[Updated] Beeminder - put your money where your mouth is

How many times have you said you were going to do something, then seen your commitment evaporate?  I know it's happened to me.  In the past, I've written about how to overcome procrastination, how to turn to coaches and other 3rd parties to help keep you on task, etc. But what about online tools to help keep you on track?

Recently, I was contacted by the creators of an interesting productivity service called Beeminder and I was intrigued enough to give it a try. Beeminder is an innovative approach to help you commit to specific goals, and stay focused on them. What’s the secret sauce? If you don’t do what you said you’d do, it will cost you money. In other words, it creates accountability by getting you to put your money where your mouth is.

The premise is pretty simple:

• You decide on a goal and commit to it.
• You decide on a dollar amount as a "penalty" you'll pay if you don't meet your commitments.
• You agree to Beeminder's "contract" (including an "I promise not to weasel" clause) and commit to your penalty amount. Right now, looks like $5 is your only choice - I suspect that will change at some point.
• You use Beeminder to track your progress.

Beeminder tracks daily progress against your goals to help you monitor whether you are on track or not.  You can report progress via email, text message, or directly on the site.  You also receive daily email updates from Beeminder to let you know whether you're on track or not.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

In tracking progress against your goal, Beeminder has a very good visual helper that I like a lot.  They call it the "Yellow Brick Road" and it is the sweet spot of progress against your goal - here is a sample of my graph (at right).  If you want a better illustration, check out the example from the Beeminder site.

In my case, my commitment is to blog 4 times per month (I know some of you have noticed how occasional my blogging has become, and I want to change that).  I also have my own internal guidelines about what it means to "blog" 4 times a month - for example, I'm talking about original content (not reposts), and the posts need to be long enough (I don't have a hard guideline on post length - but I know it when I see it).

I've established daily milestones toward a weekly blog post, and my goal is to stay within the bounds of the yellow line (my Yellow Brick Road) or above it, which means I'm ahead of my goal.  If it falls below the yellow line, I have a short amount of time to correct it, or I pay my penalty (in this case $5) to reset my goal.

The effect is cumulative, too - the first time you miss your goal, it costs what you committed originally, but each time you fall off the path, the price goes up - very motivating. Here is the formula for increases, per the Beeminder site:

What exactly is the exponential fee schedule for subsequent derailments?

Going off your yellow brick road the first time costs nothing, the second time (if you chose to unfreeze after the first attempt) it costs $5, the third time it costs $10, then $30, $90, $270, $810, etc. In general, the cost of going off the road the ith time is:

You can chicken out at any time, of course.  Which leads me to the next point...

It's free if you stay awesome

One cool thing about Beeminder is that it will cost you nothing if you meet your commitments - you only pay when you fail to do what you said you'd do, at which point you have to pay to reset/restart your goal.  I think this approach is pretty cool - they provide a great tool to help you track your progress, and it stays free if you adhere to your plan.  Mess up, and you pay the site's owners - yep, they reap the rewards if I don't do what I committed to, which is a fascinating business model.

A lot of thought has gone into this approach, from what I can tell - there is a good overview about Beeminder on the site that goes into a lot more detail, and I suggest you read it if you're considering using Beeminder.

On Goals and tracking

You can pick just about any general goal, but I encourage you to think about what daily progress looks like, as Beeminder expects you to check in daily.  They provide a bit of guidance on this on the site, as well as some specific guidance if you want to use Beeminder to track weight loss.  More on that, plus general information about the approach and "akrasia" are detailed on the Beeminder blog, in the post "The Magical Widening Yellow Brick Road."

Update: I was having trouble figuring out how to effectively track my goal, which has a weekly "deliverable" rather than a daily cadence. I just spoke with one of the Beeminder founders and he pointed me at a great blog post on that very topic: Chunky Time! - it's a must-read if you have a "chunky" kind of goal.

Give it a try

If you need a little help overcoming procrastination, or some extra motivation to keep you focused on your goals, I recommend taking a look at Beeminder.  I think it provides an interesting, innovative, and motivating method to help you get more done.  You'll know whether I succeed or not - it will be measured in blog posts per month.

If you try Beeminder, let me know how you fare!

How "IFTTT" can make you seem smarter

Recently, I heard about a service called "If This Then That" or "IFTTT" while listening to the Mac Power Users podcast.  IFTTT is a free automation service that can do a lot of things for you online, automatically.

On their site, there are a bunch of building blocks to help you create automated actions, along with a whole collection of "recipes" other people have created that you can just use for your own purposes. Some examples of recipes:

• When Facebook profile picture changes, update Twitter profile picture
• If its raining tommorow, send me an email!
• Thanking people in Twitter when they mention you or RT (note: this is a bit of overkill - I tried it for a few hours - it was too much)
• star ★ a Gmail, send it to Evernote

And there are a whole lot more.  I am still an IFTTT novice, but I have stuck with one recipe I really like:

Since I've started using this recipe, every morning I get an email that tells me 10 current events or relevant news stories that I can use to seem "up" on current events.  The stories tend to be a bit technology biased, but that is a perfect fit for me.  For example, the one I got this morning was:

Of course, this information is available on a "Business Insider" web page, but I love having it waiting there piping hot in my inbox every morning so I don't have to remember to go to the Business Insider site to catch up on things.

As I mention, I'm a newbie with this so I'm just scratching the surface, but this particular automation "recipe" has made me hungry for more.  If you find a recipe you really like, please drop me a line and let me know about it.

