How is this different from Beeminder — afaik popularised "commitment contract".
I'm an active user of Beeminder; have 4 active commitments. More than feature to feature comparison, Beeminder has an amazing blog, and an ever supportive community to lean on to.
Beeminder is great. However, it's all automated and you cannot set huge penalties for single goals. Also, It's limited to things that can be verified from fitness trackers and other apps thats many people do not use.
WorkOrPay tries to add more human interactions. We text users daily to make sure they aren't starting slack off. We help them form reasonable goals. Do verifications manually, so the goals can really be anything.
> However, it's all automated... Also, It's limited to things that can be verified from fitness trackers and other apps thats many people do not use.
That isn't true. You can track progress on a goal manually, as well as automatically. For example, I used to use Beeminder to track how many push ups I did.
For my whole life, I have been dealing with bursts of motivation where I am extremely productive for several days, followed by weeks-long slumps. This yo-yo behavior does not let a person develop their skills or build anything substantial.
According to my observations, people usually start working towards a goal following a temporary spike in motivation. It lasts a few days at most. Usually, it is not enough for people to move past the hurdle that is the first 2 weeks. In the first 2 weeks of starting anything new, you are garbage at everything. It’s hard work, and not very rewarding because you are constantly getting things wrong and not being able to get in flow.
However, after 2 weeks so, People start appreciating the task. They finally see hints of progression in their abilities. Are able to work for longer stretches at a time before running into something frustrating. This allows them to get into flow. Together this starts to produce consistent internal motivation that allows the person to actually stick with the new habit long term. But 99% of the time people give up before getting here.
To address this issue, I created WorkOrPay
WorkOrPay: Set goals. Form contracts. Pay the penalty if you fail.
We let you form contracts in which you agree to reach a goal before a deadline. You then deposit some money. If you fail to accomplish your goal before the deadline, your deposit is lost and donated to a charity of your choice.
Basically, we provide you with external motivation (by holding your deposit hostage), so you get stuff done even when you don't feel like it. In addition, we text you daily to keep tabs and make sure you stay on track.
WorkOrPay's mission is to bridge the gap in motivation from the initial spike and the more consistent motivation that appears a while later. The idea is that if you make a contract for the frustrating 2 weeks where you want to quit. The pressure of potentially losing your deposit will provide enough external motivation for you to continue until you reach the promised land of consistent internal motivation.
I hope others who have the same problem I had, can use this service to break out of the loop. Without wasting years of their life.
Can I ask a bit more about your experience with this? My son has ADHD, and I'm rapidly realising that many aspects of my life correlate with the symptoms, especially in adults.
But then I get worried I'm trying to make my square peg/round hole fit the the diagnose.
Are you medicated or having any other treatment? Did it have any meaningful impact/change to your adult life?
In classic ADHD fashion, I had definitely intended to reply, started to reply, and then failed to reply, sorry!
I would say as an adult, I have built coping mechanisms and excuses for what were clearly symptoms of undiagnosed ADHD. Hyperfocus was just "being really passionate about a project", I had a million unfinished projects, both software and physical (not that I've finished most of them, but I have gotten better at it!), and I still chase the dopamine like there's no tomorrow.
What really had sealed the deal was one of my good friends getting their diagnosis and talking about it, combined with a really well timed Twitter post that said something like "an ADHD person's worst nightmare -- a 4PM meeting". Coming out of a late afternoon meeting where I physically could do nothing the entire day except think about that one meeting really pushed it home.
I am on Adderall, and it helps to an extent. It definitely plateaus, and while I'm on a low dose I'm also not keen to increase it unless needed. Another piece of it is just learning more about what ADHD is, and figuring out what's happening and what you can do about it.
