Six Steps to a Daily Writing Habit


How to use Beeminder for a daily habit of X.
A great post by Zachary Jacobi

I recommend looking at Beeminder not as a tool to effectively guilt yourself into writing, but as a reminder of what writing is worth to you. You value consistently writing at $X. You know that every time you skip writing for a day or a week, there is a Y% chance that you might lose the habit. Multiply those two together and you get your ideal maximum Beeminder pledge.

Right now I use Beeminder to read up all of my pocketed articles.
Sometime in the past couple of years I’ve created a bad akrasia-like habit of pocketing articles that are too hard to read at that moment. “Imma read this funny small LJ post now and let future-Andrey handle that huge SSC post later”. I also used to add some neat posts that are useless to me (e.g. HN post about how to use ardruino and tensorflow to detect misoginy in Sillicon Valley). Thus I amassed hundreds of articles and tons of guilt.
Now, each time I add an article, a point is substracted; a point is added each time I finish one (automation through IFTTT snippets). In the last three months, I’ve ploughed through 150 articles, some 400 yet to go.