The War on Akrasia

I learnt a new word yesterday: akrasia (rhymes with “aphasia” and “Malaysia”). It means not doing the things you want to do and know that you want to do; acting against your better judgement. The classic example of akratic behaviour is weight loss (or weight control). That extra slice of pie always looks like such a good idea at the time and there’s no short-term consequence. It’s only later that you look back with a queasy feeling of regret at the empty pie dish and think of how your rolls of kidney flab are just not fashionable any more (and probably haven’t been since the 1830s).

Everyone is akratic to some extent. I know that I am. Some days I just can’t face the work I have to do (even though it’s usually fun once I get started) and just doodle around on the internet. I’ve tried various methods for organising myself (I use org-mode in Emacs for pretty much everything: TODO lists, scheduling, time tracking for invoicing), I’ve tried structured procrastination. Sometimes these things work and sometimes they don’t. The main problem is that, while these methods can help you to organise yourself, they don’t impose any short-term consequences on you to make you do things.

A good example for me is blogging. There are no short-term consequences at all for me if I fail (for weeks and weeks) to write any blog articles. In the long run though, there probably are consequences. One of my current contracts came about because Tom Nielsen at OpenBrain had been reading some stuff on my blog and as a direct result contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in some Haskell contracting work. No blogging ⇒ no contract.

So how do you get some control on this? Enter Beeminder. I first read about this on Brent Yorgey’s blog a while ago, but Brent just posted a follow-up to his experiences with Beeminder. He had such positive outcomes from using the thing that I decided I ought to give it a try too.

The basic idea of Beeminder is pretty simple. You set yourself a goal which has some numerical measurement associated with it (it might be body weight, it might be number of blog articles written per week, it might be hours per week spent on a particular project, whatever you like). Beeminder then shows you a “yellow brick road” which you need to follow–if you fall off your target a little bit, you have a day or so to recover, if you get ahead of your target you can relax a little. If you fall off the wagon again though, there are consequences. The consequences, as well as the natural embarrassment that anyone would feel, are monetary. There is an exponential scale of payments you have to make each time you stray from the yellow brick road–small payments at first, but they get bigger quickly. The idea is that you need to reach a level of payment that really motivates you to stick to your goals. And because there is continuous monitoring (if you let it, Beeminder will remind you every day how much of a safety buffer you have before you end up in the hole) and short-term consequences, there really is a strong chance that you will stick to the plan.

There is quite a bit more clever stuff involved (there are nice graphics, there’s flexibility about changing your goals as you go along, but done in a very smart way that prevents you from just weaseling out of the goal you’ve set yourself, and there’s some good stuff for data smoothing for weight measurements), but that’s the essential idea.

For me, it’s already working! I’ve set up goals for German study, blogging, a work project (Beeminder has GitHub integration, which means you can set yourself a target of a certain number of commits per week to a certain repository) and a bunch of other things. And as soon as I’ve published this blog article, I’ll go and update my stats...