One surprisingly helpful resource has been a person on social media, Connor DeWolfe (https://www.instagram.com/connor.dewolfe/) who posts comical videos that both resonate and are just eye opening because they made me second guess things I've done all my life. Things like "out of sight, out of mind" and why people with ADHD tend to leave cabinet doors open, "chasing the dopamine", the intense amount of focus you get when you are right up against a deadline, etc. It really helped me to start pointing these out in my day to day life when before they'd just be things I did.
I think you are correctly identifying the problem, but implementing the wrong solution, by your own admission.
> People start appreciating the task. They finally see hints of progression in their abilities. Are able to work for longer stretches at a time before running into something frustrating.
This part hits the nail on the head. Appreciating the task and enjoying the progression.
To me, trying to make this experience happen earlier is the solution to the problem, not creating artificial constraints that dance around the problem.
We are a New York LLC. We're not incorporated at the moment.
We make money through a subscription model. We do not make anything from the contracts because it seemed wrong to profit from our users failing. We want our incentives to be aligned correctly!
> We do not make anything from the contracts because it seemed wrong to profit from our users failing. We want our incentives to be aligned correctly!
I assumed that the monthly fee was on top of a percentage fee on lost bets, which other platforms charge. You should make this more prominent on the site — aligned incentives are great!
Since you're allowing people to donate to charities or "anti-charities," you should just allow the user to specify a % fee that goes to you. If I set up a $1,000 contract to go to some Nazi org if I fail, I'd much rather $1 go to the Nazi org and $999 to you.
For all the people asking how this differs from Beeminder: my first reaction was "finally, a version of Beeminder that lets me pay $1000!"
Beeminder is obviously amazing, but it really "loses its sting" when you can't set a penalty higher than $25 (give or take -- I don't know what the current limit is).
> Beeminder is obviously amazing, but it really "loses its sting" when you can't set a penalty higher than $25 (give or take -- I don't know what the current limit is).
Beeminder's model is a bit different, in that the payment amount keeps going up if you keep falling off track. The current upper amount you can pay is $7290 (as in once you hit $7290, it will keep charging you that amount).
Even better, you can pay Beeminder money to jump to the big penalties right away. Very clever upsell since anyone who needs to lose thousands to be motivated won’t miss a fraction of that. :)
I’ve recently got a loan (~35k) with the idea of using that money for marketing once I’ll be done with development. It kind of works the same way - I’ll either launch the product and pay it off early (paying just 3% of the amount in this case) or keep paying 9% interest rate for 6 years. An important difference is that this money can actually work for me, when I’ll launch the product which provides positive motivation for me.
I was about to get a subscription when I spotted this
> Choose a deadline as short as 3 days or as long as a month!
Why the 3 days? Is it to lessen the burden on the support staff who do the daily check ups? If I'm eager to subscribe to a service like this it means I want to use it to get stuff done I need to do starting right now, today, not something I need to get done in three days.
I like the idea of adding financial incentive to stick to habits etc, but i would be uncomfortable with having to deposit money, why not just take a CC and charge it if I break the contract?
also: what prevents me from just lying about whether I did the thing I promised to do?
From what I have seen, depositing before making the commitment makes you much more likely to succeed. Seeing the money leave your account creates a lot of psychological pressure that otherwise doesn't exist.
The verification system is not fool proof. If you put some effort into forging proof you will succeed. However, I do not believe most people who willingly sign up for this would do that.
A lot of us know what's good for us... doesn't mean it's always easy to do. This is just another way of making it a little easier to actually do what you know is good for you.
> We try to offer much more human support. Such as daily texts and manual verification of goals instead of just pulling data from an API.
If people value this at $12/mo, that's great. It has no use for me, and will likely detract many from joining. When Beeminder raised their rates from $4/mo to $8/mo, they put in all kinds of mitigations for the customer:
1. Not charged if you don't have any active goals.
2. If you fall off track and have to pay an amount, they deduct that from the monthly cost.
The key is to make it easy for people to sign up.
