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Howdy, I'm Bethany, co-founder of Beeminder here to show you how Beeminder
works!
Beeminder tracks your progress towards goals. Anything you can put a number on --
weight loss, push-ups, time spent on Facebook,
number of steps with Fitbit. You pledge money to stay on track towards your goals
and if you go off track we take your money. After you sign up
click big red "New Goal" button, then pick your goal type.
We'll pick weight loss since it's a common Beeminder goal.
So Beeminder is going to need to know your starting weight
and you need to give your goal a title and then Bam
you see your graph and a yellow brick road.
By default the Beeminder bot bugs you daily to enter your data.
Just reply to the email as instructed. You can change how often you get reminded
and change the time of those reminders. You can also sign up to get text message
reminders
or you can just enter data directly below the graph
or ideally use one of the wifi connected scales that we integrate with.
At some point you'll want to make your weight loss rate easier or harder.
You do that right below the graph with the road dial. Say that you want to
start losing weight at a half pound
per week. You would enter -.5 for the rate and then click Dial-it-in.
If you forget the negative sign, no harm done. The road will start sloping up
but its actually by design that Beeminder allows that in case you want to go on
an all you can eat buffet-hopping vacation or something.
In fact that's where Beeminder really shines! As you drive along your yellow brick road you
can actually change the steepness at any time. It seems
like that defeats the entire point of a commitment contract
but there's a clever catch:
any changes you make even including ending the goal entirely
take effect with a one-week delay. So all the usual ways you'd weasel out
"Aww but there were donuts at work!" "But it's my sister's birthday."
"I'll get serious again next week." -- they're all out the window. Let's assume you've got the road sloping down
enforcing a steady rate of weight loss.
Your job now is to make sure that your datapoints
stay on that yellow brick road. But what if you go off track and drift off your
yellow brick road?
WelI that's when it gets interesting. Beeminder is a harsh mistress
If you find yourself above the road your datapoint for the day will show up red
and you have until midnight to get back on track. If you end the day
off the road
that's called derailing. If you've never pledged money with Beeminder
the graph will freeze and a reset button will appear.
You can restart the goal and try again but this time you have to pledge
to stay on track
and by pledge we mean actual money! You put in your credit card and you agree
to get charged $5.00 if you go off track again.
Now the whole process repeats but this time you have some skin in the game.
Note that despite having actually put in a credit card if you toe the line
from this point forward then you'll never actually paid Beeminder a penny.
But also be careful! Once we have your credit card will continue to charge you
money and put you back on track
if you derail again. If you continue to ignore the goal it will get
increasingly expensive.
If you want to quit aber it's easy -- the archive button is right there on the goal page.
If you're down with this crazy concept of a commitment device
to incentivize yourself you'll find this insanely powerful. The quotes on our testimonials
page with people gushing about how life changing this is are for real.
So, good luck! And happy Beeminding!