Beeminder Works

Beeminder works, for me at least. This is a short post and basically a public service announcement.

Beeminder is a service that allows you to make commitments for your future self, and if you don’t follow through on those commitments you’re charged real money for failing. This allows you to “tie yourself to the mast” and face real consequences for failing to follow through.

In October 2024, I set a Beeminder goal to spend 1hr per week strength training which pencils out to about 8.5 minutes per day. It’s not a lot of time, but my baseline was pretty low. I used Beeminder to commit myself to this goal.

This chart shows my cumulative strength training minutes over the year prior to setting that goal and since then. It also shows the date I set the goal and the trendline I commited to.

There are a few activities that I counted as strength training in Beeminder that didn’t end up getting directly recorded in the data used for that figure. This explains why I was below the “goal” line for a while. I derailed on my goal and was charged real money only once, and this cost me $5.

I’m ending this goal now since I have recently changed the way I approach strength training and tracking minutes is no longer that interesting to me. I consider this to be an incredible success.

Some observations:

• This probably only worked because I really did want to change my behavior.
• Behavior change is still really hard, how many examples do most people have of this kind of thing?
• $5 is REALLY not enough to motivate me on it’s own, but my past self wagering the money makes it much more motivating. This is incredibly cheap, even if I think it only helped on the margin.
• If you have something you want to do, but can’t bring yourself to do it in the moment, you should at least consider using Beeminder.