Also, anecdotally, the majority of people will fail the first time round. My first stint with Beeminder was mostly a failure and I stopped using it for a few years. Then I came back to it with the lessons learned and use it much better now. If it cost me $20/mo, I'd probably never have returned to it.
I bet many people failed trying services like beeminder. The stakes are high. If it works, the upside is huge. If If doesn't, just a couple dozen dollars lost. Experimenting is a no brainer.
If it works, 12 or 20 dollars/mo is ridiculously cheap.
I'd pay $200/mo if it works and helps me achieve more in less time. Many would be able to recoup this investment in one or two productive days...
> I'd pay $200/mo if it works and helps me achieve more in less time.
Think of fitness programs. Many would pay $200 per month for one that works. But are they willing to pay that much for each one they try till they find the one that works? The data is clear that they don't.
There is little innovation in this particular offering. Why go with this service vs other ones?
- Suppose you have a project worth $10,000 to you in some intangible form if successful, with a 20% chance of success. You use a penalty site to pay $2,000 if you make no progress. You set this high enough to put some non-productive entertainment out of your budget. Your hope is that when evaluating what you want to do, entertainment goes from being "$20" to "$20 plus $2,000 penalty". In your thinking, this promotes work on the project! You will not actually have to pay the penalty, since you intend to work on the project. You hope to influence yourself to increase your happiness by an intangible $2,000 (expected value of $10k * 20%) for free, by manually pricing entertainment out of your budget.
- What happens if another project is worth $500 billion to you in some intangible non-monetary form, for sure? You definitely need to do that now. You are out the $2,000 if you don't also do something toward the first project, though. Thus, the penalty which had been intended to keep you from goofing off becomes an extra burden also on something worth an intangible $500 billion to your happiness. The "here's your incentive to be happy and productive" becomes: "here's your penalty for being hyper happy and productive" (on a new, temporarily very valuable project.) Clearly a misalignment of incentives: an unintended consequence.
- Note that if you are independently rich this contract could still help you make some progress! Suppose you committed to pay $2,000 as a penalty for stopping work, but stopped work since you have something guaranteed to give you $500b in intangible happiness. Now it is strictly better to hire someone such as an intern or assistant and pay them anything less than $2,000 as long as this counts as progress and avoids tripping the penalty. i.e. a loss of $1900 paid to an assistant (counting as some marginal progress) is strictly better than a penalty of $2000 (and zero progress).
- Could this explain why rich people hire personal assistants and project managers? It is an automatic penalty: once the assistant / project manager is on staff their salary goes out the window. You might as well use them to do what you, as a rich person who can hire personal assistants and project managers, want to get done.
Is their behavior of hiring assistants and project managers why rich people get so much done?
If so, the moral of the story may be to set aside $2000 to be handed over to project managers you deploy strategically on any project you want done.
If it works for wealthy people, it could work for you - if you pay the cash for it. While disincentives could be nice, as the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money.
I remember using a gym app with a similar thing 10 yrs ago. I said I would run 7 days a week. Cancelled app after first week. I met my commitment and I never stopped since then.
I actually used to make my friends promise to give away my money if I failed to do whatever. But it never really worked that great because I would always make some plausible excuse and my friends would let it slide and eventually just give my money back.
I strongly believe external motivation kills the inner motivation. Maybe that is the goal here, by killing it completely so you can't ever think of depending on it(?). For me personally, I always found these kind of tools that helps trick one's self into doing or not doing things, very soul crushing. It's almost like trying to beat yourself into submission, disowning the part of yourself. If you can't make yourself to do something, maybe you shouldn't do it?
The role of this is to bridge the gaps between the spikes of internal motivation.
A lot of times people start working on something new and for the first few days they have enough motivation to stick with it. But when that disappears a lot of people just quit. They don't stick with the new activity long enough for the next surge of internal motivation.
We believe this service can help people grind it out for a week or two until they get a surge of internal motivation and no longer need us.
Why would you grind out something you found you don't want to do? Or on another note, if something really should get done, I think their argument is that this sort of crutch makes you lose the muscle of "just do it and get on with it".
