Last updated May 24, 2025
Looking for the "right" productivity tools
I've been interested in all kinds of planning and habit tracking systems for a pretty long time. In middle school, we were all given a planner and expected to use it, but I rarely remembered to check what I'd written in it. I figured there must be some trick that would get me to remember or some other system that would be easier for me to use, and I spent a long time trying to find it. Name any productivity tool or system, and I've probably tried it at some point. My most recent attempt was with Beeminder, which I used from January to April of 2025, and it made such an impact on the mindset I bring to habit tracking that I sincerely believe I might never try a new productivity app ever again.
What I learned from Beeminder
When you first join, you're limited to three goals at a time. You could pay for a premium plan and get unlimited goals, but if that's all you want, the people behind Beeminder encourage you to earn more goals instead. Every time you fall behind on one of your current goals, you're able to start one more. Their blog further discusses the philosophy behind this: it forces you to both start slow and be ambitious. Starting too many goals too quickly leads to overwhelm, and if you never fall behind on any of your goals then you aren't pushing yourself.
I don't think any system can completely answer the question of whether you don't feel like doing something because it's unpleasant but you'll thank yourself for doing it, or because it just doesn't add value to your life. Beeminder and its community really encourage you to take that question seriously, though—what habits actually lead to things like "better mental health" or "higher effectiveness in life"? Focus on the ones that do and ditch the ones that don't. Focus on improving your life a little bit each day, not just keeping a streak.
Finally, it taught me that I'm much more capable of making and keeping commitments than I previously thought. Beeminder is more of a commitment than other productivity software: every time you fall behind on a goal, you have to pay a predetermined amount (by default, this starts at $5 USD and increases if you slip up on the same goal multiple times). There were so many habits I've tried and failed to get myself to keep for years, but I found that once I tracked them with Beeminder—once I had the tiniest consequence for not doing them—I would keep up with them perfectly. It was honestly kind of frustrating being stuck at the three-goal limit, eventually I made a checklist of habits elsewhere and only used Beeminder to track whether I had completed every item on it. I was still sticking with all my habits though, so it got me thinking that maybe I don't need Beeminder to hold me accountable. Maybe I can hold myself accountable.
What I learned from leaving
Beeminder focuses heavily on quantifiable goals, and things you can really measure, like pages read or time spent outside, make more interesting data than "did you do this thing today or not?". When I transitioned to tracking my habits outside of Beeminder, I realized that how much progress I was making really didn't matter to me as much as recognizing that I was, in fact, making progress every day. Hence, all of my current habits are things I either did or I didn't, none of them track amounts.
I also learned that it's okay to fall behind sometimes. Visualizing my progress on a graph like Beeminder does probably helped a lot with getting me to really understand that. If you've sought advice on forming habits, you've probably heard at some point that doing something every day for a month or three months or whatever solidifies it as a habit, so a lot of habit trackers highlight your current or longest streak. I understood that it was "okay" to break a streak sometimes in the sense that it didn't make me a failure, but I still thought of it as failing at something. Beeminder turns that around, plotting your progress on a graph that goes up the more you do a habit, and stays flat when you don't do it. You don't lose progress that you already made. This didn't really sink in until I left Beeminder, though, because while using it you're competing to keep your graph above the "bright red line" of the minimum amount of progress you've said you'll make, and you lose money if you cross that line.