The Top 5 Things For Greater Productivity

I was just reading a great article by Brett Nelson of Forbes, called "Eight Secrets To Getting More Done In 2012."  I love the ideas he's assembled, particularly the one about "Hourly Gut Checks."

With his post in mind, I have an idea of my own to contribute:  The Top 5 Things.

The Top 5 Things

This is a pretty simple concept that I use, which I find to be very useful:

1. Start with a "mind sweep" as prescribed in David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology - get everything out of your head, out of your inbox, out of meeting notes, etc. in to one big list.
2. When you sit down to plan your week, look at this list and pick the top 5 things you need to get done this week from the list.  Try to pick the 5 things that will have the most impact or drive the most progress toward your most important goals.
3. Write your Top 5 on an index card.
4. Carry that index card with you, and review it regularly to help you focus on what is important.  As things get done, mark them off.
5. Repeat the process.

You can do this weekly, or just wait until you've done your top 5 - figure out what works best for you.

Another thing I've found useful is to use the back of the index card to record the "in the moment" priorities you end up working on, so you can review the things you chose to work on instead of your top 5.  This can be helpful in figuring out what (or who) is undermining your productivity.  Sometimes you'll find your doing it to yourself.

Got any tips of your own?  Please share!

Practical Genius

The other day, I read Gina Amaro Rudan's book, "Practical Genius: The Real Smarts You Need to Get Your Talents and Passions Working for You." I found this book to be a very down-to-earth approach to unlocking your creative juices, through a well-ordered method.  In other words, it made sense, was prescriptive enough that you can apply it immediately, and it feels like an approach that will actually work for most people.

In "Practical Genius," the author takes us though a 5-step plan for figuring out what your best skills are, and coming up with a plan to leverage those skills.  The steps are:

• Identify Your Genius,
• Express Your Genius,
• Surround Yourself With Genius,
• Sustain Your Genius, and
• Market Your Genius

Throughout the book, the author shares her perspective, techniques, and a lot of personal stories that bring things down to a tangible level. The stories helped make it real for me.

What struck me as most powerful in this book were the two sections on "Surrounding Yourself With Genius," and "Sustaining Your Genius."  What I liked about these sections is that they help you change your circumstances in a way that reinforces and amplifies your strengths, rather than draining or sabotaging them.  I have seen very creative people who gave up on their gifts because they didn't think they were good enough, or were hanging around with people who didn't support or appreciate their gifts.  In this book, you'll learn some techniques and new habits that will help you find people who add energy to your gifts, instead of taking it away.

You'll also find sensible guidance on when to seek the help of others -- I like the section on finding a "Yoda for hire," enlisting the help of "ambassadors," and building your "tribe."

I got a lot out of the section on "Sustaining..." because I found some techniques to help me re-start some of the fun and creative things I've drifted away from, due to some parts of my life getting a bit too busy.  Throughout the book, the author shares little tips labelled as "Playboooks," and I found the "Sustaining" playbooks to be the most useful for me.

If you feel like you're stuck, have writer's block, or your creative juices just aren't flowing the way they used to be, I think "Practical Genius" can help.

Then, once you've gotten things unstuck, take advantage of the ideas in "Marketing Your Genius," to increase your value. You can apply the marketing tips for "getting famous" kinds of things, or just to increase your impact in your job and community - it's up to you.

Evernote, convenience, and habits

I was recently catching up on some of my favorite blog stops, and just read an article from a few months back on the Success Begins Today blog, where John talks about the lovely marriage that is Evernote+iPad 2.  John and I are usually of like mind, and our fondness for Evernote is no exception.

Background

I'm a long-time user of Evernote which, if you aren't familiar with it, is an excellent capture and recall tool for storing all kinds of digital information.  You can take pictures of things and add them as a note, you can type things in, you can forward emails and PDF's to it, and much more.

Everything you send to Evernote gets indexed and stored in your account on its cloud-based service.  Once the information is indexed, you can quickly retrieve it based on tags, location, or keyword searches (it will even convert text in pictures to a searchable form - it is awesome for retrieving pictures you've taken on whiteboard diagrams with lots of text on them).

Evernote offers a robust free account, as well as a subscription option (faster indexing of your files, and more monthly storage - most people will be fine with the free version).

Evernote makes it easy to collect and interact with this data - you can run desktop clients on your computer, access it in a web browser, or from mobile clients on most tablets or smartphones.  Very simple.

Challenges

For me, the hardest things with adopting Evernote were:

1. Developing the habit of using Evernote
   • The number of clients available for Evernote (see above) makes this easier but, like with any new process, it took me a while to develop the habit of entering my notes into Evernote.  I wish there were some magic potion that would make this easy, but I don't know of one.
   • One thing that can help is to ditch your paper notepad for a while so you are encouraged to take notes directly into Evernote.
2. Taking notes directly into Evernote in meetings
   • There were a couple of problems in this area:
     • first, my computer was a bit bulky so I didn't carry it around to all my meetings;
     • second, the soft keyboard on my phone or iPad were kind of a pain to type on and I ended up spending more time concentrating on finger typing than I did on the contents of the meeting.
   • The best solution I found for this was to get the Zagg ZaggFolio for my iPad 2.  This is a combination iPad 2 case and Bluetooth keyboard.  When I use this in combination with the Evernote iPad app, I can use my touch-typing skills to easily take notes in my meetings.  The iPad's 10-hour battery life plus the long life of this keyboard (I charge it every month or two) makes this a much better alternative than my laptop.

So, if you're looking for a great way to centralize all your meeting notes, easily retrieve them, and you have an iPad, I think this is a great solution.