> I think their argument is that this sort of crutch makes you lose the muscle of "just do it and get on with it".
I don't have that muscle when it comes to "internal motivation", and decades of floundering have not particularly succeeded in developing it.
The right external motivation - for me, most typically, something along the lines of not wanting to let down the people who are depending upon me in a reasonable manner - means I can absolutely slay it when it comes to getting things done in a 9-5 work environment, and rather than being soul crushing, it's a relief that I can contribute value. I might grumble a bit at the start of my mornings, but getting into the grove of work quickly distracts me from said grumbling. johnthewise's experience is far from universal.
Precommitment in the form of money laden goalposts and checkpoints alone aren't super effective for me, but they do accomplish something.
> Why would you grind out something you found you don't want to do
Because it will be valuable enough to have it done, to be worth it in the long run. My natural internal motivation is terribly shortsighted - to the point that I'll procrastinate on getting myself food when I'm only a little hungry, because cooking, walking, driving, or even ordering sounds like a bother and a chore. Does spending an extra hour or three hungry improve my day overall? It does not.
It's 10AM, I've skipped breakfast, and I'm rather hungry for lunch. My natural instinct is to spend another few hours doomscrolling reddit or HN or otherwise making not particularly good use of my time, even when it comes to the explicit goal of leisure or relaxation. But, instead, I'm going to hunt down some socks, shoes, keys, wallet, sunglasses, mask, jacket, and go out into the beautiful sunny day that I've been hiding away from, and go grab some delicious food I've been looking forward to all week, and improve my day in the process.
And I will grumble slightly along the way, because among other injustices, I will have to "get up".
I have to do X. I don't want to do X but I must finish X. Instead of procrastinating and wasting my entire day on avoiding X, it would be more productive to do X and then do the things I am actually interested in.
I've been down this rabbit role trying to find my inner motivation for half a decade already. I've tried everything, from recreational to prescription drugs, routine, exercise, nutrition changes, therapy, even became a parent. Nothing works consistently.
So when I find myself unable to be motivated, I just stack techniques as much as I can. I have a whole toolbox of maneuvers and mechanisms to achieve whatever I have to without any inner motivation.
It's the best way of coping with life I've found up until this point.
> If you can't make yourself to do something, maybe you shouldn't do it?
That attitude probably works if it’s some sort of leisure activity, but someone who struggles to do routine, necessary tasks might not want to just give up on them.
I totally understand, I can't still make the bed or do procrastinate with many things. Would it be better if I somehow tricked myself into doing them by delegating the decision making process into a third-party? If this worked, maybe. But these tools never work on me as I feel I'm being tricked and get stressed/annoyed even more. I understand everyone is different, but if anyone out there is like me, I'd suggest trying to make your peace with yourself and with all the cool projects you abandon. or get stressed enough that maybe you can change yourself :) If you're depressed, get help!
I recall a Twilight Zone movie "Cat's Eye" and a sketch from that including James Woods called "Dying For a Smoke". The premise is a man wants to quit smoking so he goes to a firm called Quitters Inc. where he signs a contract. If they catch him smoking they will escalate the punishments against him. After a few relatively tame punishments for sneaking a cigarette, he gets caught smoking again and so they kidnap his wife and daughter. They force him to watch as the company tortures his family and then they insinuate even worse fates for his family if they catch him smoking again.
The sketch from the mentioned movie is a dark satire. It lampoons the kind of pseudo-logical thinking which simplifies problems by externalizing responsibility for our actions to external entities. Yet it is only when that external entity reflects the consequences of our action back on us that there is a chance we alter our behavior. However, once externalized we lose control of the process and in some sense become a slave to it.
I feel that dystopian sketch is a satire directly aimed at this kind of application.
[links] https://www.beeminder.com/home https://blog.beeminder.com/ https://forum.beeminder.com/