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Comment by aerialcombat | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we need to find the answer to 'how to fight procrastination even when knowing the answer to fighting procrastination'

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We'll get to it eventually.

Non-judgmental fair third-party oversight who has free action only reversible by themselves over your environment.

If we limit 'free action' to mean 'ability to charge your credit card' then you are pretty much described beeminder.com (a company I highly recommend and of which I am a very happy user).

Thanks so much for saying so! Maybe I'll also take this excuse to highlight the footnote in the article:

> Thanks to my friends at Beeminder for some of the ideas I mention here. You can see their full article [http://blog.beeminder.com/akrasia] on commitment devices to overcome akrasia for more ideas.

(I'm one of the founders of Beeminder.)

I remember looking at Beeminder, probably around the time that article was written unless you promoted/were promoted on LW before then. How much would you say you've improved the service since then? It definitely looks better than I remember... I think I'll test it out this weekend since I can see it being pretty helpful for those long term yet easily measurable goals, two of which I have under "lose x lbs" and "read y books this year". I'm not so sure it would be that helpful for the smaller goals, though, especially ones that require more subjective measurement ("you've been on your cell phone too much today") or ones that require frequent measurement updates from the individual ("out of this list of whitelisted sites that are directly work related your fraction of time spent on other sites over the last time period is x%, which happens to be too much"). Anyway I wanted to ask if you're familiar with any research on akrasia correlated with childhood. I have no idea if or how much things like divorce, loose parenting, strict parenting, or a change in style as the child transitions into teenage years affects anything. It was just an idea I had this morning when I realized my above comment is really just asking for a strict parent who in the process of looking out for my own best interests (that as an adult I can now agree with are such, or at least rationally argue otherwise and be taken seriously) can do such a wide variety of things like taking away my phone for a set period (while still letting me answer any important calls that might come in), or periodically poking me with a stick if I'm staring at my screen seemingly frozen and there isn't a code editor open.

OMG yes, that article is from before we actually launched. We've made, let's see, 1789 user-visible improvements since then -- http://beeminder.com/meta/uvi

It's still confusing and nerd-centric and we're working on making it more intelligible to newbees. Would especially love to hear your thoughts, having looked it years ago and now coming back to it.

As for beeminding things like time spent on your phone, you'd be surprised what's possible if you're willing to nerd out a bit. For iPhone I think Apple makes this impossible but on Android you can connect RescueTime and Tasker to Beeminder to automatically measure and report time spent. Or you could just have Tasker count the number of times you turn on your phone's display and beemind that. I'd love the excuse to better document such things so email me, dreeves@beeminder.com, if that sounds intriguing.

Akrasia and childhood: I don't know of research other than the Stanford Marshmallow experiment which I used to cite as supportive of Beeminder's philosophy (kids who employed tricks to distract themselves from the temptation did better) but later research makes it much less clear what's really going on there (maybe kids from unstable homes just don't trust the researcher to keep their promise which makes it rational, in expectation, to grab the marshmallow while the grabbing's good).

I do, personally, view the holy grail of Beeminder to be a nannybot that tells you minute by minute what the optimal thing for you to be doing is. Actually we just made a Beeminder Slack bot -- http://slackminder.com -- that may point us in that direction, though still very primitive now.

I also recommend them to everyone, but between all the praise they're getting, I think I should also give a fair word of warning - while great, it may not work for everyone.

I used the service once; I tried to discipline myself out of a poor financial situation using Beeminder - very quickly I found myself consistently slipping, had to pay the money, and I ended up in a worse financial situation and stressed to the point I could barely function.

Now don't treat it as a negative - instead, like a warning on the razor box: this thing is sharp, do not use when your hands are shaking. It's great as a motivator, but be sure you're in a good enough mental shape to handle both your commitments and the eventual slip-ups.

That said, I also have to praise Beeminder for having a great tool with lots of little nice features (I'm particularly fond of the graph aesthetics), amazing and responsive support (and proactive - I screwed something up once, they fixed it for me pretty much immediately and sent tips on how to avoid this happening again), and wrote a lot of interesting things on akrasia.

EDIT:

To 'dreeves - long time ago I shared this experience over at SlateStarCodex, and I missed your reply then. Referring to it, and that you're "extremely averse to people paying money to Beeminder that they don’t feel was worth it" - no, I feel it was totally worth it, even if it contributed a bit to one of my biggest stress episodes in my lifetime. I'm not scared of Beeminder, I'm scared of myself. I treat it as a combat scar in battle against akrasia :). So thanks for your kind refund offer, but a) you're totally entitled to the money, and b) it was long time ago :).

Oh, and thanks for supporting SSC :).

And, to everyone else - did I tell you already that Beeminder people are really great, friendly and radiate honesty in a way that's pretty much unseen in this industry? I do very much recommend the service despite the fact that, by my own fault, I managed to cut myself with it.

Holy cow, you made my day! <blush> Thank you! Fascinating what you said in another comment about the catch 22 of remembering and sticking to plans when you're feeling good. Actually, I'm realizing I'm confused about this. I'm so everything-looks-like-a-nail that it sounds eminently beemindable so it would probably be good for me to keep trying to understand what I'm missing there. dreeves@beeminder.com if an email thread seems easier.

Btw, I collected my replies from that SlateStarCodex comment thread and put them here for posterity: http://forum.beeminder.com/t/slate-star-codex-on-willpower/5...

Thanks again for all the feedback and kind words!

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