Last updated March 25, 2025
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I've been interested in planning, habit tracking, and all kinds of "productivity" tools and systems for a pretty long time. It probably started in middle school, when we were all given a planner and expected to use it. I rarely remembered to check my planner, so I figured there must be some trick that would make me remember or some other system that would be easier for me to use, and I just had to find it. Turns out that's probably not the case. I started using Beeminder in January and it's had a big impact on me, but more on the mindset I bring to habit tracking than because of the system itself. In fact, I'm seriously considering phasing out all of my current Beeminder goals.
When you first join Beeminder, you're limited to three goals at a time. You earn one more every time you don't complete a habit on time. You can also get unlimited goals with a premium plan, but literally on that page it says that if all you want is more goals, then you should earn them the usual way. They further discuss the philosophy behind this on their blog: it forces you to both start slow and be ambitious, since adding too many goals too quickly leads to overwhelm, and if you're only tracking habits you never fail at then you aren't pushing yourself. I agree with this philosophy by the way, and it's my strongest argument in favor of staying on Beeminder.
That, and the fact that one of my goals fits really well in Beeminder's scheme of "keep your data points above this line," and not so well in the scheme of doing something a fixed amount of times per day, or on certain days of the week/month, or other normal habit-tracking systems.