How well does this work for variables that are not entirely under your control? I’m specifically thinking for weight gain contracts. I’d like to motivate myself to gain weight, but past history teaches me that being sick will crater my weight.
I think it doesn’t work so well. Especially with weight gain because, I suspect, if you had to you could always gain weight, but not in the right way. My suggestion would be to beemind pushups or protein consumption, or something where you do have direct control.
Not being able to because of being sick is another story altogether though. For that we have an SOS Clause in the commitment contract: http://blog.beeminder.com/sos
This might have problems scaling up. Might I suggest asking customers for the email addresses of three friends, so that all three have to send the email in order for you to quit? There are all sorts of problems with that, but they’re all greatly mitigated by picking the right three friends.
That is damn brilliant. Much more scalable (and I think just much more elegant) than the craziness we came up with.
That said, I think we’ll leave this on the back burner until it’s an issue. (We’re always reminding ourselves to only work on things that are solving problems right now, not problems we’re going to have—when we scale up, when someone wants to do such-and-such.) To quote Patrick McKenzie: “A startup’s most likely problem with scaling is that it will have no scaling problems.”
How well does this work for variables that are not entirely under your control? I’m specifically thinking for weight gain contracts. I’d like to motivate myself to gain weight, but past history teaches me that being sick will crater my weight.
I think it doesn’t work so well. Especially with weight gain because, I suspect, if you had to you could always gain weight, but not in the right way. My suggestion would be to beemind pushups or protein consumption, or something where you do have direct control.
Not being able to because of being sick is another story altogether though. For that we have an SOS Clause in the commitment contract: http://blog.beeminder.com/sos
This might have problems scaling up. Might I suggest asking customers for the email addresses of three friends, so that all three have to send the email in order for you to quit? There are all sorts of problems with that, but they’re all greatly mitigated by picking the right three friends.
That is damn brilliant. Much more scalable (and I think just much more elegant) than the craziness we came up with.
That said, I think we’ll leave this on the back burner until it’s an issue. (We’re always reminding ourselves to only work on things that are solving problems right now, not problems we’re going to have—when we scale up, when someone wants to do such-and-such.) To quote Patrick McKenzie: “A startup’s most likely problem with scaling is that it will have no scaling problems.”