmate was another experiment, because homework is easier when I have an "appointment" to work on it, and just telling myself to work on it at a specific time isn't enough of a commitment. I recently remembered my department at school has hours where you can just show up and work on stuff and there are people there to answer questions, so I'm going to try going to those sessions and see if it's as good as or better than using Focusmate.